Gomorrah has since been translated into several dozen languages. It's well worth the read.
Any help with my translation is welcome. My rap isn't all that good. Nor have I seen the Sopranos.
Buffone was difficult. Fool, asshole, jerk. mothafucka doesn't quite do it in this context.
But it might be best rendered by "wanker"?
How widely known is Saviano among young Italians (from high schoolers into 20s), and if he were murdered, what do you think would be the response among these youth, and the Italian people at large? A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
Saviano is well known among the young literate and the illiterate for different reasons. At the moment there is an ad personam campaign against him, accusing him of running after fame and glory. It's a well-known routine. The illiterate buy it acritically.
Seeing as the relative majority of the young voted left, it would suggest that he is well-perceived by most youth. His book continues to be an all time best-seller in Italy.
His murder would be lived as a national- as well as an international- outrage.
Yes, they are. A few moments spent with Google will show that the literacy of American youth is deteriorating fast. No child left behind, the only real educational showpiece of the last decade, has proven a failure by every measure. People who see their future in the bottom of a french fryer pan are well aware that they are powerless, hopeless. They are--dare I say it-- Bitter.
People who cannot see or understand the web of life, the net of process that enclose, support their lives are starved for understanding, and so reduced to soundbite thought, cartoon realities where the bank robber becomes the hero, and the dead teller is just nothing-- as they are nothing.
But they are easily controlled- anarchic yet servile, worshiping power yet despising the failed law.
The similarities with the Italy described here are sometimes striking, and grow more so, as I learn. Yet the differences are enough to give me hope- for Italy. Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
It may have been too rash and/or simplistic a comparison to make, but there are some similarities, I think.
For example, here is Bill Cosby talking to a men only black audience:
Instead of waiting for handouts or outside help, Cosby argues, disadvantaged blacks should start by purging their own culture of noxious elements like gangsta rap, a favorite target. "What do record producers think when they churn out that gangsta rap with antisocial, women-hating messages?," Cosby and Poussaint ask in their book. "Do they think that black male youth won't act out what they have repeated since they were old enough to listen?" Cosby's rhetoric on culture echoes--and amplifies--a swelling strain of black opinion: last November's Pew study reported that 71 percent of blacks feel that rap is a bad influence. This Is How We Lost to the White Man
This Is How We Lost to the White Man
Despite the title of that article, though, it is not just black American boys, but American boys of all races. Although -- and this is purely speculation -- middle-class white kids are probably far more likely to grow out of it [Eminem notwithstanding], disadvantaged kids with fewer social and economic options are more likely emulate the images and words in gangsta rap culture in their own lives.
But again, that is purely my personal impression and it may be way off. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
Yup. Should have read that article more carefully. Aside from the fact that the excerpt above was not from one of Cosby's talks but rather from his book, there is also this:
At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? "The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles," wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, "are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police." Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there's still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you'd have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop's popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too--many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?
Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there's still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you'd have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop's popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too--many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?
(I wonder if Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day may shed some light on this subject.)
But one senses a deep and sincere ambivalence in the author, who himself is black, as he alternates between praising Cosby and then critiquing (respectfully) what he says:
I wished, then, that my 7-year-old son could have seen Cosby there, to take in the same basic message that I endeavor to serve him every day--that manhood means more than virility and strut, that it calls for discipline and dutiful stewardship. <...> I'd take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.
I'd take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.
Given his apparent huge success, do you think the Camorra might not think twice about killing him?
Cappotto di legno: The line
"tardarielli" ma non "scordarelli" "late doers" but not "forgetters"
If so, Saviano may be condemned to seek ever greater heights of popularity for the rest of his life as a deterrent against assassination. Unless, of course, the Camorra can be destroyed before that.
(Incidentally, the first chapter of the book in English is provided on the New York Times website.) A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
He was pretty much saying: you have no choice but to kill me, because I'm messing your lives up, as long as I go on talking I'm giving you no peace.
It's a way of asserting the power of words to ridicule their silence, and of making his murder look like a weak man's response.
I don't think that Saviano's strategy is going to change the Camorra's decision. The mafias have another language and reality. Further, Saviano's primary scope is to write and to fight the mafias by exposing them to public scrutiny and ridicule and heightening awareness among the young. The death sentence works both ways. The more he is famous the more he will be targeted, especially when he reveals the connivance and complicity of politicians, judges, professionals, administrators, et al. His assassination would be a demonstration of power, that everything must remain as it is.
Saviano greatly regrets the damage his writing has caused to his family, for they could be targeted also. However, because of the actual play of forces it is unlikely that the Camorra will resort to "transversal revenge."
As for the world view of the mafias, Saviano has done something unpardonable, as the song says. He's mixed "men" with sewer scum. According to the mafia view, only members of the mafias are "men." Everyone else is of no account, a lower race so to say, to be exploited. By treating "men" as low life Saviano has signed his death sentence. He is an "infame."
i must recommend the sopranos as great drama and una favola di morale.
i never was a fan of the spate of very successful mafia movies from hollywood, and when i saw how successful the sopranos was in the states, before it made it to europe, in my mind i sneered, thinking it was going to be more of the same, a kind of fetishism of criminality, honour among thieves etc.
however i gave it a shot, and was hooked immediately. it's much, much more than that...essential tv, in fact, to understand the organised crime 'mentality', and should be required viewing for italians. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Guagliaccio would be something like "damned bastard" or "idiotic brat."
In the silence of the port's black hole, the molecular structure of merchandise seems to break down, only to recompose once it gets beyond the perimeter of the coast. Goods have to leave the port immediately. Everything happens so quickly that they disappear in the process, evaporate as if they'd never existed. As if nothing had happened, as if it had all been simply an act. An imaginary voyage, a false landing, a phantom ship, evanescent cargo. Goods need to arrive in the buyer's hands without leaving any drool to mark their route, they have to reach their warehouse quickly, right away, before time can even begin -- time that might allow for an inspection. Hundreds of pounds of merchandise move as if they were a package hand-delivered by the mailman. In the port of Naples -- 330 acres spread out along seven miles of coastline -- time undergoes unique expansions and contractions. Things that take an hour elsewhere seem to happen here in less than a minute. Here the proverbial slowness that makes the Neapolitan's every move molasses-like is quashed, confuted, negated. The ruthless swiftness of Chinese merchandise overruns the temporal dimension of customs inspections, killing time itself. A massacre of minutes, a slaughter of seconds stolen from the records, chased by trucks, hurried along by cranes, helped by forklifts that disembowel the containers.
My God, can he write! Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
However, as a reporter on such cases as the waste emergency in Campania, he is just a plain, damned good reporter.
passes through here ... open wound ... end point for the interminable voyage ... enter the gulf ... hole in the earth out of which what's made in China comes ... everything made in China is poured out here ... Like a bucket of water dumped into a hole in the sand. The water eats the sand, and the hole gets bigger and deeper ... in the silence of the port's black hole ... unique expansions and contractions ... disembowel the containers ...
-- until they rise up within view --
rumbling with heaving iron, the sheet metal and screws slowly penetrate the tiny Neapolitan opening
At this point, there is no need to name it, but after all that metaphorical teasing and foreplay, Saviano disposes with false modesty:
It is as if the anus of the sea were opening out, causing great pain to the sphincter muscles.
Gomorrah indeed. No wonder some people panic from reading him.
But his metaphors are not the only reason. The stark facts he enumerates are jarring as well:
According to the Italian Customs Agency, 60 percent of the goods arriving in Naples escape official customs inspection, 20 percent of the bills of entry go unchecked, and fifty thousand shipments are contraband, 99 percent of them from China -- all for an estimated 200 million euros in evaded taxes each semester. The containers that need to disappear before being inspected are in the first row. Every container is duly numbered, but the numbers on many of them are identical. So one inspected container baptizes all the illegal ones with the same number.
And then back to the metaphors...
The port is detached from the city. An infected appendix, never quite degenerating into peritonitis, always there in the abdomen of the coastline. ... A grounded amphibian, a marine metamorphosis.
When Céline was asked what he thought about literature, he remarked that there were two kinds of literature. When pressed to elaborate, Céline replied that there are those who write literature and then there are those that construct needles to shove up flies' asses.
