Wings of thought, etc.

 Nearly 8 years ago I wrote here

In a summer concert (probably called Music for a summer's evening  – they usually are [see here]) given by a choir I used to sing with we were singing, inter alia [or should that be aRia? {bou-boum-tsh  – Ithangyou}],  Verdi's Va Pensiero and Borodin's Polovtsian dances [victim of many a metathesis, but I digress]. They seemed quite dissimilar, until you look at the lyrics – particularly the metaphors in them:

Verdi's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)

The words are translated ('after a fashion' as my brother once said in response to a sales assistant's 'Are you being served?'...

<autobiographical-note type="2023 addition">

It was in Squire Pianos, once at an address in the Uxbridge Road, Ealing, known to me at the time, thanks to a youthful misreading of their sign, as "Square Pianos".

</autobiographical-note>

...) in this Wikipedia article:

Fly, thought, on wings of gold;

go settle upon the slopes and the hills,

where, soft and mild, the sweet airs

of our native land smell fragrant!

Borodin's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as Stranger in Paradise)

– translated as

Fly away on wings of wind

To native lands, our native song,

To there, where we sang you freely,

Where we were so carefree with you

There, under the hot sky,

'Fly', 'wings', 'native land'  – it's all there in both of them., because the people singing, in both pieces, are expatriated slaves. Moreover, the Wikipedia translation does the correspondence no favours: Borodin's sky is 'hot', but Verdi's 'sweet airs' are 'mild' – a flamboyantly inappropriate translation of tepidi (which you'll see towards the end of the second line).

During one of the Covid lockdowns, when Wokingham Choral Society was wrestling with the unfathomable whims of the DCMS, I was singing the Verdi again:

My choir's latest virtual rehearsal was based on what is known in England as "The chorus of the Hebrew slaves" (so much better as the Coro di Schiavi Ebrei, as our copy had it...

<TYPO status="dubious" reason="old language?">
I think, though my knowledge of Italian is based on a course I did in 1992. the modern Italian would have degli in place of di. This would be yet another example of archaism in the 19th century text, like those I noted here

In his text for Va pensiero, Verdi (or his librettist if he had one ...? 

<stop-press date="June 2020">
Yes he did – the splendidly named Temistocle Solera
</stop-press >

...) does not use dove, in

Ove olezzano tepide e molli 

L'aure dolci del suolo natal

...

The ove shows that at one stage some Italic dialects followed the French path, without an initial d. 

<background>
Earlier in the same post I had written:

The word for 'where' has a chequered history in the Romance Languages. Simply put (which is all I'm up to) it is derived from UBI [='where'] or UNDE [='where from'], with or without an initial DE. So French où comes from UBI, Italian dove comes from DE + UBI and Spanish is 'etymologically pleonastic' when it asks 'Where are you from?'; '¿De dónde eres?' starts with DE DE UNDE, meaning 'from[from[from where]]]'.

And what in modern Italian would be aire is aure (reminiscent, to me, of the two possible forms in Portuguese of the word derived from CAUSA(M): Fr.chose, Italian and Spanish cosa, but Portuguese [modern Continental Portuguese, that is] either coisa or cousa – to be filed under Interesting but irrelevant I suspect). ...[2023 note: the original had an interesting note on Catalan on, but the indentation was a bit much. And my use of the term 'interesting' is admittedly relative.]

</background>

As Metternich...

<parenthesis>
"needs citation", to use Wikipedia's passive-aggressive  gibe, but my history teacher used to say it, and what's good enough for Mr Crosby is good enough for me.
</parenthesis>

...said at the time 'Italy is a geographical expression'. The name VERDI was a coded feature of political graffiti, standing for Vittorio Emanuele Rei D'Italia. (And, now I think of it, the Hebrew Slaves have an allegorical relevance: the people of that geographical expression had been "enslaved" for centuries by various imperial powers.)
</TYPO>

Those quotes around "enslaved" would be frowned on in much post-colonial analysis, but I used them at the time of writing. 

That's all for now. Lots of words to be learnt for our June concert.

b