Translating is always betraying. 10) New Wor(l)d Hawdah
LKJ The New World Order The killers in Kigali will have to be healthcare workers
The butchers of Butare will have to be healthcare workers
The savages in Chatila will have to be healthcare workers
And Bosnian beasts will have to be healthcare workers. In the new world order
You place a dirty old gauze over the scarred face of humanity. The old order unveils and reveals the ancient plague that reopens and still hurts. The primal wound that time will not heal
And in the flow of blood that repeats, tribal tyrants settle their scores.
The killers in Kigali will have to be healthcare workers
The butchers of Butare will have to be healthcare workers
The savages in Chatila will have to be healthcare workers
And Bosnian beasts will have to be healthcare workers. In the new world order
It’s always the same old Cain and Abel syndrome, even older than the fall and Rome. But in the new world order, atrocity is just the new language of barbarism.
Mass extermination - Normalized
Pogrom - Rationalized
Genocide - Sterilized
And the ancient tribal sin is now called ethnic cleansing.
And so
The killers in Kigali will have to be healthcare workers
The butchers of Butare will have to be healthcare workers
The savages in Chatila will have to be healthcare workers
And Bosnian beasts will have to be healthcare workers
Pra Pram Pram
In the new world order
Here, for my last little translation, I really went overboard!
First: not being able to (knowing) directly translate Linton's slang, I used an English translation of the original text (which you could also say about me “great translator of translators”....).
Second: not knowing how to capture Linton's “speech,” that popular yet literary slang of his, I decided to use Neapolitan. I didn't translate the entire text into Neapolitan (the effect would have been grotesque) but only interspersed the text with “sounds” and Neapolitan cadences.
A trick that, I fear, occasionally falls into unintentional comedy.
But anyway, this is a tribute to what I consider one of the greatest; and then I don’t think he will ever find out….
