Just started watching Brigands and it’s actually an Italian production, which I didn’t know, based in Sicily and shows Garibaldi in the opening scene being the scumbag he was. The acting is all in Italian with heavy Sicilian accent and some dialect. There is a little mistranslation in the first episode as the Piedmontese are referred to simply as “soldiers”, which is corrected later but makes a non Italian miss the point that each region of Italy, before the forced and unwanted “unification” was really a nation in its own right.
In the second episode, towards the end is a popular song. The words are very cool. I reproduce them in Italian as that is how they rhyme. They rhyme in the Sicilian dialect too but google translate is not going to help you with that. You can use google translate for the rough meaning from the Italian spellings.
Com’è bella la luna
E questa vita quando è in fiore
Col brigante e il contadino
Lotta contro l’oppressore
Che del mondo e del cielo
Pensa di essere il padrone
La terra ci ha donato il Padre Nostro (play on words here as Padre Nostro means Our Father)
Proteggi la famiglia
Brindiamo a lu guaglione (guaglione = boy but also street urchin in Napolitan slang)
A morte gli invasori
Prendiamo i loro denari
Finche siamo insieme
Non abbiamo paura
Delle cose che ci possono accadere
Accadere
Seguiamo il lupo che ci guiderà
Non è per l’oro ma per la libertà
Per ogni uomo o donna che verrà
Dalla terra un brigante nascerà
Seguiamo il lupo che ci guiderà
Non è per l’oro ma per la libertà
Per ogni uomo o donna che cadrà
Dalla terra un brigante nascerà
It really has everything. The reality of the oppressors who think they own the land and the sky, and the fact that the so-called brigands, like the farmers, are just people that want to be free of them. And that for every man or woman that will be born, or killed, a new brigand will rise from the Earth.
I have never been one for singing around a fire, but I can listen to it when it is not done by drunks at least. I’m no singer, and no musician, I only know at most two songs off by heart, (linked below) but that is because mostly I am apart from most human beings. Some men are like that partly by nature, partly by what life makes them, I think it is what happens to a natural man that does not lose his nature and survives the slings and arrows of so-called modern life, with all its barbaries. Which is why I always got along with farmers, though I am not one, not by nature, temperament or talent. And why I also got along with brigands, at least those honest ones that have a code of sorts, even though I am not a brigand either, not by nature or temperament, the skill I have if I wanted to use it that way, but I do not. And both farmers and brigands, though recognising I am neither, also get along with me.
All natural people who have not lost their true nature are similar in some way. I am not Sicilian and though most think Sicilians are not reliable people, I always got on with them and found them reliable and honest. Then again, most people think Venetians are arrogant, underhanded schemers, while I see them as not falsely modest, proud, and hard to fool or take advantage of. So maybe Venetians and Sicilians have more in common than most other regions despite the distance and superficial differences in culture.
Anyway, I hope you translate the song. It’s a good hymn for present times, whoever you are.
Good men have much in common with each oteher around the world, I guess. I’m not one (yet) but thanks to your blog among others, I’m beginning to learn to recognize one when I see one.