Un ottico [English translation]

You color-blind people, far-sighted people, beggars of sight:

the light merchant – your eye doctor –

now wants only special customers

who don’t know what to do with normal eyes.

No longer an optician but a lens dealer,

to improvise happy eyes,

so that the pupils, that are used to copying,

may invent worlds to look at.

Follow these eyes with me, as they dream,

as they escape from the orbit and never want to come back.

«I see that I go up to steal the sun

to have no more nights;

to prevent it from falling into nets of sunsets,

I have closed it in my eyes;

and people who will feel cold,

shall warm up along my gaze.»

«I see the rivers inside my veins,

they are looking for their sea,

they are breaking the banks,

they find skies to take pictures of.

Blood flowing with no imagination,

it brings tumors of melancholy.

«I see policemen grazing,

women bent over the dew,

the red tongues on the flower pollen,

but where is the queen bee?

Maybe she’s flown to the nests of dawn,

maybe she’s flown, maybe she flies no more.

«I see my friends still on the streets,

they are in no hurry:

they still steal cheerfulness from sleep,

a bit of night from dawn;

and then the light, light that changes

the world into a toy.»

We’ll make glasses like this!

We’ll make glasses like this!

• Artist:Fabrizio De André
• Album:Non al denaro non all’amore né al cielo (1971)