Translation: Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day

A rainy evening in NYC, Marion Wolcott Post, 1939

This is Bora Mici’s original French to English translation of the end of Simone de Beauvoir’s travel journal America Day by Day, or L’Amérique au jour le jour in French. In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir spent four months travelling around the US, and she was most impressed by New York City, where she spent most of her time. She was struck by how intellectuals and artists in the US were so marginalized and so lonely. And American idealism is something she muses over, both praising it and criticizing it in this particular passage and throughout the book. In light of a philosophy podcast (Parole de philosophe) I recently listened to about George Orwell’s 1984 and the importance of Newspeak and thought crimes in explaining the current climate of irresolvable contradictions, in which the crises of individual privacy and the culture wars are slowly eroding factual reality and the reliability of science, I reflected on Simone de Beauvoir’s text and how American idealism has created a post-truth society where individuals are more and more disenfranchised by rising new technologies, social media and clickbait political messaging. In wanting to impose our will upon the facts, we have created a grand illusion of persistent denial and have lost our grasp on what is a shared reality. Are we all being brainwashed or can we think for ourselves? Do we still have a commitment to truth or do we think everything is relative and open to interpretation? How do we distinguish trends from what really matters? What kind of a world do we want to live in and what values do we want to impart to each other and to future generations?

L’Amérique au jour le jour, excerpt translated from French into English by Bora Mici

Columbus Circle, Broadway, Times Square. Four months have gone by. It’s the same crowds, the same taxis, cars, the streaming of the lights. The drug-stores and the high-rises have not lost any of their magic. I know why I love them. There is a fascinating mirage that takes shape through the conveniences and generous abundance of this civilization: that of an existence that is not consumed through its maintenance and that could be entirely used with the goal of surpassing it. Eating, commuting, clothing oneself, all this is done without any effort and without spending too much time: starting from there, anything could happen. My dizzying attraction to America, where the nearby memory of the pioneers still roams, is that it seems like the realm of transcendence; contracted in time, magnificently expansive across space, its history is that of the creation of a world. That’s what moves me in the high-rises: they shout out that man is not a stagnant being, but that he is momentum, expansiveness and conquest; and in the shameless profusion of the drug-stores, there is a poetry that is just as hopelessly passionate as in a baroque church; crude being has been caught in the trap of man’s desires; he affirms the power of his imagination upon matter. New York, Chicago reflect the existence of this demiurge with imperious dreams, and that is why they are the most human and exciting cities that I know. There is no room here for the gloomy wisdom of the petit-bourgeois in his slippers whose only project, as he expresses it for example in the famous sonnet on happiness “is to wait for death pleasantly at home.” Dedicating yourself to such a wait is already death. In this way, Americans are very much alive: they live with life in mind and not death; they are not satisfied with inertia; everyone is judged based on their actions; in order to be you have to do. The large metallic bridges, the buildings, Grand Central, Park Avenue, the airports, the roads, the mines are the confirmation of this faith.

It will be difficult for me to be separated from these great visions of hope; however, I also know their false attraction. Life is exhausted through its maintenance in this country too. “I have been out since 6 a.m.,” a taxi driver was telling me around 10 p.m. yesterday. “Imagine how badly I want to go home.” I remember the rush towards the New Jersey ferryboat. All of my friends have told me how difficult the workdays are in this city where the distances are so great; particularly women who have to keep up a job and a household and are worn out when evening comes; often I have seen them too exhausted to say yes to going out or to enjoy it. I have also understood that people don’t drink so much out of obsession; they need a pick-me-up at the end of the afternoon. And the most common cause of death in New York is heart disease.

That’s not all. One has the exciting feeling that anything could happen. But what happens in reality? What do people do with their time and the money they’ve earned? It goes without saying that I have not met any of the leading classes, those that study, invent, go into business, fight; but they only make up a small minority. Most Americans are similar to the ones with whom I have rubbed shoulders: they allow their life to go round in circles. They have neither the taste nor a feeling for collective life; they are not concerned about their individual fate either. That is where the sadness I have felt among them comes from: this world full of generous promise crushes them; and its splendor soon becomes sterile because there are no men to dominate it. All civilizations offer man the diversion of “the banality of daily life,” but what is specific here is the extent to which this diversion is systematically organized. Neither his education nor the social setting in which he grows exist in such a way as to enable the individual to discover his interiority. He becomes conscious of himself not only as a body made of flesh and blood but as an organism that protects and prolongs an arsenal of mechanical devices: he goes from one floor to another in an elevator, he commutes on the subway, speaks on the phone, writes with a typewriter, sweeps with a vacuum cleaner; canned food factories, refrigerators, electric stovetops come between his food and his stomach; between his sexual desires and their satisfaction, there’s a whole paraphernalia of moral principles and hygienic practices. Society gets a hold of him as soon as childhood. He learns to look outside of himself, in the other, as a model for his behaviors; that’s where what’s called American conformity comes from. In reality, individuals are just as different, just as separated from one another in the new as in the old world, but for the former, it is easier to find the means to escape their singularity and to avoid the sentiment of the “original abandonment;” or maybe they don’t find it, but they look for it more obstinately. Like everyone else, they experience boredom, dissatisfaction, doubt, but they try to rationalize their anxiety by setting out their “problems;” instead of relying on their solitude, trying to surpass it by deepening it, they cling resolutely to what’s given; they see the source of values and truth in things and not in themselves; their own presence is just a fluke to which they don’t want to attach any importance. That is why they are interested in the crude result, not in the mental process that begets it, just like professor T’s students who did not want the proof of a formula. In the same way, they think they can isolate the part from the whole, as shown by the investment in specialization that is prevalent in technology, science and culture. In Hegelian terms, we can say that the negation of the subject leads to the triumph of the understanding on the Spirit, that is to say the triumph of abstraction. And that is why in this country that seems so inclined toward the concrete, the word abstraction has so often been on my lips; the idolized object loses its human truth and becomes an abstract thing, for concrete reality is that which includes both an object and a subject. That is the paradox of all positivisms, of all pseudo-realisms that depart from man in order to affirm things; they miss the thing itself and only produce concepts.

What I have often felt in listening to their jazz, in talking with them, is that the time itself in which they live is abstract. They respect the past, but as an embalmed monument. The idea of a living past that is integrated in the present is foreign to them. They only want to know a present that is cut off from the flow of time; and the future in which they project themselves is one that can follow mechanically, not one in which a slow maturation or sudden explosion implies unpredictable risks; they believe in the future of a bridge, of an economic plan, but not in that of an art or a revolution. Their time is “the time of the physicist,” a pure exteriority that is coupled with that of space. And because they refuse duration, they also refuse quality; it’s not just for economic reasons that “artisanal arts” don’t exist in America; even during free time as part of domestic life, one does not seek a qualitative achievement; one cooks food and conserves fruits as quickly as possible; in all fields of life, you have to hurry up out of fear that the result is already out of date at the moment it has been attained. Cut off from the past and future, the present is without substance; there is nothing more foreign to Americans than the idea of seeing the moment as compounded time, a mirror of eternity, and of grasping it in order to understand eternal values or truths; the content of a moment seems precarious to them just like the moment itself. Because they do not accept that truths and values become, they also don’t know how to preserve them in the movement that surpasses them; they disown them. History is a great cemetery here; men, works and ideas die almost as soon as they are born. And every individual existence also tastes like death; from one minute to another, the present is just an honorary past; you have to constantly refill it in order to hide this curse upon it; that’s why Americans like speed, alcohol, thrillers, sensational news; they feverishly ask for one thing after another because they don’t rest on anything. But here, like everywhere else, life repeats itself day after day; so people have fun with gadgets, and because they lack real projects, they cultivate hobbies; through this obsession, they pretend to make daily habits their own by their own choice. Sports, movies, comics offer diversions. But ultimately one has to contend precisely with what one was trying to escape: the dry crux of American life is boredom.

Boredom: loneliness too. I’ve mentioned it a thousand times and it’s true: the people I rub shoulders with are alone. Because they are too afraid of and run away from their original solitude, because they run away from themselves, they do not really have a good grasp of themselves; so how could they give of themselves? How could they receive in return? They are, however, open and welcoming, they are capable of tenderness, passion, sentimentality, politeness; but it is rare for them to know how to build a deep love, a lasting friendship. They are far from being heartless, and yet, their relationships remain superficial and cold. They are far from lacking vitality, momentum, generosity, and yet, they still don’t know how to dive into the enterprise of their lives; it’s for the same reasons. Being Julien Sorel or Rastignac requires taking charge of oneself and not looking away from oneself; there are very few real ambitious people here; they idolize heroes, capriciously by the way, but when it comes to oneself, one does not wish to do more than rise one or two steps in the social hierarchy; at most, if a young man wishes to distinguish himself, it will be as a citizen and not as a man; he will not dream of standing out from the given world, a dream that is symbolized by the treetop on which Julien Sorel is perched, the summit from which Rastignac arrogantly looks down at Paris. These desires of grandeur are a source of many disappointments and often underscore petty faults, which Americans do not have; they possess the virtues that come from an indifference as to themselves; they are neither bitter, nor haunted, nor mean, nor jealous, nor egotistical. But they do not have an internal fire. As much as they have gotten lost in the object, they find themselves without an object. They experience the “original abandonment,” which their civilization pretends to mask, in a different way. It is even this contrast between their secret fragility and the things they’ve build with so much pride that makes them so pathetic.

It seems to me that it is because of the abstract atmosphere in which they live that money assumes such a disproportionate importance here. These people are neither miserly, nor petty; on the contrary, these are the faults for which they criticize the French; they do not desire money in order to accumulate it, they spend easily, and for the sake of others as much as for themselves; giving comes naturally to them; they are not materialists either; they do not go after great fortunes in order to satisfy extravagant appetites. If money is for many of them the only goal, it’s that all of the other values have been reduced to this common denominator; it has become the measure of all human accomplishment, when it is only an abstract sign of real wealth. It is because they do not know what makes up and affirms concrete values that Americans are satisfied by this empty symbol. In reality, they are not satisfied by it; excepting the high-flying capitalists, they are as burdened by their dollars as by their free time activities. I guess it’s one of the reasons why American women have come to stand in for idols: the dollar is too gloomy of a god. Man is not unhappy to justify his work and his earnings by dedicating them to another being of flesh and blood. But the cult of the woman, just like the cult of money, is nothing but a stand-in. The destiny of the American man would not be meaningful unless he were able to give a concrete content to the abstract entity that is his freedom. Here we have a vicious cycle because, in order to fill this empty freedom, it would be necessary for him to change the political and social conditions in which he lives and which are the ones that beget his inertia. Certainly, thousands of Americans work toward breaking this cycle. And of course there are also thousands of other Americans to whom my reflection here do not apply at all or only a little. But as long as we can allow for generalizations, most of them are victims of this machinery: running away from boredom and loneliness gets them stuck in boredom and loneliness; because they wanted to get lost in the world, they have lost their grasp upon it.

One of the characteristics that has most stood out to me is to what extent they refuse to question both the world and themselves. They need to believe that Good and Evil are clear-cut categories and that the Good will easily be achieved. I had sensed this from the beginning of my stay. But recently, I have had clear confirmations of it. Among other things, I caused a scandal among practically all of the students, without exception, at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, when I spoke to them about the dilemma presented in Rousset’s book, les Jours de notre mort. On what criteria should rely those who are in a position of responsibility for saving the lives of two or three of their friends who have been deported to a concentration camp? They stubbornly responded: “No one has the right to decide on the life of human beings” or “What right do they have to choose?” If one retorted that not choosing would have meant not saving anyone, that at any rate, the positive act of saving two lives was more valuable than a murderous abstention, they would shut down; I believe that, as for them, they would have preferred to let the whole group perish instead of taking up a difficult initiative. Or rather, they could not even imagine a situation where they would have had to admit evil, which, however, is the only way to fight it. One refuses, for example, even when one shows good will, to establish clearly the current conflict between justice and freedom and the need to come up with a compromise between these two ideas; one prefers to deny the existence of injustice and the lack of freedom. One does not want to admit that the complexity of the factors in action creates problems that go beyond all virtuous solutions. Evil is just a residue that we will be able to eliminate gradually through a more rigorous application of institutions which are healthy in themselves. That’s what so many idealistic souls believe; and if this optimism seems too easy, then we will choose to create an obsession that must be eradicated: the Soviet Union is Evil. All we have to do is destroy it, and we will find ourselves again within the realm of the Good. This is what explains that these very students, who were so respectful of human beings, quietly discuss nuking Russia.

If I have formulated so many criticisms while thinking again about all these things, why is it still so painful for me to leave? First of all, one could formulate the same criticisms about our European civilization, about the French civilization, which I will return to, other, different criticisms but equally depressing ones. We have other ways of being unhappy, inauthentic, that’s all: my judgements about Americans during this journey are not at all accompanied by a feeling of superiority. I see what they are lacking, I do not forget what we are lacking. And beyond what I love and what I hate about it, there is something fascinating about this country: it’s the innumerable chances and risks it runs after, and the world with it. All human problems are at play at a mind boggling scale: and it’s largely the solution that will be found here that will retrospectively shine a light of pathos upon them or drown them in the night of indifference. Yes, I believe that is what moves me so much just before my departure: here is one of the places in the world where the future of mankind is being played out. To like or not to like America: these worlds have no meaning. America is a battlefield, and we can only become passionate about the fight it wages within itself and its stakes would have us forego all measure.

Translation: Excerpt from Zeno's Conscience, Part 1

René Magritte, Le donateur heureux, 1966

This is Bora Mici's original translation from Italian into English of an excerpt from the 20th-century novel La Coscienza di Zeno, Zeno's Conscience, by Italo Svevo. The following are actually two excerpts published as one continuous reflection on life, whether it is fair or unfair, good or bad, and all the things in between. The main character, Zeno, is a person full of good resolve, who has lived his life in between the extremes he describes and who eventually comes to the conclusion that he has always lived according to love and that has saved him, despite his many vacillations, distractedness and little jealousies. The novel is a somewhat picaresque journey into Zeno's reflections as he finds himself in quirky and pathos-laden situations which he manages with improvised dexterity.

Excerpt from La Coscienza di Zeno, Part 1,  translated by Bora Mici   

The next day, the obstetrician who was taking care of Ada asked for the help of Dr. Paoli, who immediately pronounced the word that I had not been able to say: Morbus Basedowii. Guido told me about it, describing the illness in a learned fashion and sympathizing with Ada who was suffering a lot. Without any ill will, I thought his compassion and science were not great. He assumed a heartfelt look when he spoke of his wife, but when he dictated letters for Carmen, he displayed all the joy of living and imparting lessons; he also thought that the man that had lent his name to the illness was the Basedow who had been Goethe’s friend, while when I looked up that illness in the encyclopedia, I immediately figured out that it was someone else.

What a greatly important illness that of Basedow! For me it was most important to have learned about it. I studied it in various monographs and thought I had just discovered the secret of our organism. I think that in many people, just as with me, there are periods of time when certain ideas occupy and encumber the whole mind, shutting out other things. But the same thing happens to society too! First it lives on Darwin, after having lived on Robespierre and Napoleon, and then on Liebig or maybe Leopardi, when it’s not Bismarck that rules over the whole cosmos!

But I am the only one who lived on Basedow! It seemed to me that it had brought to the fore the roots of life, which is made in the following way: all organisms can be distributed on a line, on one end of which is the illness of Basedow, which implies the most ample, crazy consumption of the vital force at a precipitous pace, a rapid heartbeat, and at the other end are the organisms who are impoverished because of an organic avarice, destined to perish of an illness that would seem to be exhaustion but in fact is sedentariness. The right balance between the two illnesses is at the center and is improperly designated as good health, which is nothing but a stopover. And between the center and one extremity—that of Basedow—fall all of those who are exasperated and whose lives are consumed by great desires, ambitions, pleasures and work too, and on the other those who only put crumbs on their plate and save in preparation for that abject longevity that would seem a burden to society. It turns out that this burden is also necessary. Society goes forth because the Basedowans push it forward, and it does not fall because the others hold it in place. I am convinced that if we wanted to build a society, we could have done so in a much simpler way, but this is how it’s made, with the goiter at one of its ends and edema at the other, and there’s no fixing it. In the middle are those who are starting to develop either a goiter or an edema and along the whole line, for all of humanity, absolute good health is missing.

…………………………

“Life is hard and unfair!”

It seemed to me that I was not allowed to say a single word that might suggest any kind of judgement on my part about him and Ada. But it seemed to me that I still needed to say something. He had ended up speaking about life and had saddled it with two predicates that were not guilty of excessive originality. I was able to come up with something even better precisely because I had decided to criticize what he had said. So many times we say things following the sound of the words, as they relate to each other by chance. Then, as soon as you try to see if what was being said was worth the breath expended, sometimes you discover that the random association has given birth to an idea. I said, “Life is neither good or bad, but original!”

When I thought about it, it seemed to me like I had said something important. Labeled in such a way, life seemed so new that I began looking at it as if I had seen it for the first time with its gaseous bodies, fluids and solids. If I had described it to someone who was not used to it and therefore lacked our common sense, he would have been breathless before the enormous structure without a purpose. He would have asked me, “But how do you put up with it?” And having been informed about every single detail, from those celestial bodies hanging up there so that they can be seen but not touched all the way to the mystery of death, he would have certainly exclaimed: “Very original!”

“Life is original,” laughed Guido. “Where did you read that?”

I did not think it was important to reassure him that I had not read it anywhere because otherwise my words would have been less significant to him. But the more I thought about it, the more original I found life. And it was not even necessary to look at it from the outside to see that it was put together in such a bizarre way. It was enough to remember all the things us men expect of life in order to see it as so strange as to arrive to the conclusion that maybe man ended up inside of it by mistake and that does not belong there.

Without having colluded about the direction our walk would take, we came to the incline of via Belvedere just like before. Once he had found the short wall on which he had laid down that other night, Guido climbed on it and lay down just like before. He was singling softly, perhaps always oppressed by his thoughts, and he certainly meditated on the inexorable numbers of his accounting. As for me, I remembered that I had wanted to kill him in that very place, and comparing my feelings then with my current ones, I was admiring once again the incomparable originality of life. However, I suddenly remembered that just a little while ago, our of an ambitious whim, I had railed against the poor Guido, and on one of the worst days of his life. I dedicated myself to a search: without great pain I was witnessing the torture that my careful accounting was inflicting on Guido, and a curious doubt came over me after a curious memory. The doubt was whether I was good or bad. The memory was provoked suddenly by the doubt, which was not new: I saw myself as a child and I was dressed (I am certain) in short skirts, and I raised my face to ask my mother who was smiling: “And I good or bad?” At that time, the doubt must have been inspired in the child’s mind by many of those who had called him good and the many others whom, jokingly, had qualified him as bad. There was no reason to wonder why the child had been burdened by that dilemma. Oh, the incomparable originality of life! It was amazing that the doubt that had already been inflicted on the child in such a puerile way had not been resolved by the adult, who had already crossed into midlife.

In the foggy night, exactly in that place where I had wanted to kill him once, that doubt deeply anguished me. Certainly when the child had felt that doubt err in his mind, his head only recently liberated from the bonnet, he had not suffered much because children are told that one can be cured from being bad. In order to free myself from so much anguish, I wanted to believe it again, and I succeeded.

If I had not succeeded, I would have had to cry for Guido and for myself, and for our most sad life. The resolution renewed the illusion! The resolution was to stand by Guido’s side and to collaborate with him in the growth of his business, on which his life and the life of his family depended, and all this without any kind of profit for myself. I glimpsed the possibility of rushing, desiring and studying for him, and I accepted the possibility of becoming, in order to help him, a great, an enterprising, a brilliant negotiator. That’s what I thought on that foggy night of this very original life!

The Man Who Wore the News

Barbara Kruger, We don't need another hero, 1987

This is Bora Mici's original text, written in Italian, which may or may not contain a few minor mistakes, and which will be difficult to translate with an AI translator. It presents a parody of a person who does not exist in real life by employing vocabulary learned while listening to the news in Italian and to Italian-language podcasts. As a result, it might give you the impression that the character the story describes is modeled on real-life characters, since he embodies the spirit of the times, but I assure you he does not exist. The text began as a mere vocabulary-learning exercise and transformed into an endeavor of literary ambition. I had tried this kind of exercise once before using French vocabulary on a French test at the University of Maryland, and I found that it gave me a great amount of playful liberty with words. For this particular piece of writing, I just used the words in the order they appeared in my notes, which also represents a certain kind of underlying logical structure, since the sources I drew the unknown vocabulary from mostly discussed current events from around the world.  

Giovanni è una persona smaccatamente attendista. Il suo attendismo è inviso ai suoi amici che non vogliono più fare da sponda per lui. Hanno cercato di ricompattarsi come gruppo, ma in fin dei conti, Giovanni pensa soltanto a se stesso. Una volta ha fatto costruire uno striscione sul quale era scritto “Giovanni prima di tutti gli altri”, proprio come quei leader populisti che vogliono mettere in avanti la priorità del proprio partito e di conseguenza del proprio paese. Gli amici di Giovanni hanno deciso di fare un piccolo smistamento e provare di toglierlo dal gruppo. Hanno deciso di andare al mare con lui, di metterlo su un gommone col maglioncino giallo che gli aveva confezionato la nonna, molto amata da lui, di dargli alcune zucchine grigliate per poter nutrirsi durante lo smarrimento meritato, ma lui ha capito subito il tranello in cui lo cacciavano ed ha intimato che non fosse coerente con la loro amicizia disinteressata e che non valeva. E poi sarebbe stata una soluzione contingente. Invece di andare al mare, Giovanni ha intrapreso di leggere un testo ostico, ad alta voce, e farne una carrellata per gli amici e mandarli a quel paese perché potessero scovare dalla sabbia della sua coscienza un tesoro facoltoso di cui lui era già prettamente assuefatto. E doveroso menzionare che si rifaceva ai suoi maestri più colti di scienze umane, compresa la psicologia e la letteratura. I suoi amici avevano pensato di proporgli così un capestro da cui non poteva più slegarsi, ma lui si dimostrò propositivo, al netto, dobbiamo aggiungere, di voler sempre ribaltare le carte in tavola. Non si sapeva più dove lo avesse celato quel gruzzolo di sapienza che aveva acquisito col tempo adagio adagio, e forse sarebbe stato il caso di fare appello ad un umarell per dare le istruzioni che occorrevano ai ragazzi. Per forza, si trovavano costretti ad edificare il loro baluardo di avanguardia contro la sapienza faticosa e preponderante di Giovanni. Di recente, lo ritenevano piuttosto istrionico e non del tutto canonico, anche se Giovanni gli esortava di appuntare senza barare tutto ciò che cercasse di trasmettere a loro. Perorava che, dopo tutto, la resilienza vuol dire piegarsi senza spezzarsi, e Giovanni se ne intendeva di queste cose. Puntava la distensione e la riscossa del gruppetto, anche se era chiaro che allargava le maglie della giustizia a suo compiacimento. Era un furbo che faceva finta di andare alla volta dei suoi addetti, ma forse non se ne accorgeva nemmeno della sua duplicità. Al netto del suo atteggiamento protagonista, li considerava i suoi soci più cari e voleva plasmare la loro amicizia, adibirla, senza però millantare, mi raccomando, in un ateneo. Auspicava la loro adesione, e d’acchito, non sembrava troppo esigente. Purtroppo agiva sempre a scapito degli altri e intasava le loro vie d'uscita. Li faceva intrappolare nel suo gorgo ai prezzi stracciati, che campeggiavano in bella mostra su un affiche con una dicitura sgradevole annunciando la degenza, semmai non gli si fosse dato retta. Brandendo il cartellone dal balcone che dava su un piccolo spiazzo fuori casa sua, invocava i suoi discepoli, cercando come sempre di accreditarsi con loro, intercalando nei suoi discorsi gustosi ed espansivi questioni di atteggiamenti sindacabili da parte dei suoi rivali. Siamo lì, diceva, tutto fiero di sé, dobbiamo accendere un faro su queste velleità raffazzonate di quel tizio che sempre ordisce ai danni della buona giustizia, di cui noi stessi abbiamo fatto le lodi, pensando di aver imbroccato l’argomento anche se tutti sospettavano che non fosse altro che una macchietta bislacca e se la ridevano sotto i baffi. Aveva un’ossessione morbosa col delitto dell’appropriazione indebita, cercava sempre aggravanti, ma siccome non voleva essere percepito nemmeno come un foriero di verità indiscutibili, era chiaro o no, che si trattasse di un fifone che incollava la propria immagine di sé, come uomo da bene, sulla realtà poco gradevole. Così, si era ritagliato un posticino sicuro in mezzo al caos quotidiano della sua città e badava sempre ad appropriarsi una quota di mercato che andava sempre incrementando, accolta in sottintese scoppiettate di riso. Seppure la sua casa si trovasse vicino alla Borsa e potesse essere informato da subito di potenziali flessioni, lasciava intendere di collocarsi dall’altra parte della barricata per far sì che fosse caldeggiato da quelli che curiosavano nei suoi affari. Spesso con i suoi soci intavolava discorsi a far tremare i polsi, scattenandosi delirante come se fosse in procinto di vedersi costretto a firmare un accordo svantaggioso. Che stramboide, diceva la gente. Altri ammiravano il suo impeto dilagante e dicevano sottovoce, ma che figo, ammazza! La calca si faceva sempre più fitta quando saliva in cattedra anche se non gli riusciva mai di fare altro che scalfire la superficie dell’argomento prescelto, conseguendo così di trovarsi conciato male davanti alla ciurma, che comunque si beveva le sue parole come vino sfuso. Si era messo in testa di debellare la reputazione dei suoi nemici, inalberandosi e squadernandosi, spalancando le braccia per far intravedere le sue ascelle sfrangiate e sbiadite dal tanto sudore che ci metteva per confutare le menzogne sulla sua persona, tra cui si potevano annoverare quelle sul afflato fatiscente dei rivali. Perorava spesso della sua impresa, che beninteso, non mirasse il tornaconto, bensì si impegnasse a non lasciare le cose andare in tilt, che si desse per spacciato lo sforzo quotidiano della gente per edificare quel tempio alla sapienza. Dal suo leggio che fungeva da posto investito dell’autorità suprema, quasi quasi si potrebbe dire che avesse raggiunto il prestigio del papa quando professava la carità e l’umiltà dal balcone della San Pietro, rivolgendosi alle masse nel suo discorso famosissimo dell’urbi et orbi. Insomma, Giovanni non cercava di tirare le somme di quanto fossero divenuti colti i suoi coetanei, bensì raccomandava loro un cambio di marcia per ottenere quella margine risicata in più, che avrebbe permesso loro di bollarsi gente di cultura. A questo proposito faceva aleggiare una nube florida di speranza che somigliava, se esaminata da vicino, ad una spocchiosa avvampata che sbaciucchiava in aria, che col passare del tempo, sarebbe poi divenuta una rimbambita bitorzoluta che nessuno avrebbe più adorato, ma che tuttora sbottava di scatto i suoi rincari e sbuffava di non essere riconosciuta a pieno titolo come la guida suprema per antonomasia. Non si sapeva a chi dovesse questa sua convinzione, quale mutuato nascondesse nel cassone della sua macchina con una marcia in più. Tuttavia era calzante la sua passione senza fronzoli, come lui credesse, che riusciva comunque a gasare la folla. Però come ve lo potete immaginare, si diceva intorno, che fosse un bacchettone, che avesse un pallino per la mistificazione, che esercitava tramite grossolani strafalcioni sui propri pargoli, costringendoli a farsi il mazzo. Siccome nessuno voleva che si riprendesse dallo smacco cagionato dalla loro andatura a rilento, si stipulava il conclamato divieto di impicciarsi platealmente nei affari del capo, che tra l’atro, si deve riconoscere una volta per tutto, portava i vestiti nuovi del re. In ultima istanza siamo costretti anche a dargli retta, tirando un grandissimo fiatone di sollievo, perché il suo indole non era del tutto congeniale al coinvolgimento in malefatta. Si vedeva chiaramente che aveva soltanto bisogno di convincersi che poteva portare a termine le sue illusioni, frutto di un farneticare sfizioso, per poi defilarsi con un’umiltà sentitissima e dare spago allo stuolo ferale che gli pareva dignitoso e bonario, quando invece si trattava di arraffoni disillusi, che ormai si potevano perfino vantarsi di essere colti come lui.

Translation: Com'è profondo il mare by Lucio Dalla

Lucio Dalla, Com'è profondo il mare, Album Cover, 1977

This is Bora Mici's original Italian to English translation of the 1977 Italian song Com'è profondo il mare, How deep is the sea or The sea is so deep by the Italian signer-songwriter Lucio Dalla. This song tells the story of humankind from antiquity to nowadays evoking the sea as the immovable guardian of its secrets. You can listen to the original song here.

Com'è profondo il Mare, Lucio Dalla, translated by Bora Mici

It’s us, we are many beside

We hide at night
Afraid of the motorists, the journalists
We are the black cats, the pessimists
We are the dark cracks
And we have nothing to eat
The sea is so deep
The sea is so deep

Dad, you once were a great shot
Of quail and pheasant
Drive away these flies
They drive me mad
They won’t let me sleep
The sea is so deep
The sea is so deep

It’s useless, there’s no more quorum
There’s no more decorum
God or whoever in his name
Is trying to divide us
To hurt us, to make us sink deep
The sea is so deep
The sea is so deep

Through the power of a bribe
Man became someone
Brought the dead back alive, unlocked prisons
Blocked six trains with their wagons
Uplifted the poor man for a moment
To a role that was hard to maintain
Then he let himself fall again, shout and weep
Alone in the middle of the sea
The sea is so deep.

Then by itself the shout became a drumbeat
And the poor man like lightning in the sky ready to meet
Began a war to conquer
That joke of the land
That his great heart was going to till deep
The sea is so deep
The sea is so deep

But the land was taken away
Including that still on his britches
He was thrown into houses, into ditches
I don’t really remember
Then a story about manacled members, beatings
And experimental surgery
How deep is the sea
How deep is the sea

In the meantime a mystic, maybe an aviator
Invented sympathy
And everyone got along newly
The beautiful and the ugly
With some damage to ugly
Who on a piece of glass
Were given the opportunity
Themselves to see
How deep is the sea
How deep is the sea

In the meantime the fish
From whom we are all descended
Looked on with curiosity
At the collective drama of this world
Which undoubtedly seemed wicked to them
In their great sea
How deep is the sea
In their great sea
How deep is the sea

It’s obvious that thinking bothers some
Even if who thinks is mute like a fish
Actually a fish
As a fish is hard to seize
Because he is protected by the seas
How deep are the seas

Obviously those who command
Are not inclined to poetic distinctions
Thought like the ocean
Cannot be seized
It cannot be fenced with ease

So they are burning the seas
So they are killing the seas
So they are humiliating the seas
So they are bending the seas