INADVERTENT ~ (Why I Write)

UNPACKING MY LIBRARY (ARTISTS) ~

A great little series

that has taken off

The artists:

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Billy Childish

Mark Dion

Tracey Emin

Theaster Gates

Wangechi Mutu

Martin Parr

Ed Ruscha

Carrie Mae Weems

Yale University Press

2017

JOURNEYING ~

R E A D     M E

Yale Margellos 2018

WILDFLOWERS ~

Sauntering with Henry David Thoreau

UMBERTO SABA ~

Umberto Saba

The Shop-Boy With the Wheelbarrow



It's good to recover in ourselves

lost loves, or reconcile ourselves to an affront,

but if life pent up inside weighs you down,

take it out of doors.



Throw open the windows, or go down

into the crowd; you'll see how little it takes

to cheer you up: an animal, a game,

or, dressed in blue,



a shop-boy with a wheelbarrow

clearing the street with a loud voice,

who, if he finds the slightest downward slope,

runs no more, but flies.



The streets are full of people at that hour

who don't keep quiet after dodging him.

The noisier the uproar and the wrath,

the more he swings his hips and sings.


_________________


Umberto Saba
translated by George Hochfield & Leonard Nathan
SONGBOOK, the selected poems of Umberto Saba
Yale 2008