Buondì.
Longer-term club members will remember Roomie, who lived with us for a little over a year, until March this year.
Driving her to the petting zoo each weekday morning (located on the other side of the city) was a chore, as was picking her up in the evenings. She didn’t like the car, and often howled, out of frustration and boredom.
Sometimes we’d take the bus home instead, especially on days when I’d be working at our Italian school in Bologna’s historic downtown.
Then, instead of driving from home to the other side of town and back, which took an hour, twice a day, I’d walk through the porticoed streets, admiring the old buildings, looking in shop windows, and watching the chic locals chatting at tables in front of bars.
Once I’d collected the animaletto, we’d wait for a bus across town, then connect to another bus which heads north on the old road from Bologna to Ferrara. Our house is right at the city limits, about 6 KM (3.7 miles) from the central piazza.
That doesn’t seem so far as commutes go, but on a crowded bus, in rush hour traffic, with an agitated cub strapped into a stroller, it can seem like forever. A chupachup usually helped, as did looking out the window, on those rare buses with knee-high windows.
And so Roomie learnt to spot some of our local landmarks, the main ones being Bom’s school and, not far after, Lidl – a supermarket we’d sometimes drive to at weekends.
Roomie liked Tom (voice of https://easyitaliannews.com/), but couldn’t pronounce his name. And though he’d actually finished school and started college months before, she was always excited to have Bom’s school pointed out to her, from the bus window.
Click this link to see it:
http://www.comune.bologna.it/archivio-notizie/sites/default/files/galleries/aldini.jpg
It’s not an interesting building, but the mural and quotation painted on the road-facing wall do make it somewhat of a landmark. As much as Lidl, anyway.
That’s Antonio Gramsci in the picture, an Italian communist leader and thinker from the inter-war period. And the quote is a famous one, because it summarises his contribution to Marxist thought:
“Istruitevi, perché avremo bisogno di tutta la nostra intelligenza. Agitatevi, perché avremo bisogno di tutto il nostro entusiasmo. Organizzatevi, perché avremo bisogno di tutta la nostra forza.”
At this point I can sense US club members getting agitated. What horror is this? Painting commie propaganda on the side of a high school?? And Daniel, who should know better, proudly pointing it out to an impressionable young animal? Sick!
Well, that’s as may be, but if the local authorities in Bologna (a famously left-wing city, admittedly) thought the quote worth painting on one of their schools, then there must be more to it than just propaganda, right?
Find out what that might be in the sixteenth free article (with audio) in this year’s Summer Series:
Episodio 16. Antonio Gramsci e la nascita del Partito Comunista (1921)
The previous fifteen episodes in this series can be found on our History page. Scroll right down to the end to find them.
And as homework, for those of you not at the beach (tomorrow is Ferragosto), what about translating Gramsci’s famous quote (above)?
Don’t just Google it. Have a go at actually translating it yourself. And copy/paste your effort into a comment on this article, so we can compare results.
How to do that? Visit this link. Scroll down to find the comments form. Your email is required, but won’t be published (and if you’re reading this, I probably have it already).
Fill in the comments form and press the button. Your comment won’t be visible immediately, as I have to manually-approve them (it’s an anti-spam measure.) Be patient.
Bene, buono studio, and here’s the Gramsci link again:
Episodio 16. Antonio Gramsci e la nascita del Partito Comunista (1921)
The poor man had quite a tragic backstory. Someone could make a movie about his life! Oh, turns out they have.
It’s called ‘Antonio Gramsci: i giorni del carcere‘. The only version I could find on Youtbe has Portuguese subtitles, but you’re welcome to take a look: https://youtu.be/Mi9T0mrFrIs )
A mercoledì.
P.S. 
Don’t forget to read/listen to Saturday’s bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news, which is – as always – free!
Subscribing is free, too, and subscribers are emailed each bulletin as it’s published, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Go here to subscribe.
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Rob says
Educate yourselves because we will need all our intelligence. Agitate because we will need all our enthusiasm,. Organise because we will need all our strength.
Daniel says
Reading back through the other translations, Rob, and purely from the point of view of the translation of reflexive/non-reflexive nature of the three verbs (istruitevi, agitatevi, organizzatevi) – I make no comment on the rest – I think you got this spot on! The first needs to be reflexive because of the meaning in the context, whereas the other two work better in English in the non-reflexive form. Reflexive usages in Italian are often different, which makes translating them perilous… Ben fatto!
Rob says
yes – that’s what I thought. The reflexive verbs have caused me many problems on my Italian learning journey. I think Agitate is the right word here, as agitprop was an vital part of communist political tactics.
Steve Dowdle says
Good morning Daniel.
I read the quote as, “educate yourselves, because we will need all of our intelligence, agitate yourselves, because we will need all of our enthusiasm, organise yourselves, because we will need all of our strength.
It’s not a bad message as far as I can see, and certainly better than many modern meaningless slogans.
David says
Educate yourselves, because we’ll need all our intelligence. Join together to agitate, because we’ll need all our enthusiasm. Organise yourselves, because we’ll need all the force we can muster.
Agnes says
Develop your minds, for we will need every drop of intelligence. Rouse yourselves, for we will need every ounce of enthusiasm. Organise yourselves, for we will have need of all our strength.
Felice says
I prefer your translation of agitatevi as ‘rouse yourselves’; agitate sounds too forced/ technical (fine if we are talking about agitating fluids). I rather imagine someone attempting to encourage his fellow revolutionaries to ‘agitate themselves” would come across as pompous, or the meaning lost entirely on the audience. Only my opinion, but I don’t use the word “agitate” vrry much in everyday usage.
Daniel says
‘Agitate’ is not common in everyday use, Felice, but in revolutionary jargon (and we are talking about a communist leader from the 1920s) it probably sounds just perfect, especially along with the other two verbs (educate yourselves, organise). The issue is not the connotation, though (scientific for you, revolutionary to me) but the meaning – as others have argued. Some have translated this as ‘get excited’, which I don’t like at all, but is strongly suggested by the dictionaries. Your ‘rouse yourselves’ isn’t bad, and sticks close to the original reflexive. I’d previously suggested ‘rise up’, which is further from the likely original meaning but fits the context well.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) I’ll post the translations I found on the internet, so we can see how others have done this in the past.
Patricia Barber says
Get educated because we need all our intelligence, get excited because we need all our enthusiasm, get organized because we need all our strength.
I love this summer’s history series and understand it easily because it’s part of my history, too (I was born in 1940 and hope I make it to next summer so the series catches up to me). Relevance counts! Also, I knew about the retreat from Caporetto because Hemingway wrote so well about it in his novel A Farewell to Arms, a book I liked to include in my curriculum when I was a professoressa. Literature counts, too!
Mrs Zsuzsanna Snarey says
I like your translation the best! But I am surprised because Daniel’s advice was always not to translate! What has changed?
Daniel says
If you’re looking for proficiency in reading/listening to/speaking your foreign language, then translating what you don’t know, espcially at lower levels, is a huge distraction from the tasks of building those skills. Take reading, for example. It doesn’t take much actual reading PRACTICE to begin to develop the knack of it, and the more you do, the better you get. Familiarity with grammar structures and a wide range of vocabulary follow naturally along. Listening is the same. So is speaking.
Translating might be unhelpful for the above-mentioned development of skills, but is very interesting from the point of view of understanding the differences between your native tongue and foreign language. That might, in turn, lead to greater proficiency, and/or fewer mistakes (it might also not, as I can translate well from Italian to English, but am still very inaccurate when speaking/writing Italian.)
And if someone is willing to pay you to translate, well, that’s a different matter. Or if, for instance, you wanted to tell your friends about Gramsci, and assuming they didn’t speak any Italian, well that’s a good reason to translate, too, don’t you think?
It’s always useful to ask yourself (reflexive usage…) why you’re doing something, and to question any assumptions you might have. People tell me all the time that they think that if they study grammar, memorise lists of words, and yes – translate texts into their own language – then that will result in them speaking Italian better, understanding what they hear, and reading effortlessly. It doesn’t.
Hilary Temple says
I like this version, partly because it matched my. translation but mainly because it starts GET which is attention-grabbing.
Daniel says
It is indeed attention grabbing, Hilary, and ‘get + past participle’ is very common in modern spoken English, protest songs too, such as Bob Marleys
“Get up, stand up
Stand up for your right”
The problem with ‘get educated’ though, is that it’s missing a vital part of the meaning. Gramsci’s theory (read the Summer Series article if you haven’t yet done so) was that the revolution wasn’t making any progress because the oppressors had ‘cultural hegemony’, that is to say they controlled the media and SCHOOLS and so controlled how the workers saw the world. Problem, then: ‘get educated’ but how? Certainly not through the brainwashing apparatus of the state or the church!
Here the reflexive seems closer to the speaker’s intent. That the proletariat needs to educate THEMSELVES, as an alternative to the other option of ‘getting an education’.
Daniel says
Just in the first hour or so, lots of non-beach-goers have responded. Thanks to everyone! And as now you can see other people’s work, I’d mention there’s a lot to learn from noting the similiarities and differences… Worth a few more minutes of anyone’s time.
Back in the day when I was first in Italy (decades ago) I used to do quite a lot of freelance translation. Of course there are always technical issues to consider, for instance, does ‘educate yourselves’ work (probably yes, in the political sense it’s spot on) or are there more colloquial alternatives? And what about agitate? Maybe that doesn’t work so well in English in the reflexive form…
The trick, I found, was to decide on an approach – the two obvious ones being to stick as close to the original as possible (which makes the result ‘sound Italian’, and is easy) or translate into a particular English style/register, departing from the original as required to facilitate that. And then to DO IT CONSISTENTLY throughout the text. That’s the hard part, and these days it’s all done with software or AI.
But the lesson is a useful one – the way we express ourselves in a foreign language, and understand what others are communicating in it is by definition going to be different in many respects to how things are done in our native tongue.
Helen says
Educate yourselves, because we need all of our wit.
Rouse yourselves, because we need all of our enthusiasm.
Organise yourselves, because we need all of our strength.
I hope Roomie is happy wherever she is. I miss hearing about her.
Daniel says
“I miss hearing about her.”
Us too, Helen!
Question about your translation choice for the third reflexive verb… An English/American revolutionary might use an imperative here, don’t you think? As in “Organise, rise up, overthrow the oppressors!” ‘Organise yourselves’ for me has the connotation that the speaker would prefer not to be involved, or maybe is delegating. Could be just me.
Brenda Burton says
Get educated, because we will need all our intelligence.
Get (excited?) because we will need all our enthusiasm.
Get organized (as in joining forces) because we will need all our strength.
The only word I had to google was agitatevi and “fret” didn’t seem to fit the context, so I loosely translated it as excited.
I miss Roomie. Did you really take her to a petting zoo every morning? I always thought you were being funny and calling her day care center a petting zoo!
Daniel says
Still trying to be funny, Brenda, sorry. It’s a bad habit of mine.
The part you had problems with isn’t easy, it’s true, though it helps if you’re familiar with revolutionary/religious idiom. The particular problem here is the way the reflexive form is or isn’t used in Italian and English. Sometimes it’s the same, but often it isn’t. See my reply to Rob.
Looking it up at https://www.wordreference.com/iten/agitatevi we see that the English meanings of the Italian reflexive form are indeed rather unhelpful. But scrolling down that page to the non-reflexive form, the options seem more apt. You guessed at ‘get excited’, and guessing is good when you’re reading and listening. But when translating… ‘Get excited’ sounds more pornographic than revolutionary, don’t you think? Wordreference suggests ‘arouse’ and ‘stir’. Lots of people have stayed with ‘agitate’ (as in what ‘agitators’ do) and I think that’s a good choice, as long as it’s not reflexive. If I were being particularly creative I might go for ‘rise up’, but that’s quite a big leap.
Elizabeth Cook says
Glad to see Gramsci here!
I make it: ‘Instruct yourselves, because we need the whole of our intelligence. Get agitating, because we need every jot of our enthusiasm. Get organised, because we need to muster all our strength.’
Susette Schacherl says
The expression I thought needed special attention was “agitate yourselves.” I would suggest “rally together.”
Daniel says
Agreed, that’s a hard part. And your suggestion is reasonable. But it’s not, to my mind, exactly right (neither was mine…) I’ve resisted Googling this to see how it’s historically been translated, as that would take the fun out of it. Maybe in a day or two I will!
David Hood says
Educate yourselves, because we will need all our intellectual abilities.
Stir yourselves, because we will need all our energies.
Organize yourselves, because we will need all our combined strength.
Annette says
Instruct yourselves, because we will need our all of our intelligence. Rouse yourselves, because we will need all of our enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we will need all of our strength
Diane Horban says
I’m only at an A2 level of Italian and did not peek at all the comments scrolling down to the end to add mine…so here goes. Instruct because everyone needs to have intelligence, Agitate because everyone needs to be enthusiastic, Organize because everyone needs to be strong – have force. So Daniel, how did I do?
Daniel says
Mark your own homework, Diane. Read the comments. There’s a lot there to reflect on!
Claire Killian says
“Educate yourselves, as above all we will need our skill. Stimulate yourselves as above all we will need our enthusiasm. Organize yourselves as above all we will need our strength”
Daniel says
Stimulate yourselves?? Sounds like this revolution is going to be FUN!
Michael A Schenkel says
Though it was difficult not to peek at other’s responses … here’s my attempt to translate the sense of Gramsci’s quote:
“Get smarter, because we need all of our brains. Be an activist, because we need to activate all of our passion. Organize collectively, because we need all of our collective strength.”
Not literally translated, word for word, but more my impression of it. How’d I do?
Daniel says
Few people had the courage to not translate literally, Michael, so well done to you. Though there are pros and cons to your choice. Now read through the other comments and compare the various answers. Mark your own homework!