Letter to my children on Goyas Executions of the third of May, a poem by Jorge de Sena and the Street Art of Banksy. The excerpts from Letter to my children on Goyas Executions of the third of May, were translated by Richard Zenith. Here can you read the whole translation from Senas Carta a meus Filhos sobre os Fuzilamentos de Goya (1959): I dont know, children, what world will be yours. Its possible (everythings possible) that it will be the world I wish for you. A simple world, in which the only difficulty will come from there being nothing thats not simple and natural. A world in which everything will be allowed, according to your fancy, your yearning, your pleasure, your respect for others and their respect for you. Its also possible that it wont be this, and that this wont even be what you want in life. Everythings possible, even though we fight, as we must fight, on behalf of our idea of freedom and justice and -- still more important -- in steadfast allegiance to the honour of being alive. One day you will realize what a vast multitude, as countless as humanity, felt this way, loving others for whatever they had that was unique, unusual, free, different, and they were sacrificed, tortured, beaten and hypocritically handed over to secular justice, to be liquidated with sovereign pity and without bloodshed. For being loyal to a god, to a conviction, to a country, to a hope, or merely to the irrefutable hunger that gnawed them from within, they were gutted, flayed, burned, gassed, and their bodies heaped up as anonymously as they had lived, or their ashes scattered so that no memory of them remained. Sometimes, for belonging to a certain race or class, they atoned for all the wrongs they had not committed or had no awareness of having committed. But it also happened and happens that they were not killed. There have always been infinite methods for dominating, annihilating quietly, gently, through ways inscrutable, as they say of Gods ways. These executions, this heroism, this horror, was one episode, among thousands, that happened in Spain over a century ago and whose violence and injustice shocked the heart of a painter named Goya, who had a very large heart, full of rage and love. But this is nothing, children, just one event, a brief event, in this chain of which you are (or arent) a link of iron and sweat and blood and a bit of semen on the way to the world I dream for you. Believe me that no world, that nothing and nobody is worth more than a life or the joy of having life. It is this joy that matters most. Believe me that the dignity youll hear so much about is nothing but this joy that comes from being alive and knowing that no one has ever been less alive or suffered or died so that just one of you could stave off a little longer the death that belongs to all of us and will come. That you will know all of this with peace of mind, with rancour toward no one, without fear, without ambition, and above all without apathy or indifference is my ardent hope. So much blood, so much pain, so much anguish, must one day prove -- even if the tedium of a happy world torments you -- not to have been in vain. I confess that very often, thinking about the horror of so many centuries of oppression and cruelty, I have a moment of hesitation in which an overwhelming bitterness makes me despair. Are they or arent they in vain? And even if they arent, who will resurrect those millions, who will restore not only their lives but all that was taken from them? No Final Judgment, children, can give them that moment they did not live, that object they did not freely enjoy, that gesture of love they were going to make tomorrow. And so the same world we create urges us to treat it with care, as something that isnt just ours but has been entrusted to us that we might respectfully watch over it in memory of the blood that flows in our veins, and of the flesh weve inherited, and of the love that others did not love because it was taken from them. Jorge de Sena (1919-1978) was a Portuguese poet, novelist and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Banksy (born in 1974) is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter. He is often considered as the most famous graffiti practitioner in the world. Music by Diagram of Suburban Chaos (pseudonym of William Collin Snavely, a composer of electronic music). Around seventy percent of the audio was made of his OST for Black day to freedom by Rob Chiu.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 16:51:36 +0000
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