Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Joseph Tusiani / Giosuè Carducci
Let a dark ilex, here, fight with the winter,
and boldly tell each throbbing May its secrets,
an ilex with its trunk merrily mantled
with youthful glory!
Here, round the rising deity, let, watchful
giants, the thick, deep cypresses still gather;
and you, Clitumnus, sing beneath their shadows
your fatal songs.
Murmur to us, O witness of three empires,
how the fierce Umbrian, savage in his battles,
bowed to the light-speared fighter, and undaunted
Etruria grew:
tell us how, over the united hamlets,
from the surmounted Cimino Gradivus
came later down and planted the rebellious
banners of Rome.
But you, O god indigenous and common
to all Italians, victories and losses
you blent; and when the Punic fury thundered
from Thrasimene,
one cry went through your dens, and soon the tortile
trumpet was echo to it from the mountains:
“You, that are pasturing oxen near mist-mantled
Mevania;
“and you, that on the Nar’s left bank are ploughing
the sloping hills; and you now felling verdant
woods near Spoleto, or in Martian Todi
being now wed
“leave your fat ox among the reeds, abandon
your yellow bullock in the field, abandon
in the bent oak the wedge, and at the altar
leave, quick, your bride,
“and run, and run, and run! run with a hatchet,
run with your club and spear, run with your arrows!
Run! Cruel Hannibal has come to threaten
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