I am friend of the winter's afternoon that disposes me to a poem
that cannot be accomplished. I am friend of the lost idea,
of the useless effort to make a few words sound in the valley
that has made me what I am now and whose confines I rarely leave.
As long as I go back to loving the yearning of the adolescent
that I was when of Mozart I knew almost nothing,
I am friend of the winter's afternoon that disposes me to the poem.
It is difficult to cross the frontiers of pure exercise
and to understand the chance language of lifeless objects.
Countless are the times I have seen the castle that overlooks
the lands in which was cultivated this gesture of the hand
that caresses the warmed stone, my forebears' land,
knowing that the desire to imitate it with rhymed words
would not be accomplished. I am friend of the winter's afternoon.
I am friend of the notes that forget a heart that is too gravid
and of all the things that lie beyond my reach.
I am friend of the winter's afternoon that disposes me to the poem
and have finally learned that the poem itself has no end.

Translated by Julie Wark