'The heart is half a prophet.' Yiddish proverb

'Il cuore è un mezzo profeta.' proverbio yiddish


Alberico Collina

The other day, I went to dinner in a school that doubles as a restaurant in the evening. On the walls of the corridor leading to the classroom-come-dining room, pupils had posted their drawings. Picture after picture of square houses with a triangular roof and matchstick figures variously identified as parents, grandparents, or neighbours. All the drawings looked alike. Apart from one. A picture of a matchstick girl with an oversized blonde bob, lying on her back in emerald grass looking up at an indigo sky, where candid clouds looked like sheep grazing in a lake. Below her drawing, the girl had written, ‘I’m a lazy artist.’
 
After dinner, my friends and I bid each other goodbye, and promised to do it again soon. Driving home, I thought that if schools can become affordable restaurants, maybe restaurants can become affordable schools. Food for thought. Literally. When I arrived home, I looked up to see sheep-clouds grazing in the star-filled ocean above, and imagined the little lazy artist tucked up in bed dreaming. And smiling.
 
​
Alberico Collina

‘How is a road beaten down from the virgin snow?’
 
This is the question the writer Varlam Shalamov asks and answers in his tale, Through the Snow*, based on his experience as a political prisoner in the infamous Kolyma gulag.
 
‘One person walks ahead, sweating, swearing, and barely moving his feet. He keeps getting stuck in the loose, deep snow. He goes far ahead…(selecting) points in the snow’s infinity to orient himself – a cliff, a tall tree. He steers his body through the snow in the same fashion that a helmsman steers a riverboat from one cape to another.
 
Five or six persons follow shoulder-to-shoulder along the narrow, wavering track of the first man. They walk beside his path but not along it. When they reach a predetermined spot, they turn back and tramp down the clean virgin snow which has not yet felt the foot of man. The road is tramped down. It can be used by people, sleighs, tractors. If they were to walk directly behind the first man, the second group would make a clearly defined but barely passable narrow path, and not a road. The first man has the hardest task, and when he is exhausted, another man from the group of five takes his place. Each of them – even the smallest and weakest – must beat down a section of virgin snow, and not simply follow in another’s footsteps. Later will come tractors and horses driven by readers, instead of authors and poets.’
 
Shalamov knows how to tell a story, but here he gives us something even more precious - a most eloquent way to describe how a writer and his writing become mainstream.
 
 
Alberico Collina
 
 
*from Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov (translated by John Glad)

'Truth stabs the eyes.' Russian proverb

'La verità pugnala gli occhi.' proverbio Russo

'First think, then dare.' German proverb

​'Prima pensa, poi osa.' proverbio tedesco

'Luck and glass break easily.' German proverb

'La fortuna e il vetro si rompono facilmente.' proverbio tedesco

'A clean conscience is a soft pillow' German proverb

'Una coscienza pulita è un guanciale soffice.' proverbio tedesco

'Love truth, but pardon error.' French proverb

​'Ama la verità ma perdona lo sbaglio.' proverbio francese

'Hope is the bread of the unfortunate.' French proverb

'La speranza è il pane degli sfortunati.' proverbio francese

'The poor are the silent of the land.' Iraqi proverb

'I poveri sono i silenziosi della terra.' proverbio iracheno