Stefano Pietrosanti

on translating Francesco Guccini

In this piece, Francesco Guccini wrote about destiny and afterthought. The song focuses on the figure of Enrico* — Guccini’s great-uncle — who left the village of Pàvana in the early twentieth century to work as a miner in the US.

I decided to translate a piece by Guccini because I see the organic evolution of the ``classical’’ tradition of Italian poetry in his work.** Due to my personal hobby of searching for conservative poetry — which is poetry infused with a certain sad love for small facts, for the imperfect life of men, for memory and roots, and for the careful crafting of phrases — in unexpected places, I cannot but pay homage.

I chose this particular song because I see a moving celebration of how personal lives repeat, of how we actually share experiences that we perceive as solitary struggles with others — before and after us – in it. Second, it is an interesting instance of how much of recent European culture developed in constant dialogue with and about the US.

*Called Nerico in dialect, and thus Amerigo.
**On the relationship between Guccini’s work and classical Italian poetry, I refer to this article by Paolo Squillacioti, of the Italian National Research Council.

In translating, I sacrificed literal meaning to favor the flow of phrases, in order to recreate the smooth rhythm of the song. Moreover, I often used direct questions where the original text does not; I decided not to translate Paperino as Donald Duck, and I stuck to Guccini’s pronunciation of the name “Texas” in the song, the truncation “Tex.”