Wisława Szymborska: Falling from the Sky / Cadenti dal cielo

The magic goes, although the great forces

stay in their place. On August nights

you don’t know if the falling thing is a star,

nor if it is precisely that that has to fall.

Vincent van Gogh | The starry night, 1888

And you don’t know if it’s good to wish

or draw predictions. From an astral misunderstanding?

As if modernity hadn’t arrived yet?

What lightning will tell you: I am a spark,

truly a spark from a comet’s tail,

just a spark that softly dies -

not I’m falling into the papers of the planet,

it’s the other one, next to it, that has an engine failure.

Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska (1923-2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality".

Wisława Szymborska: Cadenti dal cielo

La magia se ne va, benché le grandi forze

restino al loro posto. Nelle notti d’agosto

non sai se la cosa che cade sia una stella,

né se a dover cadere sia proprio quella.

E non sai se convenga bene augurare

o trarre vaticini. Da un equivoco astrale?

Van Gogh | The Starry Night, 1889 (detail) | The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Quasi non fosse ancor giunta la modernità?

Quale lampo ti dirà: sono una scintilla,

davvero una scintilla d’una coda di cometa,

solo una scintilla che dolcemente muore -

non io sto cadendo sui giornali del pianeta,

è quell’altra, accanto, ha un guasto al motore.

Van Gogh | The Starry Night, 1889 | The Museum of Modern Art, New York