Guerra e pace in Eraclito

Resumen

Heraclitus teaches that, in the infinite circularity of becoming, “day and night are one” (DK 22 B 57), and that they are a single manifestation of the “divine”, like “war and peace” (DK 22 B 67), according to an implicit and evident circularity in which everything passes not into its opposite according to a banal and extreme reasoning, but rather into its contiguity based on a continuity in which being and becoming are the same thing. This contribution on “war and peace” takes place in this only apparently paradoxical perspective, to be understood as the same thing (in war there are the premises of peace and vice versa), while at the outset we can identify various thematic correspondences and overlaps in the poem by John Donne, A Lecture upon the Shadow, which in the first verses declares: «…I will read to thee / a Lecture, Love, in loves philosophy», so a possible reference to Heraclitus is not so… far-fetched. And, if you think about it, Quasimodo, Montale and Ungaretti are also somehow “Heraclitean” in their perception of the contiguity/continuity between life and death. My contribution will consist above all in a reflection on the possible translations and interpretations of three fragments of Heraclitus in which war is the protagonist.