From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antonio Porchia (November 13, 1885 - November 9, 1968) was an Italian poet. He was born in Conflenti (Italy) but, after the death of his father in 1900, moved to Argentina. He wrote a Spanish book entitled Voces ("Voices"), a book of aphorisms. It has since been translated into English (by W.S. Merwin), French, and German. A very influential, yet extremely succinct writer, he has been a cult author for a number of renowned figures of contemporary literature and thought such as André Breton, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Juarroz and Henry Miller, amongst others. Some critics have paralleled his work to Japanese Haiku and found many similarities with a number of Zen schools of thought.

Works

• Voces (1943), English translation by W. S. Merwin: Voices, Copper Canyon Press, 2003, ISBN 1556591896

External links

• Antonio Porchia's Voces Website
• The Extraordinary Story of Antonio Porchia An essay of Prof. Vincenzo Villella

From Wikiquote

Antonio Porchia (November 13, 1886 – November 9, 1968) was an Italian-born writer and poet.

Voces (1943)

Translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin:

• Creo que son los males del alma, el alma. Porque el alma que se cura de sus males, muere.
  
  • Translation: I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings. For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies.

• I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.

• If only I could leave everything as it is, without moving a single star or a single cloud. Oh, if only I could!

• You can owe nothing, if you give back its light to the sun.

• Those who gave away their wings are sad not to see them fly.

• You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.

• Nothing is not only nothing. It is also our prison.

• My great day came and went, I do not know how. Because it did not pass through dawn when it came, nor through dusk when it went.

• Quien no llena su mundo de fantasmas, se queda solo.
  
  • Translation: He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.

• I would go to heaven, but I would take my hell; I would not go alone.

• They have stopped deceiving you, not loving you. And it seems to you that they have stopped loving you.

• He who holds me by a thread is not strong; the thread is strong.

• Tú crees que me matas. Yo creo que te suicidas.
  
  • Translation: You think you are killing me. I think you are committing suicide.

• My heaviness comes from the heights.

• Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.

• Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?

• You are fastened to them and cannot understand how, because they are not fastened to you.

• I stop wanting what I am looking for, looking for it.

• When I die, I will not see myself die, for the first time.

• We become aware of the void as we fill it.

• Because they know the name of what I am looking for, they think they know what I am looking for!

• A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.

• When I break any of the chains that bind me I feel that I make myself smaller.

• Before I travelled my road I was my road.

• One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

• Sometimes, at night, I turn on the light to not see my own darkness.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Antonio Porchia

• Antonio Porchia's Voces Website

• A collection of quotes including many from Antonio Porchia