Yay!
Despite my doubts, I passed all the exams (some even with good marks) Now I only have finals to worry about.
To celebrate it, I'll post something of what I am translating. I dedicate it to Sylvie because I know how much she loves Willie.
Everything and nothing
Nobody was in him. Behind his face (that even through the inaccurate portraits of the time looks like no other) and his words, that were copious, fantastic and agitated, there was nothing but a bit of cold, a dream not dreamt by someone. At first he believed that everyone was like him, but the astonishment of a partner, with whim he had started to comment this emptiness, showed him his error and let him feel, forever, that an individual must not differ from the species. At some moment he thought that in books he’d find the remedy for his condition, and that way he learned the little Latin and less Greek that a contemporary would mention; then he considered that in the exercise of an elemental rite of humanity could as well be what he looked for, and he let Anne Hathaway initiate him, in a long June afternoon.At twenty something, he went to London. Instinctively he had already trained in the habit of pretending he was someone, so his condition of no one would not be discovered; in London he found the profession he was predestined for, of actor, whom in a stage plays to be someone else, in front of a concourse of people who play to take his for that someone. Histrionic duties taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first one he knew; but after the last verse was acclaimed, and the last corpse taken off scene, the hated taste of unreality fell back on him. He would stop being Ferrex or Tamerlan, and return to being no one. Harassed, he started imagining other heroes and other tragic stories. That way, while the body carried out its destiny of body in London’s taverns and brothels, the soul that inhabited was Caesar, who ignores the oracle’s admonition, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks in the barren lands with the witches, who are also the Parcae. No man was so many men as that man, who as the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the appearances of the being. Sometimes he left, in the corner of a play, a confession, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard assures that in his person, he plays the role of many, and Iago says, with curious words “I am not who I am”. The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and representing inspired famous passages.
Twenty years he persisted in that directed hallucination, but one day he was overcome by the boredom of being so many kings that die by the sword, and so many sad lovers who converge, diverge, and melodiously agonise. That same day he finished the sale of his theatre. Before a week he had returned to his village, where he recovered trees and the river of his childhood and did not relate them to those which his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin voices. He had to be someone; he was a retired enriched businessman, who is interested in money lending and trials. In that character he dictated the arid will we know, from which he deliberately excluded any literary or pathetic feature. Friends from London used to visit him in his retirement, and he retook for them the role of a poet.
History adds that, before or after dying, he knew himself before God and told Him: “I, whom so many have been in vain, want to be one and me” And the voice of God answered from a whirlwind “neither I am; I dreamt the world as you dreamt your plays, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream were you, that as I, are many and none”.