In silence let us rest, calm, resolute:
It is not right to trouble, in his sleep,
Nature, that fearsome god, ferocious, mute.
Translated from the French
by
Norman Shapiro
LUCIANO ERBA
The Ibis and the Crocodile
The story's famous, and its moral obvious.
The wolf was howling because of a bone
stuck in his throat and badly turned,
but when a crane came to help him
and free it with his beak, it was for what purpose?
"Just be satisfied," says the wolf, "to leave
with your head on your neck and let it be!"
The authors agree about the wolf.
But that other creature with the beak?
Only Phaedrus says it is a crane;
Aesop speaks of a heron
and La Fontaine, instead, of a stork.
Disagreement, then, and uncertain sources
brought indifference into nature's frame.
The sense of landscape became almost nil.
You know the wolf will head towards the forest,
while the environment of each wader
with a long neck and slender legs-
be ita plover, a coot, or a snipe-
is a scene of slimy water and air
whether it's a pond, cane field, or marsh.
I conclude that it's like this.
It's time for the wolf to leave the
fable
and return to his woods, leaving space in the scene
for the alternate-a more voracious beast,
that is, in terms of the swamp. You may have already
intuited that the crocodile is evil.
