Laudator Temporis Acti

Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), "The Knight and Death," tr. Joseph Farrell, in Open Doors and Three Novellas (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 81-151 (at 145-146):

He was walking now through the park. The children, yes, the children: so graceful, so much better fed than previously (the frail and hungry childhood of those who were now elderly), perhaps more intelligent and undoubtedly, overall, better informed. Yet he had for them an enormous compassion and apprehension. Will they still be here in 1999, in 2009, or in 2019, and what would this succession of decades bring them? Immersed in these thoughts, he realized he had reached, as it were, the threshold of prayer, which he glimpsed as a deserted, desolate garden.

He stopped to follow their games, to eavesdrop on what they were saying to each other. They were still capable of joy, of imagination, but lying in wait for them was a school without joy and without imagination, the television, the computer, the car from home to school and from school to home, and food which was rich but as tasteless as blotting paper. Never again, committed to memory, the multiplication tables, the poems ... "The maiden from the country came...," or "All trembling on the threshold...," or even "The cypresses which at Bolgheri...," torments of other times. Memory was to be abolished, all memory, and accordingly those exercises that aimed at making it flexible, subtle, or retentive.

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Camminava ora per il parco. I bambini, ecco: così graziosi, tanto meglio nutriti che un tempo (l'infanzia gracile e affamata di quelli ora vecchi), forse più intelligenti e certamente, di tutto, molto più informati; ma ne aveva grande apprensione e compassione. Ci saranno, pensava, nel 1999, nel 2009, nel 2019: e che cosa il susseguirsi di questi decenni avrebbe portato per loro? E si accorse, così pensando, di essere arrivato come al cancello della preghiera, intravedendola come un giardino desolato, deserto.

Si soffermava a seguire i loro giochi, a sentire quel che si dicevano. Erano ancora capaci di gioia, di fantasia: ma li aspettava una scuola senza gioia e senza fantasia, la televisione, il computer, l'automobile da casa a scuola e da scuola a casa, il cibo ricco ma dall'indifferenziato sapore di carta assorbente. Non più, nella memoria, la tavola pitagorica, «La donzelletta vien dalla campagna...», «Scendeva dalla soglia...», «I cipressi che a Bolgheri...»: sevizie del passato. La memoria era da abolire, la Memoria; e quindi anche quegli esercizi che la rendevano duttile, sottile, prensile.

Thanks very much to Kenneth Haynes for the following comment:

The translator seems to have had trouble with one of the quotations. He added the word "poems" to Sciascia's bare list of opening phrases, not realizing that Italian schoolchildren had to memorize prose, too, and "Scendeva dalla soglia" was one of the regularly memorized passages from Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. "All trembling on the threshold" also misses the point, since the woman "came down from the threshold" with quiet dignity as she walked down the steps to place the body of her child Cecilia in the cart of the monatti (workers whose job it was to collect the corpses of plague victims).