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Thrust and riposte (abridged)
...The time has come, now, to suspend the suspension of every worldly deception - wished for by you for me...
Living on memories - I can no longer. Better the bite of the ice than your sleepwalker's lethargy, O late awakener!
Scarcely emerged from adolescence, for half my life I was thrown into the Augean stables.
I did not find two thousand oxen, nor did i see any animals - ever - and yet in the pathways, thicker and thicker with dung, walking was difficult, breathing was difficult - The human bellowing grew from day to day.
Then from year to year - who counted the seasons any more in that thick mist? - a hand feeling for the tiniest openings worked in its memorial...until from the crevices the fanning fire of a machine-gun pushed us back, tired shovellers caught in the act by the foreign police chiefs of the mud.
And at last the fall - beyond belief!
What did that new mire mean? and the breathing of other, but similar, stenches? and the whirlpool-whirling on rafts of dung? Was that the sun, that filthy grub from a sewer over the chimney pots?
...(I think that perhaps yoùve stopped reading me. But now you know all of me, of my prison and my life afterwards; now you know that the eagle can't be born of a mouse.)
(Eugenio Montale,"Botta e risposta I", Satura The translations are from the PENGUIN BOOK OF WORLD WAR I POETRY edited by Jon Silkin)
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