Italian-English translation by Francesca Corsetti

dramatic solution he proposes. The catastrophic ending of the novel might also be defined prophetic, as it foretells the invention of the atomic weapon, or the more dystopian doomsday device.

ENGLISH Zeno’s Conscience

translated by Francesca Corsetti

Life looks like sickness as it proceeds by crises and lysis, and has daily improvements and worsenings. Unlike other diseases, life is always fatal. It cannot bear treatments. It would be like filling the holes we have in the body, believing them to be wounds. We would die strangled the moment we are healed. The present life is corrupt from its roots. Man has put himself in place of trees and beasts and has polluted the air, and impeded free space. Worse it might be. The wretched but active animal might discover other forces and put them at his own service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. A great wealth will follow…in the number of men. Each square metre will be filled by men. Who will heal us from the lack of air and space? The mere thought makes me suffocate! But it is not this, not merely this. Any effort to give us health is vain.

This cannot belong but to the beast that knows only one progress: the one of its organism. Once the swallow realised that there was no other way out than migration, it developed the muscle that moves its wings, and which became the most sizable part of its body. The mole buried itself, and the whole of its body adapted to its need. The horse enlarged itself and modified its foot. Some animals’ progress is unknown, but there must have been one which has not damaged their health. Yet, the bespectacled man devises contraptions out of his body and if there was any health or nobleness in those who invented them, it is almost always missing in those who use them. Those devices can be bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly cunning and weak. Actually, you can tell that their shrewdness grows proportionately to their weakness.

ITALIAN I primi suoi ordigni parevano prolungazioni del suo braccio e non potevano essere efficaci che per la forza dello stesso, ma, oramai, l’ordigno non ha più alcuna relazione con l’arto. Ed è l’ordigno che crea la malattia con l’abbandono della legge che fu su tutta la terra la creatrice. La legge del più forte sparì e perdemmo la selezione salutare. Altro che psico-analisi ci vorrebbe: sotto la legge del possessore del maggior numero di ordigni prospereranno malattie e ammalati.

Forse traverso una catastrofe inaudita prodotta dagli ordigni ritorneremo alla salute. Quando i gas velenosi non basteranno più, un uomo fatto come tutti gli altri, nel segreto di una stanza di questo mondo, inventerà un esplosivo incomparabile, in confronto al quale gli esplosivi attualmente esistenti saranno considerati quali innocui giocattoli. Ed un altro uomo fatto anche lui come tutti gli altri, ma degli altri un po’ più ammalato, ruberà tale esplosivo e s’arrampicherà al centro della terra per porlo nel punto ove il suo effetto potrà essere il massimo. Ci sarà un’esplosione enorme che nessuno udrà e la terra ritornata alla forma di nebulosa errerà nei cieli priva di parassiti e di malattie.

ENGLISH His first contraptions appeared as extensions of his arm and could not be efficient but for its own strength; yet, at this stage, the device has no connection with the limb. And it is the same contraption that creates the disease, abandoning the law that created all the Earth. The survival of the fittest disappeared, and we lost natural selection. Far more than psychoanalysis would be necessary: diseases and patients will flourish under the law of the possessor of the highest number of contraptions.

Perhaps, through an inconceivable catastrophe generated by these devices we would restore our health. When poison gases would suffice no longer, a man just like any other, in the secrecy of a room of this world, will invent an unequalled explosive, compared to which all the explosives available nowadays will be considered as innocuous toys. And another man, just like any other as well, but even sicker than the others, will steal that explosive and climb up to the centre of the world to place it where its outcome may be maximum. There will be a colossal explosion which no one will hear, and the Earth, once back to its state of nebula, will wander in the skies deprived of parasites and diseases.

Alexander Fay, I Will Be a Sky