Blog Intermission No. 20 (entr'acte) - Journey, a poem

Blogging friends who have been reading my posts for a while know that I love to travel - whether it is a walk in our area, a quick trip in our state, a long journey or a voyage on the seas to faraway places - the idea is to move.  I am pleased now that I can take many pictures with my digital camera.  In my earlier travels I took photographs too, small ones in black and white or colored slides - they don't look too sharp.  Many trips I made alone, some with family and some with friends.  Below are friends in Oslo, Norway.

Now I can take many pictures (I show just a fraction of them on my posts.)  I like to look at all my photos of past journeys to remember the places I have seen, cities, small towns, nature, the sea, mountains, birds and relive these moments - everything, like the seagulls on Tybee Island in Georgia,

or walking into the fog in Newfoundland, Canada.

or admiring ancient trees in the Alamo Gardens in San Antonio, Texas,

or listening to some folk music in Croatia,

o

or going to a street market in Italy,

or coming upon a pretty cat sitting on a path in Jimmy Carter's childhood farm in Plains, Georgia.

Below is a poem by Italian poet Paolo Ruffilli (born in 1949.)  It is called "Viaggio" which translates as "Travel" or "Journey" - I translated it into English below.  Ruffilli uses short, lyrical and musical words.  Roberto Marcho, an English Literature teacher in Italy says of Ruffilli's poetry:  "He often tells a story in an attempt to recover a memory that "is not a way of looking back to recover what is definitively lost" but the narration of the past perceived to be "inside each one of us," since "our past is what we are."

 Travel by Stagecoach circa 1811 by Pavel Petrovich Svinin (Russian-born American 1787-1839)

Viaggio

Poi, alla fine,

mi metto in motto

nonostante

la tentazione di restare

nelle zone piu vicine

in vista del mio noto.

Ma, in compenso, parto

solo per tornare.

Non so neanch'io

cos'e che vale

e mi convince. . .

un'intuizione certa

un sesto senso

che mi spinge,

la conscienza fulminante

di una scoperta

paradossale,

che bisogna perdersi

per potersi davvero

ritrovare.  Paolo Ruffilli

  The Bath to London Coach, by Charles Cooper Henderson, British 1803-1877

Translation:

Journey

Then, at last

I go away

despite

the urge to stay

as closely as I can

in familiar surroundings.

But against that, I leave

only to return.

I do not know either

what is so true

and convincing

about this thought . . .

a strong intuition

a sixth sense

driving me,

the sudden realization

of a paradoxical

 discovery,

that you must first lose yourself

before you can truly find yourself again.  - Paolo Ruffilli

Stagecoach at Le Treport, France by Jules Achille Noel, French 1815-1881 

"I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see."  - John Burroughs, American Naturalist 1837-1921.

San Francisco, California - View of Coit Tower, Alcatraz and Marin (courtesy English Wikipedia.)

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Note:  Post pre-programmed - This is a blogger break.