Original subtitles

Our first memories are visual ones

In memory life becomes a silent film

We all have in our minds an image which is the first,

or one of the first, in our lives

The first image of my life is a white, transparent blind

which hangs - motionless, I believe -

from a window which looks out on to a somewhat sad and dark lane

That blind terrifies me and fills me with anguish:

not as something threatening and unpleasant

but as something cosmic

In that blind the spirit of the house where I was born is summed up

and takes bodily form

It was a middle class house in Bologna

What that blind said to me and taught me did not admit (and does not admit)

of rejoinders

No dialogue was possible or admissible with it

nor any act of self-education

This is why I believed that the whole world was the world

which that blind taught me

That is to say, I believed that the whole world was "proper"

idealistic, sad and sceptical, a little vulgar

- in short, petty bourgeois

I saw rustic objects in the courtyards of poor houses

I saw furnishings and furniture which were proletarian and sub-proletarian

I saw landscapes which were not city ones but suburban,

or poorly rural

I quickly understood that as well as my petty bourgeois world

- so cosmically absolute -

there was another world

Indeed, there were other worlds

The story of my life is the story of my books

Here are my books, so on this couch there is my whole life

My first book was published in 1942

It's a book of poems written in the Friulian dialect,

which was my mother's dialect

I wrote it at 18, and published it when I was 20

Why did I choose to write in Friulian?

Back then I didn't really know

But I did realise why after publishing

Some critics were not able to review the book, even if they wanted to,

because back then, in the last years of fascism,

literary journals did not wish dialects to be discussed

They did not want a literature in dialect to exist

Back then,

the image of Italy was completely stereotypical and fake,

far from any form of realism, event if meant poetically as in this case

Dialects were not allowed to be spoken in Italy,

so basically peasants and workers were not allowed to exist in Italy

In any case,

this book has nothing of what would be later called "political commitment"

It is a wholly poetical book about my romanticised love

for my mother's land, for the Friulian peasants and so on

Pasolini's arrival in the town of Casarsa,

at the start of summer

after a vacation at the beach,

was for me the happiest time of the year

I would go to the station

to welcome them

Then we'd walk home,

chatting with my aunt Susanna

who was my mother's sister

Pasolini's mother had a special character,

between shyness and...

combativeness

She would spend a couple of hours each morning to put on makeup

and she did so marvellously

Even during the war, during the bombings!

Where we lived...

we had no bathtubs nor showers...

So she would carry a large washbowl, she would wash herself and then...

One first layer of lotions...

And then lipstick, eye makeup, and so on

Her husband used to say: "Thank God our sons are males,

because if there was another woman in the house,

you'd have made her so vain"

There lied her beauty, and Pier Paolo loved her a lot

He used to call her no less than "fatty"

because she was totally skinny

Carlo Alberto was born in Ravenna

in an aristocratic family

He would look down on us,

poor people of Casarsa

However he was madly in love with Susanna

I believe Susanna never liked him

That's just me... it's the last time I talk about this anyway

He would bring her...

a box of chocolates

He'd offer it to her... She would take it and...

She'd throw them onto the fireplace

Susanna's love for Pier Paolo.

was so totally devoid of...

explanations

So much that anyone could have been jealous

I'd say that the two brothers shared their duties:

one, the eldest, stayed at home protecting their mother

and the other

heroically left for the adventure of the war

against the fascists

So Guido would come back to their yard

with the kind of attitude one sees in movies

Like someone that is about to taken on anyone

He would leave and come back with...

some 20kg of bullets or bombs

I thought this image was a dream I had

but then pictures show it actually did happen

I remember the beginning of January 1943

Days that were cold, but that had the clarity of an aquarium

that, by blazing over the plain,

drew unknown landscapes at the mountains' feet

With all the willingness and generosity of the adolescent,

I used to lose myself in the discovery of my own Casarsa,

reborn anew from the vast wintry whiteness

I nurtured within me an endless series of tender propositions,

friendships,

solitudes

I see myself, right after I got off from the train

along the familiar street through which,

at the start of every summer, we arrived at my mother's house

Now, over the town, there layed something of an endless, bright wound

In its resonant womb boys were walking, wearing furry hats and clothes

I had never seen them before

Together with Guido, I arrived at the old room

that with each summer had welcomed us a little older

and I fell asleep right away,

exhausted as I was from the night journey

Oh, to awake in that cold and white light!

Feeling rested from the sleep, while the afternoon was turning into evening

I could feel a life breathing around me

whose excessive familiarity made me feel some kind of grief

With a heart devastated by emotion, I recognised the old gestures

I recognised the evening smell of smoke

of polenta and of frost

I recognised the dialect's inflexion, its open vowels

and its sibilant consonants, that came up in an instant of unusual clarity

to touch the secret, inexpressible meaning,

hidden in all of that world

It's not like I wanted to be around him

It just happened so naturally

If he took his bike with him

he'd wait for me to get mine,

a tinier bike,

and we would ride to the Tagliamento river

at first

and then, in the later years, to the dancing halls,

to the town's festivals in the countryside

It was the happiest time in my life

One day, we were heading back from a town named "Malafiesta"

which is still called that,

in the fashion of Federico Garcia Lorca

We were so happy

from what had happened, the friends we had made

with the town's peasant boys

He says to me: "We are close to the Tagliamento,

let's go by the riverbed and slash our veins"

I lived with the constant risk of dying

For many months, it seemed certain that leaving that hell alive

was but an absurd hope

This gave me a constant sense of my own corpse

This was surely not acting healthily on the course of my inner life

which was almost paralysed because of it

During this time I learned the meaning of that limit,

beyond which there was no longer me

but someone else

This is better understood

by taking into account the actual solitude in which I was living

As my thoughts could not be stashed anywhere in particular

they crowded one over the other

forming some kind of humus layer where I would lose the sense of the real

I used to spend hours in front of a leaf, or a tree trunk

to understand it

That is, to cross over the boundary,

or the suture, where I ended and the Other started

The leaf, and the trunk

I was not thinking directly about God, but rather about the Other

something that was much more important for me

With the discovery of this new dimension,

I ended up believing in miracles, and in prophecy

My mother's house had been partly destroyed by bombings

Our furniture, which we had kept in the cellar,

was saved by miracle

So we decided to carry it to Viluta, one or two days after the raid

The noise our cart made,

tiresomely going up and down the tamped mounds made of mud and metal junk,

between the large holes left by bombs,

echoed across that solitude as if it were the only sign of life

On the 16th my mother and I entered Versuta

carrying all of our domestic language, our fierceness still uncracked

a fierceness that had a tradition of affections,

of extreme, incommunicable intimacies

of generosities that were wholly lay, yet no less sacred for us

After about 20 days we begun schooling the boys from Versuta,

two dozens in total

I don't think I ever acted with as much dedication...

as I did with those children

who were really grateful for it after all

I introduced them to a kind of jargon, to a clan,

made of poetic intuitions and moral advices

When the warm season came,

we went to hold class in one cabin in the fields

It was really small and we hardly fit inside

though often we went outside

and sat beneath the two enormous pine trees, softly brushed by the wind

Now everything from that time seems perfect

even the bombings

Not even that one memory I remember as unpleasant, of the flying formation

that bombed Casarsa's station before our eyes no less than six times

about 1 km away from us

And we were witnesses to that, from the doorstep of our school of poems

In 1945, after the war,

I founded some sort of academy in Casarsa del Friuli, my mother's hometown

I called it Little Academy for the Friulian Language

Within it, we published a few booklets, at our own expenses

This is the second booklet we published, it's called Diaries, written in Italian

They're still, so to say, pre-war poems

still belonging to the cultural environment of Symbolism,

or that of Surrealism

or, in some way, of Neoclassicism

with some ties to Hermeticism

However, here one can already find themes of my future poetry

such as the death of my partisan brother

That one is already a new theme

The Little Academy happened among a circle of children

A kindergarten for culture

None of us was older than fourteen

He would gather us round each Sunday

And each Sunday

The others and I

would recite the poems we had written during the week

I remember the most important thing I had written

was an essay about

Virgil's Georgics

I was doing stylistics

Well fuck!

Stylistics...

He reads it

And says: "Very well,

very, very well"

Then he meets my mother and says:

"Nico wrote a wonderful essay"

My mother was so delighted

However, my first poems I did hand them to my grandmother

so she would bring them to Pasolini

Because I needed an emissary

I couldn't just go to him

One couldn't just show up to Pasolini

Even though I would spend all day with him

I was still in a position of...

not embarrassment...

...of wait for a judgment

that could hit me

That could hit me as...

...a spear

She was 30 years old, but she looked like a young girl

Skinny, pale, her hair was wild and yet thin

She was healthy, lively

She used to speak like a young lady

When dinner was over,

I would come down from the one room I was living in with my mother

and stay in the kitchen, alongside the owners,

other evacuees, and some neighbour

A corrupt and heavy atmosphere would rise up

where fear of death mixed with the most banal chatter,

with talks that were sometimes overtly obscene

Living day by day without moving

going from one terror to another, had made us all worse

and the small and natural ambitions had become miserable

Pina, who lived some 100m away, with her sister's family

would often visit us bringing her violin along

One evening, expecting her visit, as I cared for her,

I came down to the kitchen earlier than usual

and sat with the others by the fireplace

I was sitting by a corner, in the shadow

and Gianni was sitting on my lap

I was talking and joking with him, who was less wild than usual, that night

He would answer back to my jokes and stare at me

with those eyes of his, like deep blue lakes

She did came

and I followed her step by step

word by word

And there I heard one or two chords from the Chaconne

They belonged to the 14th variation, mournful, heartwrenching,

similar to a human voice

Pina was calling for me

I still see every note, every stave of that music

I can still feel the light migraine that rose right after the first notes

from the effort

that that obstinate attention of the heart and the mind was costing me

The small room would disappear, submerged

A struggle sung infinitely

between the flesh and heaven

between some low, subtle, warm notes

and some strident, clear, abstract notes

Oh, how I sided with the flesh!

One has to look at things from the outside

If one looks too much from the inside, he cannot understand them anymore

He can't perceive different perspectives

He can't see depths

The fact was that Pasolini not only was coming from Bologna,

just to name one city,

but from the great University of Bologna

from Roberto Longhi's famous classes

For quite some time, I can't tell how long,

Pasolini was unsure on which direction to pursue:

that of becoming a man of letters

or a painter

They're one and the same

While he was carrying on his study on the language.

spoken by Friulian peasants

at the same time he was representing them

with the same intention

meaning the discovery of a popular, agrarian world

This was Longhi's teaching:

the painting of reality

And so Pasolini,

carrying with himself

this load of knowledge

about classical poetry

the kind that was recited and beloved by Italians

bumped into this miserable of a thing,

that was the language of the peasants

from the right bank of the Tagliamento river

And he chose in favor of them

From a linguistic point of view,

that was the first social act

of siding with the poor against the powerful

On a summer morning in 1941

I stood on the external wooden balcony of my mother's house

The sweet and strong sun of Friuli beat down on all that dear rustic stuff

On that balcony, I was either drawing or writing verses

When suddenly the word rosada [dew] rang out

It was Livio speaking,

a son of the neighbours from further down the street

A tall and big-boned boy...

A real country boy of those lands...

But kind and timid, the way certain children of rich families are,

full of elegance

The word rosada, spoken on that sunny morning

was only an expressive peak of his oral vivacity

Certainly that word,

in all the centuries of its use in the Friulian region,

which extends beyond the Tagliamento,

had never been written

It had always and only been a sound

Whatever I was doing that morning, painting or writing,

certainly I stopped immediately

and I immediately wrote verses

in that Friulian speech of the right bank of the Tagliamento

which up until that moment had been only a collection of sounds

First of all I began by putting into written form the word rosada

That people knew how to speak just that one language

In some rare, formal

instances

when addressing the town mayor

or some countryside inspector

they would speak some Italian

they learned in elementary school

So it was hardly more than a dialect

But dialect has the substance

of an existence that is lived

not only in the present time

but through ancient roots and origins

There lies the great importance of the dialect

At a certain point it became a progressive,

revolutionary element

in the face of this

mediocrity...

insanity...

of the linguistic and bureaucratic world

of Italy

Any thing that was said in dialect,

acquired an explosive character

It exploded inside bureaucracy

In a city, Trieste or Udine,

along an avenue of lindens

when the leaves change color in spring,

I shall fall down dead under a sun burning

blond and high

and close my eyes,

leaving the sky to its light.

Under a linden warm with green

I shall fall into the black of death,

which the sun and lindens will dispel

Beautiful boys will run in the light

that I've just left,

flying out of the schools,

curls falling onto their brows.

Hay on sweaty skin,

reeds soaking wet,

dozing light over the wired fence,

and the gardens and the roofs

boundless light in the sky

from the towns down the soft mountains,

all the way to the veil of the plain

with bell towers, lost in days of April

Now indeed the cry of death bursts out

because the heat and coolness of the high plains of Friuli

have blended in a blue of days not lost,

but become of a stranger;

nude inside a time as silent as light.

That which we forget

is more of help than that which we remember:

it's better I break the rope

tying me to a land

that is dead and yet anew.

This life, new and dead, is better,

this short winter

that I live, while in Casarsa

the eternal winter shines within the courtyard.

That is the fundamental theme.

of modern poetry

The kind of poetry that does not praise events or triumphs

but that goes deep inside itself

and that sinks in itself, and could very well drown in its own abyss

How many poets that failed,

or that didn't fail,

that could not express these things from the inside!

Only few could

It's like catching a dream,

like catching a fleeting image

something that appears and disappears

I think back to a moment from my childhood

It was in Belluno

I was little over three years old

Some boys were playing in the park in front of my house

Their legs struck me more than anything else

especially the hollow part of the rear knee

where, while running,

the bending stretched the sinews with a movement both elegant and violent

I was subjugated by it

I saw in those fast sinews a symbol of the life

that they still had to reach

In that movement of the running boy I would picture adulthood

Now I know that sentiment to be of an acutely sensual nature

If I think back to it, I can sharply feel in my viscera the tenderness,

the heartfeltness and the violence of desire

It was the sense of the unreachable, of the carnal

A sense for which a name has not been invented yet

I invented it back then, and it was:

teta veleta

By seeing those legs bending in the fury of play

I already told myself I was feeling teta veleta

Something like a tickle, a seduction,

a humiliation

By the end of the war we were in Casarsa

It was around June 1945

A friend calls me...

I was together with Pier Paolo...

He calls me aside and tells me:

"Look, your cousin has died"

This was a great pain for my poor aunt Susanna

The first of two

because her other son as well will have...

an atrocious

and murderous end

Precisely because of this second death, Pier Paolo's,

the pain was far too great for her,

in regard to the possibility of

overcoming the grief

that she experienced a mental breakdown

which brought her back before all of this

She came to live in Casarsa, staying with my mother and another aunt

We were forbidden from giving her any newspaper

or showing her pictures of her son

Then one day, no one knows how, a newspaper ended up there

in the waiting room of the nursing home

where Susanna was sitting

She started reading it...

Until she came upon the whole report...

about her son's death

And she read it over and over with such...

with such a total absorption for the events written there

And then she said: "I am so sorry...

this beautiful young man, how he died..."

And it was her son!

And I was there

unable to take it away from her

as I would have made it worse

So I let her read on until she reached this conclusion

She died just miserably

keeping her eyes shut, she never opened them again

After that time, she never opened her eyes again

She kept them wide shut

And we had to experience this new

death, of Pasolini's mother

which in some way ended their tragic story

that looked a bit like a Greek tragedy

I find you on the white sheet, white rose,

making my son's bed, I find you on the sheet.

My son's little rose,

where did my son's

hand pick you,

why did it pick you?

Silence you, as dour

as he is. By now no one knows where he went,

with his dour peace.

As if on the womb of the sky you fall silent on his sheet

and that young heart of mine alone falls silent under the sky.

Both of them forgotten,

the mother and the rose!

Going

who knows where

he has forgotten us.

It's hard to express in the words of a son

what, at heart, I'm not really like.

You alone in all the world know what love

has always come first in my heart.

This is why there is something terrible you should know:

it's from your grace that springs my sorrow.

You are irreplaceable.

This is why the life you blessed me with will always be condemned to loneliness.

And I don't want to be alone.

I have an infinite thirst for love, for bodies pure and soulless.

For the soul is in you, it is you,

but you are my mother,

and in your love are my fetters.

I went through childhood enslaved to a sentiment,

lofty and incurable, of overwhelming commitment.

It was the only way to feel alive, the only color,

the only form, and now it's over.

Still, we survive - in the confusion

of a life reborn outside of reason.

I beg you, oh, I beg you: don't wish for death.

I'm here, alone, with you,

in an April to come.

For some time...

For a couple of years after the war

Pasolini was considered some kind of Christian Democrat...

with some socialist leaning...

But after that

thanks also to his friendship with painter Giuseppe Zigaina

he embraced the Communist Party

The local section of the Communist Party welcomed him immediately

and he was appointed as the director of the small chapter

in the town of San Giovanni

for which he spent a great amount of energy

Zigaina was, back then, the most famous painter in Friuli

He represented modernity

and the destruction of

the old iconography of Friuli

which was about countryside and countrymen

He would give a new meaning to it

Personally I was a bit annoyed

because I have never been interested in politics

Then of course, as the petty bourgeois that I am,

I loved country boys very much, if they were beautiful

and athletic

I was less interested in the reality of poverty

I used to leave, riding my bike, in the first hours of the afternoon

I strayed away from the town,

taking long detours to the neighbouring small villages

What I was looking for, I repeat, was love

Lust even

With the ingenuity of a boy grown up in the city

I looked for my own divine presences of boys willing to sin,

right there where I could never find them

I would come back by eventide

amid the haze interrupted by some shade of yellow at the horizon

in the humid and funereal bleakness of the fields

Passing by a house or a town

the smell of fire would hit me,

together with the disorderly and tranquil yells

that were calling for supper

Some boy would stand by a hose, or on the doorsteps,

totally absent in the angelic indifference of whom

is tired from work and savours his rest

And I, despicable and guilty,

was not considered worthy even of one glance

while I biked desperately through the town

towards the far away Casarsa

of which only the bells' tolls could be heard

The trampoline was always bustling with boys diving into the water

one after the other, shouting,

laughing

The tiny plot of sand was full of boys as well

who were lying in the sun like lizards

talking about those things

The river's bight seemed like a wasp nest

The countless colours of the boys' undies and scarves

ogled in the sun

Nothing was still

Even the air over the pebbly shore was tingling

The scorched and scarred acacias

were following the boys' own motion

In one square meter, in the span of one minute,

dozens and dozens of faces followed one another

laughing furiously

Conversations lasted one moment

as right after, a new boy would barge in

or a gang would go berserk asking to make way

for diving or playing

Both the shore and the beach lying beyond the stream

were one battlefield, one shout

His hair was pitch black, though waned

His eyes had a purple shine, that would have struck me only much later

His features were crooked and washed out,

scorched by the sun

Even his half-bare chest, barely covered by a shirt,

was scorched as well

and it gave off a scent of, I don't know, river water and dust

which made me a little repulsed

even more so as it mixed with the smell of a bad cigarette

The inner chaos, the recklessness, the sexual pride

of those sons of labourers were truly remarkable

It was a constant flow of impure laughter,

an overlapping of meaningless words

For me, until that time, boys had been just sexless angels

I had never seen them

Now all of that nudity was overwhelming

One day the three of us stayed by the pond:

there was me, Bruno, and one of his peers

It was late already, and they had to scythe the grass

I went along,

noticing right away some kind of complicity between them

I remember that a strong wind was blowing,

and the sky was almost dark

We came to an edge and, with great awe of mine,

they layed on the grass, hinting at games without a purpose

That was the natural start of a friendly fight

after which we discovered a limitless intimacy

And despite my lack of initiative

little by little they got a hold of me

Thus they led me inside the labyrinth of a corn field

and they layed their sacks for me over the furrows' wet ground

What has been the driving feature

of all of my artistic output?

It has been an innate hate

against the state I live in

I say state

both as in "the state of things" and in the political meaning of the word:

the capitalistic, petty bourgeois State,

that I hated since childhood

Of course hate is useless

This is why I have never been able to write a single word

that described or denounced the typical Italian middle class man

My revulsion is so strong that I am unable to write about it

In my novels I only wrote about characters belonging to the people

I live therefore without any tie with the Italian petty bourgeoisie

I have ties either with the people or with intellectuals

But the petty bourgeoisie was indeed able to tie itself to me

and it did so with the means it holds, meaning the judiciary and the police

The expulsion from the Communist Party

and from Friuli

was due to a scandal of homosexual nature

which was concocted by the Christian Democrats

He had hooked up with some young boys

It was at a ball party, with drinking...

Wine jugs all around...

And on that infamous evening in the town of Ramuscello,

he told me: "I met four boys, one more beautiful than the other,

one more willing than the other. Do you want to come along?"

I was worried

and unenthusiastic

All the more so because I was in love with Gigi

Gigi was another boy who was supposed to join,

but wasn't there

I said: "No, I wait for Gigi"

He left, and what happened happened

I could have been involved too

You bet so!

This broke out as a huge scandal

concocted by the Catholics!

Catholics at their best are...

like those described by Agrippa d'Aubigné

They can be murderers, these Catholics...!

Casarsa remained silent

Silent in its hypocrisy

Then one evening a terrible clash happened

where Pier Paolo punched his father

Then, he told me in secrecy:

"We are leaving for Rome"

So we sent a letter to our uncle there,

who was quite wealthy

I accompanied them,

at sunrise on that day of January 1950

I took them to the station

to say goodbye

Then Pier Paolo's first letters came

He was happy,

cruising for boys along the shores of the Tevere

who were surely more available than the Friulian peasant boys

Then, in reality,

he was living the anguish of unemployment

I kept writing both in Friulian and Italian

I collected the Friulian poems after 10 years,.

in a volume called The Best of Youth

The Italian poems are collected in The Nightingale of the Catholic Church

Up to that point I thought of me as what it's technically call "a poet"

Then I started watching some movies

Even though I studied at the University of Bologna

I spent most of my childhood in my mother's town in Friuli

where I lived outside of any cultural environment

The Italian culture of that time came to me through cinema

I saw the movies of Italian neorealism

They made me realise I could write short stories and novels

I did some attempts that remained unpublished

Only one was published, The Dream of a Thing

When he left from Friuli,

he was left with a feeling of acrimony

towards its people

So I believe this book

sums up and suppresses any reproach

I do not regret a reality

but rather its worth.

I do not regret a world

but rather its colour.

Coming back

bodyless

there where the bells

sang words of duty,

deaf as thunder,

I do not cry because that world will not come back,

but I cry because its coming back is over.

I am left with all,

just without the greatest deception,

that which seemed the reason for mine

and the world's living:

I come back, crossing collapsed bridges,

like an Australian.

By now, Friuli, to be

far away is to be unknown.

The time of our love

is like a glistening dead sea.

Your part has ended in light

and I have no darkness in me

to hold your shadow.

Olimpia?

I am working with a crew!

Is Riccardo better?

Can we drop by tomorrow?

Is it okay with you or... no?

Bye bye Olimpia

My saviour has come!

Riccardino, have you bought the cappuccino?

I bought everything and more

It must have cost so much...

The bill came in

For what?

Water

You have to read me the price!

Water is the cheapest... 12 euros

It looks like Olimpia will host a luncheon

- So who's there? - Never ask who's there

because if there is someone you dislike

you're just gonna cry "no I don't want to go"

Imagine writer Erri De Luca was there!

- Oh God no! - In that case I'm not going

I'd be leaving, slamming the door

Did you get the food from that fancy shop?

I got all

You know, I need to eat luxurious food...

All for me!

And nothing for you

No

The windows are too low...

This house was...

No... I don't know who lived there

This was one of the meals

organised by my mother

for the poor

They used to make large meals for the poor

And I, who am not poor,

took good care not to mix with them!

I stand on the side, with my noble flair

This is my father

at the onset of Parkinson's

Who knows if I look like him...

This was the bombed house in front of our own

This wonderful boy...

it's me!

This photo was made by Pasolini

This is Maria Callas

signing autographs for the people of Casarsa

Jesus, what a great singer!

There has never been one greater than her

This is mom and this is my sisters

She loved Pier Paolo so much

She was the only one who had the courage to visit Pier Paolo's house,

after his death

This was Pasolini's funeral

I wasn't there

I was at a psychoanalyst's at that time

Thus I came to the days of the Resistance

knowing nothing about it except its style.

A style that was all light,

unforgettable awareness of the sun.

It could never fade, not for an instant, not even when

Europe trembled in the deadest of wakes.

With our furniture on a cart, we fled

Casarsa for a remote village lost between

canals and vineyards.

And it was pure light.

One quiet morning in March,

my brother left, on a train, in secret,

his pistol inside a book.

And it was pure light.

He lived a long time in the mountains,

which gleamed white in the pale blue gloom

of the Friulian plain.

And it was pure light.

From the attic of our country cottage, my mother

never stopped desperately eyeing those mountains,

already privy to destiny.

And it was pure light.

With the few peasants around us,

I lived a glorious life as the victim of terrible edicts.

And it was pure light.

Then the day of death and freedom

came, and the tortured world saw itself reborn in light...

That light was the hope of justice,

I didn't know what kind: Justice.

Light is always the same as all other light.

Then it changed: the light became uncertain dawn,

a dawn that grew and spread over the fields and canals of Friuli.

It lit up the laborers in their struggle.

Thus the newborn dawn was a light outside the eternity of style...

Justice in history was awareness

of a human division of wealth,

and hope had new light.