Nick Drake
Road

LA RECENSIONE

"you can say the sun is shining, but I see the moon and it seems so clear to me"...ah, the vampire, ever since I translated it for him, adores this line...he says it makes him want to take a stroll...and so he imagines doing it...that the stroll is this road, is this song...yes, he imagines doing it...because going out is out of the question...yes, he imagines doing it...with eyes now closed, now open...while in the air there's a sound that's partly silence and partly that of a certain guitar...a tortuous sound...and magmatic...and hypnotic...that despite infinite detours, continuously returns to itself, digging an ever deeper groove...yet it's only two minutes...too short...so I fix it...and a few seconds before the end, I go back to the beginning...and then I do it again...and again...in this way, the piece seems unending...and also never-ending...more than whirling dervishes!!!...but we were saying "you can say the sun is shining, but I see the moon and it seems so clear to me"...but, it doesn’t end there...right after comes a "you can take the road that leads you to the stars, I'll take a road that’ll follow me to the end"...and this last line repeats over and over, like a mantra...or an existential magic formula...and, you know, at certain moments in my life, I would invent phrases like that...and repeat them to exhaustion...like a sort of personal prayer...or a gentle exorcism at the edge of lips...and it's something like that which road brings to my mind....which isn't a sad song, but a telegram of the soul...one of those that go towards the sky, even if terribly practical...yes, practical...like all truly essential things...I even see a kind of mysticism in it...meaning mysticism as deeply feeling something that wasn't there before, in this case arriving at seeing oneself...that I had translated "I can take a road that I'll see me through" as the road to seeing oneself...that maybe in the end the meaning is the same, that it's really at the end that we truly see ourselves...and anyway, among all, the translation I prefer is the very free one by gigi giancursi, who made a beautiful sung cover of road, a small detail, both in English and Italian...and in Italian it goes like this: "dici che se vuoi davvero il sole risplende, dico che la luna è chiara già così/prendi pure strade che vanno alle stelle, prendo strade che raccontino di me/io prendo strade che raccontino di me, io prendo strade che raccontino di me"...that the roads that tell of us are indeed the ones where we finally see ourselves...and of certain roads nick had already spoken in “time has told me”, the first song of the first album, where he said “so I'll leave the ways that making me be what I really don't want to be”...”but here, in road, “the roads that make us be what we really don't want to be” are abandoned forever...the bard has transformed into a blues man...and it takes him just four lines to tell it like it is...