Il poeta polacco Bogdan Chorążuk e i testi scritti per Tadeusz Woźniak

Nella mia forsennata ricerca musicale, che dura da anni ed è anche approfondimento storico di culture altre (diverse dalle solite italiche o anglosassoni), ho incontrato diverse collaborazioni tra poeti e musicisti. Ovvio che parlare di Polonia oggi, in ambito poetico, significa parlare di Wisława Szymborska, ma quella scena ha proposto anche altri validi nomi, ingiustamente rimasti nell’ombra, almeno a livello mondiale.

Era infatti frequente che musicisti dell’epoca si avvalessero dei testi di poeti contemporanei (questa fusione di poeti e musicisti si concretizzò in collaborazioni poetiche anche per il grande Czeslaw Niemen, forse il musicista più importante per la musica polacca post-bellica, quanto e forse più di quanto lo è stato Lucio Battisti per l’Italia. Per la cronaca, a Niemen è stato dedicato anche un francobollo, a sottolinearne l’importanza).

Segnalo quindi questo splendido disco pubblicato nel 1974 dall’etichetta nazionale polacca (ebbene sì: in Polonia, come in Russia, ci pensava lo Stato a selezionare e pubblicare le opere meritevoli), dove il cantautore e musicista Tadeusz Wòzniak si avvale ai testi della collaborazione del poeta – oggi 83enne – Bogdan Chorazuk. Non credo che esista nulla tradotto in italiano di questo grande (volevo dire “visionario”, ma la parola è ormai talmente abusata che mi procura repulsione) poeta.

Ad esempio l’immagine delle automobili piovute dal cielo (auto “profumate di angeli”) si materializza in Pewnego Dnia O Świcie

Pewnego Dnia O Świcie (One day near dawn)

One day near dawn cars fell from the sky.
Even as I slept I drove a car away.
The seat was cold. The steering wheel,
the dashboard, smelled of angels.
It happened last June, to someone else, perhaps.

I drove through the streets, passed corners, lamps,
paving stones and shop facades:
I knew their every brick and painted sign.
An illusion, reflected in living glass
where girls sleepwalk or shine like sighs.

Maybe it’s the silence, or an engine’s noise?
One silver car draws so close to us
we catch the pure metal of its machine breath turn.
Lilies of the valley overwhelm all sense
where horizons flourish with narcotic leaves.

And I am moving further, always, further on,
dawn exploding in the windscreen’s glass
at every turn and bend of the road.
Everything happens. I might even meet myself
living other lives I’ve never known.

Maybe it’s the silence, or an engine’s noise?
One silver car draws so close to me
I feel its velocity and momentum fade.
The roads seem clean as white surgeons’ screens
someone, anyway, is already taking down.

Fortuna che esiste almeno qualche traduzione in inglese e riguarda appunto alcuni brani contenuti nell’album Odcien Ciszy (Le Ombre del Silenzio), pubblicato nel 1974.

Ringrazio quindi il blog https://easternblocsongs.wordpress.com/ per le traduzioni

Chiudo questo breve articolo con quello che è il capolavoro dell’album di Tadeusz Wozniak, ancora coi testi (appena sotto i video) di Chorazuk: la lunga Odcien Ciszy (intenso e malinconico brano di 15 minuti), che accosta l’intero album al rock progressivo imperante in quegli anni, e ci fa viaggiare su un lago tra violini alati, con corde che vibrano nel vento come biondi capelli.

Buon ascolto e buona lettura!

Odcień Ciszy (Shades of Silence)

What was it? How could it happen? Violin clouds flew very high
and their hair-strings woven into the wind
made the quietest of sighs.

A hair-string is night when the moon blooms among evening flowers.
I have been, done much, but own little now –
one small box could hold everything.

I ran, touched by light: the fingers, my eyes, a gleaming fossil field.
The lakes scattered when the sound of silver seemed to live,
when gold encircled swarms of calm.

This is certain: a violin might open its wings above a sleeping lake,
seduce flight to altitudes where nothing’s seen.
There is no time to turn, return,

as sound heads for the setting sun, getting smaller, smaller…
The strings are so many, each one the slightest of sighs
where tension gathers till it resonates.

There is no time. When the hammer strikes low notes in these ears
even the deaf man opens his hands, sees swallows
in flight as a feathered cloud.

There was no time. There is no time now, for the strings are so many,
their cries breaking, like echoes, across the lake
where I live among reeds and fear

and do not move, seem paralysed. There is no time for strings,
camped on the shoreline from daybreak till dawn,
to break their bows or blind thirsty crowds –

and because strings swell from too much height, do not count spaces
between the echo and any hollow note,
there can be no time.

We scythe wind, worms carving wood, hand-knives wet hay,
cut through silence with beaten strings
made helpless by sound.

There is no time to fill these hours. In each instant of sunlit skin
I will not rust time, for there is no time
and I was never here.

There is no time for forests to prepare, resin bursting at each seam,
neither air nor space nor anything either here or there.
There was never time.

I hung the music’s thunder on a hooked bough bleached by light,
felt so thirsty, then, so burned by my own body’s fire
I understood those Saints who loved the poor.

I knew where the days went, how fires ignite with your every move
when you choose to rise. There was never time.
Now I’m walking inside these woods –

trees lean and leaves stroke light. Music’s green and hung on boughs.
Can you hear violins brushing gold hair among leaves?
Behold: stones open when thunder comes.