Va, pensiero
- amolosh
- Dec 22, 2024
- 1 min read
“Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate” / “Go, thought, on wings of gold”—chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco, libretto by Temistocle Solera (1842)
“No, we have nothing death will not inherit,
Except the blessings of the mind and spirit.
Look, I—I’ve lost you, lost my land, my home;
I’m one whom no more can be taken from;
But my mind’s left, my sole delight and friend,
Where Caesar’s sovereignty does not extend.”
—Chris Childers’ translation of Ovid’s Tristia 3.7:
Ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque:
Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil.
The famous Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE) was exiled by the emperor Augustus, for unknown reasons, to Tomis, on the Black Sea (now Constanța in Romania), where he lived the rest of his life. I learned these lines of his from Dr. Arthur Davids, mentor of the Citizen Group, which originated the modern South African concept of nonracialism, in Cape Town in the late 1950s.
December 22, 2024
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