Un matto [dietro ogni scemo c’è un villaggio] [English translation]

What if you had a world in your heart

and you weren’t able to express it with words,

and the daylight was splitting

between a laughing village and you – the idiot who passes by,

and not even the night left you alone:

the others would dream about themselves and you would dream about them.

And yes, you too would go looking

for the foolproof words to make them listen to you:

to astonish for half an hour, all you need is a history book;

I tried to learn the Encyclopedia Britannica by heart;1

and after ‹macebearer›, ‹machinery›, ‹made-up›,

they carried on until they read me ‹madman›.

And without knowing whom I owed my life to,

I gave it back in a madhouse;

here on the hill I’m sleeping unwillingly,

yet there is light in my thoughts now;

here in the dim light I invent words now,

but I regret one light, the sunlight.

My bones still give to life,

they give it blooming grass.

But life has remained in the muffled voices

of those who lost the idiot and are crying for him on the hill,

of those who still whisper with the same irony

‟A merciful death took him away from madness”.

1. Treccani is the most famous Italian encyclopedia (here is their very good online dictionary), so De André used it as a translation for the less well known (in Italy) Encyclopædia Britannica.

The song literally says

and after ‹pig›, ‹Majakóvskij›, ‹misshapen›,

following an alphabetical order take makes sense only in Italian.

Majakóvskij was a Russian poet.