Even Benigni provokes Sanremo audience and brings penetration and oral sex to prime time on Rai Uno

If the Sanremo Festival audience had not been satisfied with Achille Lauro’s provocation (who last night repeated the feat by appearing on the stage of the Ariston Theater dressed as Ziggy Stardust), Roberto Benigni also took it upon himself to put an eleven-pound load on Italy’s most-watched singing event. Perhaps his provocation went more unnoticed, because he did not perform in leotards like the Roman singer (and because the beginning of his monologue was rather boring), but he declaimed to the audience some of the most explicit passages from the Song of Songs, the well-known biblical poem about the love between a man and a woman that has undergone various interpretations and simplifications throughout history.

In Sanremo, Benigni proposed an essentially secular interpretation of the text, sticking to its literal meaning: the Song of Songs is in fact, trivializing, a kind of dialogue between two lovers who express to each other the desires they have for each other, where by desires are also meant carnal ones. The poem is called by Benigni “the most beautiful song,” a “song that sings physical love” and that “has never been done on television,” the “summit of poetry of all time, like a piece of the Sistine Chapel.” The Tuscan actor then briefly reviewed the Church’s centuries-old discomfort with the poem’s presence in the biblical canon, suggesting that the work was included in the Bible because it was deemed so beautiful as to be considered sacred, and finally, after an (often very repetitive) premise that lasted almost twenty minutes, he declaimed a few verses from the work, presenting it as written by “someone who was working for eternity” (we do not in fact know who the author is“) and saying that ”every word is a diamond.")

Benigni presented his “reinterpretation” of the work as a trailer for the Song of Songs, and he recited it with a very strong translation, dwelling in particular on the verses describing the carnal union between man and woman, especially those where a fellatio is described (“I have a great desire to curl up in your shadow, and your sex on me, love, and its sweet fruit in my mouth”), the beloved’s body (“your breasts are like two deer grazing among the roses, your thighs an artist’s hand has turned them, like a split pomegranate are your buttocks removed from your robe, a handful of wheat in a rose garden lies between your groins, how much grace and how much pleasure in your love’s flutterings, the smell of your sex is the odor of the sweetest of balms, it intoxicates me, an enclosed garden you are fullness of me, a garden with exquisite fruit”), his body (“his eyes are like doves in a mirror of water, his belly is an ivory disk shaded by sapphires, his testicles are roses dripping myrrh that satiates, his sex is a golden case filled with gems, his hips call to intercourse, everything in him is desire, sweetness to suck”), the intercourse between the two (“when my beloved thrust his sex into me my bowels quivered”), and so on.

Given the fact that many translations are decidedly less explicit than Benigni’s (read, for example, the CEI translation, easily found on the web, where the passage about the penis penetrating the beloved is rendered as “my beloved put his hand in the chink and a quivering shocked me”), we wondered which text Benigni used: the actor, in fact, before declaiming the verses premised that he had searched for a fitting translation with the help of some scholars (Cesare Angelini, Andrea Ponso, Giovanni Garbini, Guido Ceronetti, Piero Capelli, Luca Mazzinghi, and even Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi are mentioned), and that his version “you will not find it in the Bible, it is a version that is earlier and comes before all rabbinic and professional revisions, it is a primitive version of the Canto,” a version that would see a toning down of terms related to eroticism and sex that Benigni would “restore.” The Song of Songs has experienced revisions throughout history, but this is not the only problem, since it is also, having found the version amended by the revisions, a matter of finding appropriate criteria for translation, which we do not delve into as we are not Hebrews: however, we have researched it, and although some parts do not fully reflect it, Benigni’s translation almost totally traces the one that the Hebraist Giovanni Garbini published in his 1992 edition of the Song of Songs (Paideia editions), which was presented as the realization of a research project discussing the “problems inherent in a critical edition of ancient Hebrew texts.” Garbini, however, was well aware of the problems of translation that a text from ancient Hebrew entails, and called the criteria by which the translation was conducted “subjective and debatable as you like” (refer directly to the book for more information).

It is therefore worth taking a closer look at how Garbini deals with some of the most sensual passages among those read by Benigni. The passage in which oral intercourse is alluded to is resolved differently by the Hebrewist, who translates as follows: “I would like to lie in its shadow because its fruit is sweet to my palate,” and the metaphor of the fruit is diluted by the scholar in the terms of a maiden who “knows that she is readarda, and free, like a country flower,” and “expresses her desire for love” with delicacy. Not very dissimilar, however, is the part about the beloved’s body, translated by Garbini as follows: “your breasts are like twin gazelle goats grazing among the roses, like a split pomegranate are your buttocks removed from the cloth,” and then, a few lines below (Benigni skips several): “the smell of your sex is like the smell of incense, a closed garden you are, my sister, bride, a closed garden, a sealed spring, and your hips a garden of pomegranates with exquisite fruit, cypruses with nards.” Benigni sums up here two distinct portions of the Song of Songs, that of the encounter (where the young woman’s buttocks, Garbini writes, are mentioned “twice explicitly at the descriptive level and once allusively as an object of desire. Obviously awkward for a religious reading, the presence of this anatomical part is quite obvious in a text that presents itself as a love poem, let us say erotic; as it is only natural that a lover should praise and desire his woman’s breasts and buttocks and that these should be evoked when the Canticle records the echoes of amplexes.”) and that of the “first night” (words that “the groom addresses to the bride in their first intimate encounter”).

Benigni was then faithful to Garbini both in the description of the intercourse with the verse “when my beloved thrust into her sex my bowels quivered,” identical to that of the Hebrew (the crude language, he explains in his book, comes from the fact that “the author wanted to give this woman the uninhibited language of a prostitute [...] in order to accentuate the gap between the materiality of an act well known to the protagonist and the depth of feeling with which that same act could be accompanied in a particular situation”), and in the description of the man (again, Benigni stuck to Garbini’s translation).

Ultimately, the actor brought to the Sanremo stage a kind of “cut and sew” (due to reasons of television timing) of the Song of Songs, in order to present it as a love poem with strong erotic allusions, as indeed it is.Taking into account the fact that anyway, in the space of half an hour, it is impossible to account for all the problems involved in translating it (also because, Garbini explains in the foreword to his edition, we do not know the exact dating of the work, we do not know in what environment it was produced, some expressions remain obscure): the fact remains that... it is not like everyone to speak explicitly about sex on the Sanremo stage.

Even Benigni provokes Sanremo audience and brings penetration and oral sex to prime time on Rai Uno

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