Nostra signora dell'ipocrisia - Francesco Guccini (Parnassius, 1993)

Nostra signora dell’ipocrisia

Francesco Guccini (Parnassius, 1993)

Alla fine della baldoria c’era nell’aria un silenzio strano:
qualcuno ragliava con meno boria e qualcun altro grugniva piano.
Alle sfilate degli stilisti si trasgrediva con meno allegria
ed in quei visi sazi e stravisti pulsava un’ombra di malattia.
Un artigiano di scoop forzati scrisse che Weimar già si scorgeva
e fra biscotti sponsorizzati vidi un anchorman che piangeva,
e poi la nebbia discese a banchi ed il barometro segnò tempesta,
ci risvegliammo più vecchi e stanchi, amaro in bocca, cerchio alla testa…

Il Mercoledì delle Ceneri ci confessarono bene o male
che la festa era ormai finita, e ormai lontano il Carnevale.
E proclamarono penitenza e in giro andarono col cilicio
ruttando austeri: “Ci vuol pazienza, siempre adelante, ma con juicio”.
E fecero voti con faccia scaltra a Nostra Signora dell’Ipocrisia
perché una mano lavasse l’altra, tutti colpevoli e così sia!
E minacciosi ed un po’ pregando, incenso sparsero al loro Dio,
sempre accusando, sempre cercando il responsabile, non certo io…

La domenica di mezza Quaresima fu processione di etère di stato:
dai puttanieri a diversi pollici, dai furbi del “chi ha dato ha dato”.
Ed echeggiarono tutte le sere come rintocchi schioccanti a morto:
Amen, Mea Culpa e Miserere, ma neanche un cane che sia risorto!
E i cavalieri di tigri a ore e i trombettieri senza ritegno
inamidarono un nuovo pudore, misero a lucido un nuovo sdegno…
Si andò alle prime con casto lusso e i quiz pagarono sobri milioni
e in pubblico si linciò il riflusso per farci ridiventare buoni…

Così domenica dopo domenica fu una stagione davvero cupa:
quel lungo mese della Quaresima rise la iena, ululò la lupa,
stelle comete ed altri prodigi facilitarono le conversioni,
mulini bianchi tornaron grigi, candidi agnelli certi ex leoni.
Soltanto i pochi che si incazzarono dissero che era l’usato passo
fatto dai soliti che ci marciavano per poi rimetterlo sempre là in basso.
Poi tutto tacque, vinse ragione, si placò il cielo, si posò il mare,
solo qualcuno in resurrezione, piano, in silenzio, tornò a pensare

Our Lady of Hypocrisy

Translated by: Cristina Perissinotto

At the end of the revelry a strange silence hung in the air
someone brayed with less arrogance someone else grunted softly.
At fashion shows less cheerful were the transgressions
and in those faces, bloated and overexposed a shadow of disease pulsed.
An artisan of forced scoops wrote that Weimar was already there
and among the sponsored biscotti they saw a weeping anchorman.
Then fog descended in banks and the barometer forecast a storm
we woke up older and more tired with a bitter aftertaste, and a splitting headache.

On Ash Wednesday they proclaimed, for better or worse
that the party was now over and the Carnival long gone.
They proclaimed penance they went around wearing a cilice
burping austerely: we need patience always ahead, but with prudence.
With their sly faces they made vows to Our lady of Hypocrisy
so that one hand could wash the other all equally guilty, and amen.
And partly menacing and partly praying they burned incense to their God
always accusing, always seeking “the one responsible, certainly not me”

On the Sunday of Mid-Lent they held a procession of state hetaer
as of televised pimps, of experts of “what’s done is done.”
Every night brought echoes like the tolling of mourning bells
of their Amen, Mea Culpa and Miserere of but not a dog ever resurrected!
And the tiger-riders, the unrestrained trumpeters
They polished up a new modesty, they shone up a new disdain,
opening nights showed chaste luxury, quiz shows paid sober millions
and in public we condemned political apathy so we could all be good again.

This way, Sunday after Sunday it was a truly bleak season,
in that long month of Lent the hyena laughed
the she-wolf howled. Comets stars and other prodigies
facilitated the conversions white mills went back to grey
some ex-lions became white lambs.
Only the few that got enraged said that these were the typical steps
taken by the usual suspects to fool people, as usual.
Then everything quieted, reason won; the tempest died down, the sea settled.
Just a few, in resurrection, slowly, quietly, went back to thinking…

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