The London Lounge

Io sono una forza del Passato.
Solo nella tradizione è il mio amore.
Vengo dai ruderi, dalle Chiese,
dalle pale d'altare, dai borghi
dimenticati sugli Appennini o le Prealpi,
dove sono vissuti i fratelli.
Giro per la Tuscolana come un pazzo,
per l'Appia come un cane senza padrone.
O guardo i crepuscoli, le mattine
su Roma, sulla Ciociaria, sul mondo,
come i primi atti della Dopostoria,
cui io sussisto, per privilegio d'anagrafe,
dall'orlo estremo di qualche età
sepolta. Mostruoso è chi è nato
dalle viscere di una donna morta.
E io, feto adulto, mi aggiro
più moderno d'ogni moderno
a cercare i fratelli che non sono più.

-Pier Paolo Pasolini


I am a force of the Past.
My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned in the Appennines or foothills
of the Alps where my brothers once lived.
I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,
down the Appia like a dog without a master.
Or I see the twilights, the mornings
over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,
as the first acts of Posthistory
to which I bear witness, for the privilege
of recording them from the outer edge
of some buried age. Monstrous is the man
born of a dead woman’s womb.
And I, a fetus now grown, roam about
more modern than any modern man,
in search of brothers no longer alive.

Posthistory... la Dopostoria... defining the present as a mere "after-past", as though history were not still being made.
Cui io sussisto... I don't live - I survive, subsist, maintain life. My body is here, but my life is elsewhere, like that of a prisoner whose soul wanders far off from his body, in space and time.
Per privilegio d'anagrafe... because the register of births says I was born when I was born (it's an expression I wouldn't know how to translate nicely into my own mother tongue, let alone in English - but that's how I understood it when I heard / read it used). Because, according to the registry office I am contemporary with this Posthistory, but that's my only connection to it.

The epitome of alienation. Being the mere prisoner of the past, instead of freeing the spirit by transcending history. But the poetic material is indisputably suggestive.

I'm not much of a linguist (still less of a poet) but, according to some Italian-English bilingual, Italian friends, maybe a free translation, imparting the original meaning (although with little lyricism!), might be: "My birth date is fixed, thanks [only] to the temporal formality of the register office." Anyway, I offer it.
NJS

George Bernard Shaw makes an interesting proposition in one of his many pages of musical criticism: that it is more important and valuable to be the last of your kind, rather than the first; that many people are able to start something, but not many are capable of summing it up well. According to him, Mozart is the end of the 18th century (in spirit, and in spite of his innovations), rather than a road opener, just like Mahler represents the end, the summum of the 19th century (though he is not typically representative of it), rather than the beginning of the 20th.