Written in Italian as ‘La città incredibile’ in 1915, this extraordinary work of verse by Arturo Giovannitti on immigration, urbanity, alienation, and revolt was first translated for ‘The Liberator’ in 1918.

‘New York And I’ by Arturo Giovannitti from The Liberator. Vol. 1 No. 7. September, 1918.

CITY without history and without legends,
City without scaffolds and without monuments,
Ruinless, shrineless, gateless, open to all wayfarers,
To all the carriers of dreams, to all the burden bearers,
To all the seekers for bread and power and forbidden ken;
City of the Common Men
Who work and eat and breed, without any other ambitions,
O Incorruptible Force, O Reality without visions,
What is between you and me?

You have narrowed my vast horizons
To the coil of your cold embrace,
You have shortened my star-girt heights
To the height of your bludgeoning mace;
You have pinioned my falcon flights
With the shears of your thieving measure,
You have seared my eyes with the sights
Of the stews where you rot and gloat;
You have parched my war-shouts in my throat
With the smudge of your hot bitumes,
You have choken my white prayers with the fumes
Of your toils, and the dust of your streets.

In the charnels of my defeats,
In the welter of your foul trough
You have sealed in my lungs the cough
Of your sick and voracious breath;
You have poured the squalid death
Of your pleasures into my veins;
And all the things that are red,
And all the things that are vain,

What is between you and me, save the ashes and lees
Of orgies, the blows that you struck me, my impotent curse,
And now and again, in a fit of regret and remorse,
The truce of your soft lullaby, and my head on your knees?
I cursed in your temples, I wept leaden tears in your inns,
I laughed in your graveyards, I prayed in your slums for your blood,
I wallowed to purge my dead soul in the pools of your sins
And found the thing that’s divine, the word that was God
In the filth of your offals and swill
That to your servants you fling,
When your law, when your fate and your will
Bade me to steal and to kill,
But the glory of your face made me sing!
And all the things that are dead
Tho’ they were born to be deathlessly mine,
You have branded with kisses of fire on my flesh and my brain,
O Barren Harlot of heroes you turn into swine!

O Mad One, but how could I sing to you my last song?
O Dread One, how could I praise you, I who so long
Had seen you feed on the corpse of my dreams that you slew,
Gnaw at the plinths of all pillars I raised for the world,
Mock every flag I unfurled,
Rend every sail that I set and fell every oak that I grew?
How could I sing of you,
O Ferocious City who boil
All the mad powers of men in your cauldron, and stir
Their molten furies with tridents of lust and despair
Till the flesh and the soul and the soil
Are turned into tinsel and coin for your dress and your hair?
What was between you and me,
Grey City of Hunger and Toil?

But now…O Mighty One, what shiver shakes your form?
I see you awake and arisen,
Out of your golden seraglio, out of your lecherous prison,
Out of your shame and your sloth.
Naked your brow, your hair flung away to the breeze,
Naked your breasts, the wrath of the race in your knees,
Naked your sword, your gauntlet is cast on the seas,
And the breath of your shout swells the storm.

And shall you hear it now, the voice that smote behind
The locked gates of the past?
And shall you keep your troth?
And will you be steadfast
And will you keep your promises or will they be refused
When rise to hail you mother the vanhosts of mankind?
Will then the blood you bleed and shed be re-transfused
Into fraternal veins? Will then the dead arise,
The starved be fed again, the sick again made whole?

And will you then have flowers to cover every tomb?
You who will slay the old world, will you then bear to light
Or crush within, the new one that stirs now in your womb?
What matters all that now-now you have found a soul!
And lo! as now I hear you from sky and earth and water
Calling upon your children, to every son and daughter,
And tears are in your eyes, and in your hand is slaughter,
And you stand straight and terrible, cruel and holy, cruel and holy, bruised
And blessed and bereft,
While stilled in your calm breast your every languish lies,
My heart has been unlocked, my silence has been cleft,
My song has been unloosed,
O Brazen One! O Dreadful One! O Glory of my eyes!

And so I shall sing with a song that shall bide in the ears
Of men, like the groan of the dying in those of the child,
All that in you is eternal and placid and wild,
All that is godlike or mean, till my light burns no more.
I shall sing your streets and your marts, many-tongued, myriad-armed,
Hallucinated with fires,
Athunder with tumult and roar;
Your human beehives alarmed
With frenzies of hastes and desires;
I shall sing of your strong sons and weak ones,
The prophets and seers that you maim,
The singers you starve, the wastrels you fill,
The thieves and the strumpets you honor, the cowards you acclaim
And the saints and the heroes you kill.

I shall sing of your slums where you bleed,
Your machines, iron claws of your greed,
And your jails, viscid coils of your mind,
The light of your eyes that dazzles the sun
And turns your midnights into noons,
The Street where you buy and resell
Each day the whole world and mankind,
Your foundations that reach down to hell
And your towers that rend the typhoons,
And your voice drunk with bloody libations,
And your harbor that swallows the nations,
And the glory of your nameless dead,
And the bitterness of your bread,
And the sword that shall hallow your hand,
And the dawn that shall garland your head!

The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. In 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1918/07/v1n07-sep-1918-liberator-hr.pdf