Voto:
Here on the arid back
Of the formidable Mount
Sternitor Vesuvius,
Which no other joyful tree or flower,
Your solitary clumps around,
Fragrant broom,
Content with the deserts. I saw you
Embellishing the desolate lands
That surround the city
Which was once the lady of mortals,
And with its heavy and silent appearance
Seems to affirm and remind the passerby.
Now I see you again in this land, of sad
Places and abandoned by the world,
And always companion of afflicted fortunes.
These fields scattered
With unfruitful ashes, and covered
With petrified lava,
That echoes beneath the feet of the wanderer;
Where the serpent curls up to the sun
And where the known
Cavernous den returns the rabbit;
They were joyful villas and cultivated,
And golden spikes waved, and
Echoed with the lowing of herds;
There were gardens and palaces,
Pleasant lodgings for the leisure of the powerful;
And there were famous cities
That with its torrents, the proud mountain
Crushed down with fiery mouth
Along with the inhabitants. Now all around
A ruin envelops,
Where you sit, oh gentle flower, and almost
Pitying others’ damages, to heaven
You send a perfume of the sweetest odor,
That consoles the desert. May the one come to these shores
Who has a habit of exalting with praise
Our state, and may he see how
Our race is cared for
By loving nature. And the power
Here can also rightly value
The human seed,
Which the hard nurse, where it fears less,
With slight motion in a moment
Partially nullifies, and can with movements
Barely less slight swiftly
Annihilate entirely.
Painted on these shores
Are the magnificent fates and progressive
Of humankind.
Here behold and here reflect,
Proud and foolish century,
That until then the path
Marked out by the risen thought
You abandoned, and turning your steps back,
Boast of your return,
And call proceeding.
In your childishness all the minds,
Whose wicked fate made their father,
Go flattering, even
When sometimes
They mock you among themselves. Not I
Shall descend underground with such shame;
But rather the contempt that is closed
In my breast for you,
I will have shown as openly as possible:
Although I know that oblivion
Presses he who too much to his own age has aspired.
Of this evil, which with you
Will be common to me, I have laughed enough until now.
Dream of freedom, and servant at the same time
You want again the thought,
Only for which we arose
From barbarism in part, and for which only
One grows in civilization, which alone for the better
Guides public fates.
Thus you disliked the truth
Of the harsh fate and the lowly place
That nature gave us. For this your back
Cowardly you turned away from the light
That made it manifest: and, fugitive, you call
Vile he who follows it, and only
Magnanimous is he
Who, mocking himself or others, shrewd or foolish,
Even rises above the stars the mortal rank.
A man of poor state and weak limbs
Who is noble and high of soul,
Does not call nor esteem himself
Rich in gold nor strong,
And of splendid life or of brave
Person among the people
Makes no laughable display;
But seems to lack shame, leaving
Seeming without treasure and strength, and names
Speaking openly, and of his things
Makes esteem equal to the truth.
I do not believe that a magnanimous creature
Is already, but rather foolish,
He who born to perish, nurtured in pain,
Says, to enjoy I am made,
And with fetid pride
Fills the pages, lofty fates and new
Happiness, which all heaven ignores,
Not only this orb, promising on earth
To people that a wave
Of troubled sea, a breath
Of malignant air, a subterranean collapse
Destroys so badly, that it advances
With great difficulty the memory of them.
Noble is that nature
Which dares to raise
Mortal eyes against
Common fate, and which with free tongue,
Not detracting fro
