Simon Boccanegra

Today I remembered an opera in Vienna (Austria) at the Opera House I went to with my friend Dan Spagnola.

Since the hostel we were staying at took our international student IDs as collateral, we weren't able to get student discounted seats. We stood in line until just before the opera started, and we got horrible nosebleed seats. I could only see the stage if I stood on my toes, but it was still an exhilarating performance, albeit uncomfortable.

Anyways, I understood very little of the opera on my own, as it was in some Milanese-Italian dialect that no one knows except people from Milan. But there was one part that struck me, and I only understood it at the time because they had German & English subtitles on these little hard-to-read screens (pretty nasty translations to English, I might add).

A couple weeks later when I was back in Rome, I was able to find the text of the play, and found that little part very difficult to translate. I even asked a couple native Italian speakers for help, and they weren't able to translate a couple of words. So I hit the books, and needless to say, I was able to translate this beautiful little Italian dialect that no one knows or cares about. Luckily, I wrote all this down a couple years ago, and am now sharing it with the interwebz:

The play is "Simon Boccanegra" by Giuseppe Verdi, and was written in 1850's. This is one of the last lines of the Opera, the tragic death of this one dude inspires this other guy that is in love with his daughter to exclaim upon his death:

CORO:
Sì - piange, piange, è vero,
Ognor la creatura;
S'avvolge la natura
In manto di dolor!

Most of this is really obvious either because the words are very similar or the same as either standard Italian or Latin (or both). Here were a couple tough ones though:

"Ognor" is the Florentine (standard Italian) equivalent of ogni ora (an old word). The literal definition of "ogni ora" is "every hour."
Another weird one is actually "la creatura." In Latin and Italian "creatura" is simply "creature." But that doesn't really make sense here. As it turns out, "la creatura" here means something made in God's image, or something that is loved -- a good translation might be, "the human heart."

The rest is fairly obvious and simple. Here's my translation, since an English translation of this play doesn't seem to exist outside of the Opera House in Vienna:

My translation:
"CORO:
Yes - it cries, it cries, it is true,
every hour the human heart;
wraps its nature
In a mantle of sorrow"

Edit: I was just thinking my Latin sucked worse back then than it does now.. in Latin, "creatura" can also sometimes mean "servant," so perhaps the second line here may be translated as "every hour the servant," to emphasize the human condition as relatively powerless and merely "creature-like."