traduzione di Angela D’Ambra

Ecco la quinta e ultima poesia di “Dancing Birches. Part 5” assieme ad altre tre nuove sempre su Hemingway c,he fanno da appendice. Le precedenti le trovate scrivendo in alto a destra (lente d’ingrandimento) il nome dell’autore. [E. A.]

 Finca Vigia[1]
 
  
 His house is now a museum. You can look,
 but you can’t touch – photos, if you wish,
 may be taken from cordoned doorways 
 or through open windows in this home 
 where he and Mary lived, where he wrote, 
 where they entertained movie stars and statesmen. 
 Pilar, his fishing boat, stands weathered,
 high and dry, alongside the swimming pool 
 where Ava Gardner is said to have stroked 
 lengths, adorned with that famous sultry smile, 
 and so the rumour goes, nothing else.
  
  
 Everywhere in Havana that Hemingway
 ate or drank, worked or played, is remembered 
 by fresh generations of those he lived among 
 and loved with a fierce tenderness, people
 who loved him back and love him still – 
 an American hero in a nation blockaded
 by his own people -- this place he came to live in, 
 where he will never die, but be forever Papa,
 a giant among the people who welcomed him,
 who took him into their hearts,
 not the man who also lived in Idaho
 and hunted pheasants, who one day 
 took his shotgun out and wrote the end
 to the story he spent a lifetime telling.