L’emozione va trovata nelle nuvole,
non nelle masse verdi di colline digradanti
e neppure nelle firme grigie dei fiumi,
secondo Constable, che era uno studioso delle nuvole,
e riempiva scaffali di quaderni con schizzi del loro moto,
del loro nobile aspetto e dei bruschi effetti del tempo.

All’aperto, deve avere guardato in su migliaia di volte,
con la matita che cercava di tenere il passo del loro alto viaggiare
e il silenzioso turbinio del loro fluire e rifluire.
Le nubi muovendosi internamente, facendo capriole nel proprio centro,
ruotando nei margini in fiamme fino a farsi vapore,
uscivano dai contorni disegnati
fino a dissiparsi nell’azzurro universale del cielo.

Ora con le fotografie possiamo fermare questo movimento
abbastanza a lungo per etichettarle con nomi latini.
Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus –
vertiginose, romantiche, autoritarie –
esibiscono i loro titoli alle scuole sottostanti
dove le loro forme e i loro significati sono mandati a memoria.

(Traduzione di Franco Nasi)

Student of Clouds

The emotion is to be found in the clouds
not in the green solids of the sloping hills
or even in the gray signatures of rivers,
according to Constable,who was a student of clouds
and filled shelves of notebooks with their motion,
their lofty gesturing and sudden implication of weather.

Outdoor, he must have looked up thousands of times,
his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging
and the silent commotion of the eddying and flow.
Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw
as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers
and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors
to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.

In photographs we can stop all this movement now
long enough to tag them with their Latin names.
Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus –
dizzying, romantic, authoritarian –
they bear their titles over the schoolhouses below
where their shapes and meanings are memorized.

High on the soft blue canvases of Constable
they are stuck in pigment but his clouds appear
to be moving still in the wind of his brush,
inching out of England and the nineteenth century
and sailing over these meadows where I am walking,
bareheaded beneath the cupola of motion,
my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling.

____________________________________

Ludovico Einaudi, Nuvole bianche