IL Postino

 

IL POSTINO, the theme is flowing from audio, with music, scenes of

movie are emerged in front of eyes.  This movie tells a fictional story

occurred in Sicily of Italy, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda forms a

relationship with a simple postman who learns to love poems.  Love

the film music and poems rather than its plot, husband knew that, secretly,

he requested his colleague in US to buy the CD (it cannot be bought in

Taiwan at that time) and did not let me know beforehand.  One day,

he suddently showed me this CD and Neruda’s poetry, it was really

surprised to me, my heart was stired in waves, he might not be able to

write beautiful poems to me, but his consideration was like as a sweet

poem to nourish my life again and again…………..

 

This morning I talked to him regarding to write down this matter, he

ask why?  I said: I am afraid of that one day I may forget how you have

loved me so much upon my getting old, so from now on I want to record

every thing which has touched my heart.  Will you forget me when you

are getting older and older? Per Neruda’s poem, “Love is so short,

forgetting is so long.”  He said: Do not worry, I will never forget how

much I have loved you even if I may forgot all things in senility.  I smiled………

 

To quote Neruda’s love poem as following:

 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example,

“The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance”.

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddes lines.

To think that I do not have her.  To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all.  In the distance someone is singing.  In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.

My heart lookd for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s.  She will be another’s.  Like my kissed before.

Her voice.  Her bright body.  Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms, my soul

is not satisfied that it has lost her.  Though this be the last pain that

she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

                                            ~~Translated by: W.S. Merwin~~