We travel: Issa Makhlouf

Muchas veces pasa. A medida que viajo por el mundo, a medida que acumulo experiencias, voy alojando en mi mente ideas vagas que luego, cuando encuentro el tiempo y la inspiración, trato de transformar en las palabras que aparecen en este blog o que nunca publico pero igual quedan escritas. Lo que pasa muchas veces, digo, es que alguien se me adelanta: esa idea guardada en su estado más crudo, que dejo lista para pulir, aparece de repente convertida en un texto del cual yo, escritor envidioso, habría querido ser el autor. 

Bueno, así me pasó la semana pasada. Mi amiga Magda, viajera incansable, mitad polaca mitad norteamericana, otra persona errabunda que como yo sueña con ir de un lado a otro mientras escribe, me envió un texto del poeta libanés Issa Makhlouf que copio literalmente porque, con excepción de algunos lugares comunes y una que otra idea con la que no estoy de acuerdo, me parece formidable y hermosamente escrito.

We travel

We travel to go far away from the place of our birth and see the other side of sunrise. We travel in search of our childhood; of births unconceived. We travel so that unfinished alphabets complete. Let farewell be imbued with promises. Let us move far away like the twilight that accompanies us and bids us farewell. We tear up destinies and disperse their pages in the wind before we find—or fail to find—our life story in other books.

We travel towards unwritten destinies. We travel to tell those we have met that we shall return and meet again. We travel to learn the language of trees that never travel; to burnish the ringing of bells resounding in holy valleys; in search of more merciful gods; to strip the faces of strangers off the masks of estrangement; to confide to passers-by that we are passers-by, too, and our stay in memory and oblivion is temporary. We travel far away from mothers who light the candle of absence and thin the crust of time whenever they raise their hands to heaven.

We travel so we do not see our parents grow old; so we do not read their days on their faces. We travel taking ages unawares; they are wasted in advance. We travel to tell those we love that we still love them; distance cannot overpower our amazement; that exile is as sweet and fresh as our homeland.. We travel so that if we returned to our homeland we would feel like immigrants everywhere. Thus, suddenly, we shake off our wings idle porches open unto the sun and onto the sea. We travel until no difference remains between air and air, water and water, heaven and hell. We mock time. We sit and look into the expanding space, watch the waves jump together like children. The sea in front of us leaves between two ships; one of them departs; the other a paper boat in the hand of a child.

We travel like the clown who moves from village to village with his animals that teach children their first lesson in boredom. We travel to trick death, letting it trail us from place to place. We continue to travel until we can no longer find ourselves in the places we travel to; until we are lost and nobody can find us anymore.