Cirano

Francesco Guccini, Giuseppe Dati & Giuseppe Bigazzi, D'amore di morte e di altre sciocchezze, 1996.

Venite pure avanti, voi con il naso corto,
signori imbellettati, io più non vi sopporto,
infilerò la penna ben dentro al vostro orgoglio
perché con questa spada vi uccido quando voglio.

Venite pure avanti poeti sgangherati,
inutili cantanti di giorni sciagurati,
buffoni che campate di versi senza forza,
avrete soldi e gloria, ma non avete scorza!

Godetevi il successo, godete finché dura,
che il pubblico è ammaestrato e non vi fa paura,
e andate chissà dove per non pagar le tasse
col ghigno e l’ignoranza dei primi della classe.

Io sono solo un povero cadetto di Guascogna,
però non la sopporto la gente che non sogna.
Gli orpelli? L’arrivismo? All’amo non abbocco!
E al fin della licenza io non perdono e tocco,
io non perdono, non perdono e tocco!

Facciamola finita, venite tutti avanti
nuovi protagonisti, politici rampanti,
venite portaborse, ruffiani e mezze calze,
feroci conduttori di trasmissioni false!

Che avete spesso fatto del qualunquismo un’arte,
coraggio liberisti, buttate giù le carte,
tanto ci sarà sempre chi pagherà le spese
in questo benedetto, assurdo Bel Paese.

Non me ne frega niente se anch’io sono sbagliato,
spiacere è il mio piacere, io amo essere odiato,
coi furbi e i prepotenti da sempre mi balocco
e al fin della licenza io non perdono e tocco,
io non perdono, non perdono e tocco!

Ma quando sono solo con questo naso al piede
che almeno di mezz’ora da sempre mi precede,
si spegne la mia rabbia e ricordo con dolore
che a me è quasi proibito il sogno di un amore…

Non so quante ne ho amate,
non so quante ne ho avute,
per colpa o per destino le donne le ho perdute!
E quando sento il peso d’essere sempre solo
mi chiudo in casa e scrivo e scrivendo mi consolo…

Ma dentro di me sento che il grande amore esiste,
amo senza peccato, amo, ma sono triste
perché Rossana è bella, siamo così diversi,
a parlarle non riesco,
le parlerò coi versi,
le parlerò coi versi…

Venite gente vuota, facciamola finita,
voi preti che vendete a tutti un’altra vita
se c’è, come voi dite, un Dio nell’infinito,
guardatevi nel cuore, l’avete già tradito!

E voi materialisti, col vostro chiodo fisso,
che Dio è morto e l’uomo è solo in questo abisso,
le verità cercate per terra, da maiali,
tenetevi le ghiande, lasciatemi le ali!

Tornate a casa nani, levatevi davanti,
per la mia rabbia enorme mi servono giganti!
Ai dogmi e ai pregiudizi da sempre non abbocco
e al fin della licenza io non perdono e tocco,
io non perdono, non perdono e tocco!

Io tocco i miei nemici col naso e con la spada,
ma in questa vita oggi non trovo più la strada.
Non voglio rassegnarmi ad essere cattivo,
tu sola puoi salvarmi, tu sola e te lo scrivo…

Dev’esserci, lo sento, in terra o in cielo un posto
dove non soffriremo e tutto sarà giusto…
Non ridere, ti prego, di queste mie parole,
io sono solo un’ombra e tu, Rossana, il sole!

Ma tu, lo so, non ridi, dolcissima signora,
ed io non mi nascondo sotto la tua dimora
perché oramai lo sento, non ho sofferto invano,
se mi ami come sono,
per sempre tuo,
per sempre tuo,
per sempre, tuo Cirano…

Cyrano

Translated by: Fabio Romerio

Come forward, all you made-up people
with your noses upturned, I can’t stand you anymore,
I will sink my pen deep inside your arrogance
because with this sword I can take you down whenever I want.

Come forward, all you rickety poets,
insignificant singers of wretched days,
you pathetic clowns making a living with your weak rhymes,
you may be rich and famous, but you’re so thin skinned.

Enjoy your success while it lasts,
the audience is wrapped around your finger and doesn’t scare you
you’d do anything to avoid paying your dues,
with that smirk and smugness like the teacher’s pet.

I am just a lowly cadet from Gascony,
but I just can’t stand those without aspirations.
Tinsel? Social climbing? I’m not falling for it
and then, as I end the refrain, thrust home without mercy,
no mercy, thrust home!

Enough already, come forward all of you
glitterati and career politicians,
come forward lackeys, kiss-asses, twits,
vicious anchors of worthless shows

masters of your indifference,
come forward, you libertarians quit your acting
there will always be someone to pay the price
in this messed-up, crazy, beautiful land.

I don’t care if you think I have faults too,
I like to be disliked and I love to be hated;
I toy with the devious and the bullies
and then, as I end the refrain, thrust home without mercy,
no mercy, thrust home!

But then when I am alone and exhausted
from carrying around a nose that’s always preceded me by a mile
my anger subsides and the painful thought reemerges
that the dream of love is beyond reach for me.

I can’t tell you how many women I have loved, how many loves I’ve had,
but through fault or destiny I lost all of them
and when I feel the weight of being alone all the time
I hide from the world and I write, and when I write I feel better.

But inside me I know that true love exists
I love chastely, I love, but I’m so sad
because Rossana is pretty, we are so different,
I can’t even talk to her, so I’ll talk to her with my verses.

Come forward all you soulless people, let’s end it;
you preachers selling the afterlife,
if God exists as you claim, a God in the infinite,
look into your souls, you’ve already failed him.

And you materialists with your obsession
that there is no God and that we’re alone in this endless abyss,
you look for the truth down on the ground, like pigs,
just keep your acorns, and I’ll keep my wings.

Shoo! you shallow people, out of my way
only those with a deep soul can subdue my anger.
I repudiate indoctrination and prejudice
and then, as I end the refrain, without mercy thrust home,
no mercy, thrust home!

I lunge at my enemies with my nose and with my sword,
but sometimes I feel lost in today’s life.
I don’t want to give in to my anger,
you’re the only one who can save me,
you alone, and I am writing to you:

I know there has to be a place in heaven or on earth
where we won’t suffer and we can be happy.
Please, don’t laugh at these words,
I am just a shadow, and you, Rossana, are the light,

but I know that you won’t laugh, sweetest lady, and I will finally come out of my shadow and into your light
because I finally realize that my pain has not been in vain
if you love me as I am, forever yours, forever yours, forever yours, Cyrano

The artist:

Francesco Guccini

by Cristina Perissinotto (University of Ottawa)

Francesco Guccini, born in Modena in 1940, is one of the best-known Italian cantautori. His career spans about 50 years, during which he recorded 16 original albums and performed in countless concerts. Although he is no longer performing, his signature voice and impassionate ballads make him one of the most iconic folk singers of his generation. In 2001, Guccini relocated from Bologna to Pàvana, his ancestral village in the Apennines, where, between 2011 and 2012, he famously moved his musicians and an entire recording studio in order to tape his last album (Ultima Thule) and shoot a documentary about this effort (La mia Thule). During the same year, still in Pàvana, he announced that he was finished with concerts and albums, and retired from the musical scene.

Life goes on, and the imposing singer-songwriter now focuses his artistic inspiration on writing mystery novels (with Loriano Macchiavelli), and autobiographical collections. Before retirement he had already penned an excellent autobiographical trilogy: Cròniche epafàniche (1991), Vacca d’un cane (1993), and Cittanòva blues (2003). In these books, he uses an idiolect that sets the Italian language in the context of different dialectal soundscapes, depending on where the books are set. Cròniche epafàniche, dedicated to his childhood in the Apennines, delighted readers for its narrative ease and strong imagery, brought about by his original linguistic choices. For example, in a passage dedicated to his childhood pastime of fishing in the local creek, he writes:

è più facile prenderli, i pesci, con le mani, quando il gorello dello sfioratore del botàccio va in secca, e nelle pozétte qualche pesce rimane: una volta, quando c’era più pesci, usavano anche le nasse di stroppe che ora sono rinsecchite e inerti nel Maganzino. (17)

(it is easy to catch the fish with your hands when the basin of the creek dries up, and some fish are left in the small puddles: in the past, when there were more fish, they even used fishing traps made out of willow branches that are now dried out and inactive in the warehouse) (17)

Guccini’s importance as a cantautore in the history of Italian music cannot be overestimated. His ballads blended ethics and poetics, satire and indignation, past and present.

Even those who are not familiar with his vast body of work have come across some of Guccini’s early songs, such as “Dio è morto” (Folk Beat n. 1, 1967), inspired in the title by Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in the lyrics by Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”:

Ho visto
la gente della mia età andare via
lungo le strade che non portano mai a niente
cercare il sogno che conduce alla pazzia
alla ricerca di qualcosa che non trovano

(I have seen the people of my generation walk away / on roads leading nowhere / pursuing a dream that leads to folly / seeking something they can’t find)

One of his other famous ballads is “Auschwitz,” also known as “La canzone del bambino nel vento” (Song of the Child in the Wind) written after reading an autobiographical book by Vincenzo Pappalettera entitled Tu passerai per il camino:

Son morto che ero bambino
sono morto con altri cento.
Passato per il camino
e adesso sono nel vento.

(I was a child when I died
I died with one hundred others
I went through the chimney
and now I am in the wind)

Guccini is the author of “L’Avvelenata” (Via Paolo Fabbri, 43, published in 1976) one of the most scurrilous songs in the history of the Italian musica cantautorale. It constitutes a powerful act of indignation, peppered with swearwords. If in the beginning it felt scandalous, later on it became a symbol of the intensity of the personal protests that characterized the 1970s.

Guccini always claimed to be more of an anarchist than a communist. “La locomotiva,” (Radici, 1972), with which he ended all of his concerts, is one of his signature songs. It is a long anarchist ballad about a railway engineer, Pietro Rigosi, who, at the turn of the 19^th century, tried to hurl a locomotor against a passenger train, to protest against the difficult living conditions at the time.

In his canzoniere, Francesco Guccini sends a strong ethical message that is poetic, politically engaged and often satirical. For all these reasons, Dario Fo once called him “la voce del movimento.” Influences on his music and texts are Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, as well as Édit Piaf.

As far as his own iconography, he was famous for performing with a bottle of wine under his chair. “Al rosso saggio chiedi i tuoi perché,” (You ask the red sage your questions) he writes in “Un altro giorno è andato.” (Un altro giorno è andato/Il bello, 1968). In his lyrics wine is a companion of many a night; the “red sage” he mentions in that song is in fact a metaphor for red wine.

Francesco Guccini is probably the only cantautore who made his own private address the title of one of his albums. Via Paolo Fabbri, 43, in Bologna, has become a necessary pilgrimage for anyone who admires his musical and poetic productions.

His poetry is inspired by his vast literary knowledge, which transpires in innumerable references, from Carlo Collodi to Alessandro Manzoni, from Jack Kerouac to John Dos Passos, from Guido Gozzano to Carl Barks. The depth and the literary value of his body of work resulted in a large number of awards, including, in 1992, the prestigious Premio Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale for the section “versi in musica.”

Gozzano in particular was greatly influential for Guccini’s most intimate lyrics. In fact, the author is indebted to crepuscularism both in his atmospheres and in stylistic choices. For example, the famous song Incontro, (Radici, 1972) describing a dinner, after many years, with a high school friend, Guccini mentions that the cutlery had the color of nostalgia (stoviglie color nostalgia). One can hear, in this romantic and nostalgic song, a reference to Gozzano’s long poem “Signorina Felicita,” (I colloqui, 1911) in particular a reference to Felicita’s eyes, described by Gozzano as cutlery-blue (“azzurri di un azzurro di stoviglia”). The most evident borrowing from Guido Gozzano is, however, Guccini’s adaptation of “La più bella,” a poem that Guccini set to music with the title “L’isola non trovata.”

In a recent interview (for Diego Bianchi’s talk show, Propaganda live) Guccini laments the disappearance of those who used to populate “his” mountains, and therefore the watering down of that particular culture, and of his own roots. The search for his roots is one of the major themes of his canzoniere, in particular in his 1972 album Radici. The song he dedicated to his uncle Amerigo, who emigrated to the United States and only returned to Pàvana an old man, exemplifies his attention for his family history.

The theme of Pàvana as the locus amoenus where many of the contradiction of life are resolved is one of the most enduring themes of his lyrics. His last album, Ultima Thule (2012), recorded inside the mill that has belonged to his family for several generations, is replete with childhood memories, including the sound of the millstone that kept grinding day and night when he was a child.

Another important theme in Guccini’s productions is time. In the eponymous song of his last album, “Ultima Thule,” he bemoans the passing of time, which brought an end to the marauding escapades with his closest musician friends:

Io che tornavo fiero ad ogni porto
dopo una lotta, dopo un arrembaggio,
non son più quello e non ho più il coraggio
di veleggiare su un vascello morto.

Dov’è la ciurma che mi accompagnava
e assecondava ogni ribalderia?
Dove la forza che ci circondava?
Ora si è spenta ormai, sparita via.

(I proudly came back to every port
after a fight, after a boarding,
I am no longer that person and I no longer have the courage
to sail on a dead vessel.

Where is the crew that accompanied me
and supported every mischief?
Where is the strength that surrounded us?
It’s gone now, gone away.”

(“Ultima Thule”, Ultima Thule, 2012)

We should not worry about this melancholy last song. Guccini’s buen retiro in the Apennines is a destination for fans and scholars alike. He does not even seem to mind the frequent interruptions or his legendary status among his admirers. In the hope of meeting him in Pàvana one day, we look forward to his next mystery novel.

Read all the translations of Francesco Guccini