Mi sembra però che sia sbagliato il riferimento ai “Gaslight Tapes” e la traduzione di “cane” come “giunchi”… “Cane” è certamente la canna da zucchero, diversamente non si spieghrebbe il successivo “molasses”, il frutto della prima spremitura della canna…

Versione italiana di Gian Piero Testa
Traduzione con l'avvertenza che, trattandosi di un tentativo metrico, qualcosa è di sicuro andato perso. (gpt)

Versione italiana di Gian Piero Testa

"The song is about serious problems that haunt the Italian land: the deaths at work, the lack of health and safety in the workplace and the moral and political impunity of the owners and employers."

"For a period the inquiry was dismissed and sidetracked. Peppino’s comrades, his mother Felicia, Giovanni Impastato, the latter’s wife Felicia and the Impastato Centre, while receiving some help from honest magistrates, often met opposition on the part of their fellow townspeople, the newspapers and the police, who even described Peppino’s death as the suicide of a misfit. Finally, twenty years later, events reached a happy ending. In the background is not only the trial of the instigators of Peppino’s murder, but also the moral trial of those who continued to glorify the winners and benefit from their protection, only to label them as crooks and abandon them for a new shady winner as soon as they had met their ruin. This is the story of a land and of its conspiracies of silence, which are no less morally to blame than the fear which grips the country, scared as it still is of looking to a future of courage – the very courage the Impastato family gave proof of."

"It was the day of Peppino’s funeral. He had been killed near a cottage just above the tracks of the Plermo-Trapani railway line. As attempts were already being made to sidetrack the inquiry, under the closed windows of the houses in Cinisi a funeral procession set off: the first demonstration ever against the mafia, this cancer that held the country in its grip. Peppino’s comrades carried his coffin through the streets of Cinisi, taking up the torch their friend had lit. Peppino’s brother answered the call of the crowd that had assembled to raise its voice against the mafia with his clenched fist, while his mother expelled her mafia relatives who were talking of vengeance from her house."

"Tune in on Radio Aut: the “Foolish Comedy” is being staged – a living hell filled with mafia bosses, whoremongers and toadies in which a jester, now resting in the limbo (a happy oasis and secular, earthly paradise), is running after virtues to save his land. He will tell us about the misdeeds of a “contemporary past”, certain that his journey will lead to the awakening of a new and more fruitful reality."

"Caught between desperate and euphoric moments, Peppino’s work intensified as he found himself having to deal with those sharing his “barricade”: on the one side, a commune founded at Terrasini, which instead of engaging in any serious struggle against the mafia was organising frivolous events based on the idea of regaining control over one’s own body; on the other, the Historic Compromise between the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and the DC (Christian-Democrat Party), which had ties with the mafia – a political manoeuvre that alienated many political and social groups. Peppino reacted with anger and frustration to these events in a letter that was later exploited to sidetrack the inquiry about his death. Once again, time has frozen."

"According to the mafia’s code of conduct, when a son turns his back on a system he is meant to be a part of, his father is authorised to “straighten him up”, even by killing him if necessary. In a way, Luigi Impastato transgressed this code, for he sought protection in America. On his return, he was killed in a simulated car accident. In a milieu utterly foreign to Peppino, Luigi Impastato had been led by his fatherly love to resort to one final action that was in its own way a humane one. At Luigi’s funeral, Peppino refused to shake hands with his father’s “mafia friends” and stood between them and the coffin. Peppino’s brother Giovanni and his mother, who were not ready yet to take the path they later so courageously choose to follow, tried toning things down."