Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio,
non so più quel che dico,
e quel che faccio!
Eppur è d'uopo, sforzati!
Bah! sei tu forse un uom?
Tu se' Pagliaccio!
Vesti la giubba,
e la faccia in farina.
La gente paga, e rider vuole qua.
E se Arlecchin t'invola Colombina,
ridi, Pagliaccio, e ognun applaudirà!
Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il
pianto;
in una smorfia il singhiozzo
il dolor, Ah!
Ridi, Pagliaccio,
sul tuo amore infranto!
Ridi del duol, che t'avvelena il cor!
To recite! While taken with delirium,
I no longer know what it is that I say,
or what it is that I am doing!
And yet it is necessary, force yourself!
Bah! Can't you be a man?
You are "Pagliaccio"!
Put on the costume,
and the face in white powder.
The people pay, and laugh when they please.
And if Harlequin invites away Colombina
laugh, Pagliaccio, and everyone will
applaud!
Change into laughs the spasms of pain;
into a grimace the tears of pain, Ah!
Laugh, Pagliaccio,
for your love is broken!
Laugh of the pain, that poisons your
heart!
POST-POST. This is a strange one, a discovery that happened late
at night. I
NEVER used to stay up so late, so I'm not sure what's happening to
me. I get a
little delirious.
Clowns obsess me, and most of them creep me out. His Milks, Milky
the Clown, has to be the creepiest, in part because he wears a traditional
Pagliaccio white ruffled costume with a pointy hat that reminds me of
nothing more than a KKK uniform.
While dredging through old files to see what might be worth
resurrecting, I came across a strange thing: the Italian words to Vesti la
Giubba (perhaps the
best-known operatic aria, sometimes known erroneously as Laugh,
Clown, Laugh) down the left side of the page, with a line-by-line English
translation
I was struck by the symmetry of it, and the startling nature of
the literal
translation. "Recitar!" literally means
"recite", or in a broader sense, "tell
it" or "perform it" (a "recital" isn't reciting,
after all, but a public
performance). Put it out there, not just the clown show, but -
tell them, or
perhaps (I don't know enough Italian) "tell them your story,
you cowardly
bastard (referring to himself). I may be way off in all this, of
course, in
which case "recitar!" says it all.
I decided to dig up some old footage of Caruso, if it existed, and
hit pay dirt
right away, with an eerie clip of him performing Vesti in full
Milky the Clown
garb. This footage has a dreamlike quality that I played around
with, reversing
the video in places to make a sort of loop. Then I thought of the
heartbreaking
performance of Placido Domingo, who stages it the RIGHT way for
once.
Instead of coming onstage already wearing his "motley",
he picks up the limp rag of costume and looks at it in loathing, nearly
tearing it apart at the end before dragging it offstage behind him like
chains. While he sings, he looks at himself in the mirror and smears white
greasepaint on his face in despair. Though my Italian is limited to three words
(amore, Lamborgini and Chef Boy-Ar-Dee), even Ican tell that "vesti la
giubba" is in the imperative: "put on the costume, you idiot,
it's time to get out there again even if your heart is falling out of
your chest". This betrays, heartbreakingly, Pagliaccio's
self-loathing and despair.
This is a slightly different version of Vesti. It's silent. Well,
why not? Why
can't we have a silent aria? Because it's idiotic, no doubt. The
music is
everything. So here, I present the Other Side.
