Manlio Sgalambro, vers. ingl. di La città dei morti, trad. di Sylvia Notini in Luigi Spina, Monumentale. Un viaggio fotografico all’interno del gran camposanto di Messina, Electa, Milano, (n.d.) 2013, p. n.d.
The citizens of this city inhabits its graves. They live inside them. In their graves they live their lives as the deceased. The arabesques carved on the granite, the faces reproduced in solemn poses that gaze emptily have nothing to do with them. On the surface of the monuments, in the inscriptions, we do not see the lives of the dead. We see the grave that has taken their place. Filled with ritual words from which our great admiration for them emerges. In truth, the grave cannot express what these words, some of which resound powerfully, while others are filled with compassion, would like to say. The grave itself, in its weighty nakedness, always says so much more. There’s a tale by Dostoevsky, called Bobok, that describes the matter at hand perfectly. But first of all what comes to mind is a Spanish joke in the days when the French, many centuries ago, built their first asylum: “They’ve locked up all the lunatics in a place built just for them, to make them think they’re the sane ones”. According to Dostoevsky, it’s the same for cemeteries. Notwithstanding the wore “Here lies the body of Major General Perdoedov, the general of this one and that one… Rest dear ‘ashes’ until the joyful dawn”, Dostoevsky is describing a cemetery where every six weeks some of the deceased, albeit decomposed, utter a meaningless word: Bobok… Bobok, and they chatter away, even when they’ve been in the grave for two to three months, after which they say Bobok once again and this is followed by a silence that is truly that of the grave. Naturally, Dostoevsky did not hold a good opinion about cemeteries. And he spoke of depravity, rather, of the depravity of supreme hope. We need to ask ourselves: do we need cemeteries? Yes, we do. The granite will be soaked with the widow’s and orphans’ tears and in time it will crumble. I don’t like the dead, I don’t like to embellish them, revere them, adorn them, and so on and so forth. But I do like death. And I don’t want to let all the chanting that is left there appall me, so that I will eventually even be appalled by death.