.
The Cantico dei Cantici (Song of Songs / Song of Solomon) is one of the most ancient texts of all literature.
Imbued with sweetness and care, scents and imaginations, it is one of the most important, perhaps one of the most mysterious texts; it is a hymn to beauty, both timid and complacent, a bolero between listening and engaging in a relationship, between abstraction and concreteness, it’s a balm to body and soul.

If you read it without any religious references or interpretative ambition, giving up on possible reading keys or parallelisms; if you read it almost unconsciously, if you utter it and not try to find other meanings, if you try to ignore who is talking, but try to pay attention only to what he is saying, regardless of chapters or role division; if you try to hold to its internal movement, to linger in its suspension, then its perfume suddenly discloses a dreamlike dimension -not a real dream, but something of that parallel, perhaps ancestral world, where dreams and words choose us and accompany us.

I did not translate its words word-for-word, even though I tried to remain as faithful as possible to the text.
What I translated to the letter is the feeling that always got hold of me while reading these pages. I tried to follow their flow, the tempo of their breathing, their voice, and their temperature.
I tried not to hold the words, so that I could speak them out loud, so that I could go after them in my body, keeping them in close proximity, on and around me; I tried to walk beside them, to take them by the hand, I closed my eyes and, weightlessly, I tried to sleep together with them.

"Please, do not wake up my sleeping love"

R. L.


video
.