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An open letter to Leonard Cohen
Dear Leonard Cohen,
We approached this Book on tiptoe, afraid of unbalacing its spiritual and wordly message.
Neither of us has that kind of faith which allows to tread without fear on spiritual grounds.
So, we let ourselves be fascinated by the fact that Book of Mercy is also about the world, and about your experience of it as a person and a poet, and we entered that world relying on our ingenuousness.
Your words spoke straight to us - as they will speak to any reader of this Book.
We tried to listen carefully to them and rehearse them in our language, following as much as possible the cadence of your own speech.
We got more curious about the meaning of their music. Instead of helping us, published criticism on your Book often led as astray.
So we went back and started all over again concentrating on key words. We asked for help from Rabbis and scholars of Jewish matters. We opened the Bible again. We tried to remember the little we read about other religious poetry and about Buddhism.
(Our own feeling is that no one single religious or national culture stands behind this Book, but rather a twilight or hybrid space with an obvious but undogmatic and open heritage, with an open heart.)
We wrote a small Introduction, so as to offer some guidelines for those who might stumble upon this translation, and the very act of writing it ended up helping us to undersntand more.
Granted the limitations and the simplicity of our spiritual awareness, your trusting us when we asked for the opportunity to translate this Book was very generous. Thanks.
We hope that our Italian will be transparent, and that your message will be fully visible through it.
With our most sincere best wishes,
Francesca Piviotti Inghilleri & Armando Pajalich
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