No Tears for the Roses
Written during the "hot autumn" of 1969, Nanni Balestrini's poem "Senza lacrime per le rose" was first published in the 1976 collection Poesie Pratiche, 1954-1969. As in Balestrini's novel We Want Everything (published in Italian in 1971) the wave of strikes and political action that would define that season and the attendant development of Operaismo form both the setting and subject of the poem.
"The poem," John Picchione has written, "evinces Balestrini's attention to direct political practice, referring to the social and political violence that, in 1969, followed the student revolts...[it] is constructed through an account of events that shaped that year and through a series of its major slogans."
We present "Senza lacrime per le rose" below, in a new translation by poet and filmmaker Peter Valente, whose translation of Balestrini's long poem Blackout will be published by Commune Editions next year.
In the end, big business and its science won’t be the prizes for the one who wins the class struggle. They are the field on which the battle itself is fought. And for as long as the enemy occupies this ground, we mustn’t hesitate to fire our guns at it, without any tears for the roses.
Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital
1.
halfway
in the dark i
n the
dense fores
the tree pre
fers the cal
m but the wind doesn’t let
up the struggle of
the revolutionary is to
eliminate the
of the class system it’s an ob
jective fact it’s in
dependent of
the will of mankin
overthrown
the
ideo
logical power of the bourgeoisie
the situation is peace
ful in Turin after the sixteen h
ours of guerilla warfare yes
terday today everything
must be subordinate to
the trees make a lot of noise
at the definition o
f a strateg
fiat did not invent a
nother man say
ing you are
my slav
the great
the
overthrow of the do
minant
ideas
2.
the great ideological trans
gression of this era
and
its secular justifications
a reality that is sink
ing suddenly into the past
o
f raging fires automobiles and
the barricades con
structed with wood
en tables s
prayed with tear gas
as the strong arm of the police
moved closer
approaching the barricades then
it was about to start the
and the woods
all around
today everything must be
subordinated
the
truth of violence the
violence as
a final reason for everythi
today it’s openly
spoken about
the political reality is
now
the reality the violence or the
word
of the oppressed class
3.
and so
it’s
for this reason we rebel be
cause we’ve been exploited enoug
completely the old ideo
logy
the culture of the bour
geoisie or the culture of ex
change value
the
task of the word
is to eli
minate logic the bourgeoisie lo
st its ideological
hegemony in
this
death
already played out
the matter
is substantially clear
and
the old cul
ture and the old w
ays and the costum
endured by all
the
ex
ploited class
for thousands of years such that
the
mind
of the people
is poisoned
it’s either cultural u
topia or
nothing will ever be
as before
4.
what
we want
EVERYTHI
cars set on fire massive vehicles
lie aslant on the road
ways remnants of the barri
cades timber stolen fr
om construction sites
blackened by flames con
torted traffic lights uprooted
a steamroller
EVERYTHING
if
you don’t str
ike down the enemy
overthrown power gen
erators burnt the pavements torn a
part and stones scattered
all over
the place storefronts neon signs
of businesses smashed frames
of
you strike the enemy of the classes
destroyed automobiles or the
burnt plate glass windows of
the entranceways to tenement buildings
collapsed after being bom
barded with stones
shipyards devastated and fences
consumed by flames
piles of stones fragments
of cement pipes
and the trees
all around
the enemy of the classes will not fall
5.
to
the definition of a
strategy
the in
version of a po
litical line from 20 years dominat
at the moment when the
working
class took control of
its own organization
and the politics of the strug
the word
meanwhile
transformed into a social insti
tution it achieves with dis
cipline its
the trees make a lot of noise
balanced functions guaran
tee order it’s every
where within this
societ
but cre
ate shape and in
the struggle
a word and a wor
d but mat
erial practice cre
ated in the
masses in the struggle
to form n
ew cus
toms
and new
- Nanni Balestrini's We Want Everything: A Novel is out now and 50% off until June 28th as part of our Summer Reads.
Peter Valente is the author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna (Punctum Books, 2014),which was nominated for a Lambda award, The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), Let the Games Begin: Five Roman Writers (Talisman House, 2015), a book of photography, Street Level (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), and the chapbook, Forge of Words a Forest (Jensen Daniels, 1998). He is the co-translator of the chapbook, Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud, 1945-1947 (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), which includes six of Artaud’s letters, and has translated the work of Luis Cernuda, Gérard de Nerval, Cesare Viviani, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as numerous Ancient Greek and Latin authors. Forthcoming is a second book of photography entitled Blue Book (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), and a translation of Nanni Balestrini’s Blackout (Commune Editions, 2017). In early 2019, City Lights will publish all 33 of Artaud’s late letters with an introduction by Stephen Barber. His poems, essays, and photographs have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Mirage #4/Periodical, First Intensity, Aufgabe, Talisman, Oyster Boy Review, and SpoKe. His work has also been published or is forthcoming online in Talisman, The Poems and Poetics Blog, Oyster Boy Review, Jacket2, Sibilia, The Recluse, and Dispatches From the Poetry Wars. In the late 1990s, he co-edited the poetry magazines Vapor/Strains and Lady Blizzard’s Batmobile and wrote articles on jazz for the Edgewater Reporter. In 2010, he turned to filmmaking and has completed 60 shorts to date, 24 of which were screened at Anthology Film Archives.