Bella Ciao

A song of resistance

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✳️ Note: The level of this article is for students with a TOEIC of 550+, Eiken Pre-1, CEFR B2. For Japanese students, vocabulary words in bold are provided in Japanese below.

(640 words)

This Italian song was first sung in the late 1800s. It was a song about the back-breaking labor of pulling weeds from the rice fields so that the rice had more room to grow. The women had bosses who carried sticks and hit them if they didn’t work fast or hard enough.

The melody is very well-known. Some of the (translated) lyrics of the original version include:

The boss is standing with his stick

Oh, goodbye, beautiful goodbye

And we work with out backs curved…

Oh my goodness, what torment…

And every hour that we pass here, we lose our youth

Another set of lyrics was written, possibly during World War II when the partisans were fighting against Nazi occupation of Italy as well as the fascist leadership of Mussolini.

These lyrics show a partisan fighter’s thoughts as he goes to fight and die.

One morning I woke up

oh goodbye beautiful, goodbye beautiful, goodbye beautiful, bye, bye, bye

One morning I woke up

And I found the invader

Oh partisan, take me away

Because I feel as if I’m going to die

And if I die a partisan

then you must bury me

Bury me up in the mountain

under the shade of a beautiful flower

And the people who pass by

will tell me, “what a beautiful flower”

This is the flower of the partisan

who died for freedom

The song structure resembles that of many songs around the world that tell a story that circles back to its beginning. Another well-known song of this type is Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone which was based on a much earlier traditional Ukrainian song Koloda-Duda.

Bella Ciao has been used in many other places and times. In 1969 the Chilean group Quilapayun recorded the song on their album, Basta. In 2018, they re-released it with new lyrics:

One morning my people rose up, O bella ciao… For a new society

Filling the boulevards with joy, O bella ciao… With their flags For peace

Spring Brought That Day, O bella ciao… The New Winds of Brotherhood

The soul fills Like the streets, O bella ciao… Of fraternity lights

Come Chileans Wake up everyone, O bella ciao… Come Chileans

Wake up everyone To rescue dignity Let's march together Arm in arm O bella ciao

Let's march together Arm in arm In a cry for freedom

(El Desconcierto, 2020).

In 2012, climate activists in Belgium wrote new lyrics in a call to action. It has been sung at the yellow-vest protests in France in 2018, during the call for independence at the protests in Catalunya in 2019, and at anti-Brexit protests in 2020.

It was used in 2020 in Wrocław, Poland, at the protest against the Constitutional Tribunal’s decision that made almost all abortions illegal. The protesters sang, “One Thursday, the Polish Tribunal tried to take over my body, your body, body, body, body” (Salerno & Warenburg, 2023). Activists in Argentina used the song as well in their fight for abortion rights (ibid).

Bella Ciao even turns up in a short prose piece of queer literature from Bosnia-Herzegovina by Lejla Kalamujić. In the short story, the main character is captivated by a woman named Bella Ciao, and wants to know more about her and the places she met other women. Dijana Simić writes: “It can be understood as the ideological background against which the narrator reflects the marginalization of queer people” (Simić, 2022).

Bella Ciao has been translated into Arabic, Turkish, German, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Danish, and there is even a Japanese version (video below). It is known the around the world as a song of resistance, probably more well-known than The International which has faded somewhat into the background since the 1960s (although Billy Bragg rewrote the lyrics for that in 1989 - but I’ll save that for another newsletter).

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VOCABULARY

curved 湾曲した

torment 苦しめる

partisans ゲリラの類義語

occupation 職業

Fascist ファシスト

invader 侵略者

bury 埋める

boulevard 大通り

brotherhood 兄弟愛

fraternity 友愛

rescue 救援

dignity 尊厳

constitutional tribunal 憲法裁判所

abortion 中絶

prose 散文

captivate 魅了する

ideological イデオロギー的

marginalization 疎外化

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(Sources are listed below the videos)

Original with lyrics:

In Japanese:

Sing for the Climate (Do It Now) - Belgium:

Sources

Causevic, S. (2020). O Bella Ciao: Nostalgia and Hauntings from the Future. eprints.soas.ac.uk. https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/33157/1/Consumer%20Culture%20Theory,%20Leicester%202020_formated.pdf accessed 30 May 2023.

El Desconcierto - Prensa digital libre, & Tudela, C. (2020, January 31). Quilapayún Edita Nueva Versión de “Bella Ciao” con letra inspirada en el estallido social. El Desconcierto - Prensa digital libre. https://www.eldesconcierto.cl/tipos-moviles/2020/01/31/quilapayun-edita-nueva-version-de-bella-ciao-con-letra-inspirada-en-el-estallido-social.html accessed 2 June 2023.

Marathe, O. (2019, November 21). “Bella Ciao”: Why a World War II anti-fascist anthem is ringing across Europe again. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/italy-protest-matteo-salvini-sardines-bella-ciao-6129038/https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/italy-protest-matteo-salvini-sardines-bella-ciao-6129038/ accessed 2 June 2023.

Salerno, D., & van de Warenburg, M. (2023). ‘Bella ciao’: A portable monument for transnational activism. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 13678779221145374. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13678779221145374 accessed 30 May 2023.

Simić, D. (2022). Recognizing Better Selves: A Reparative Reading of Contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian Queer Literature. Affective Worldmaking, 151. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/53942/1/9783839461419.pdf#page=152 accessed 2 June 2023.