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Poem for Galileo

by Antnio Gedeo

An attempt to translate from the original in Portuguese by Antnio Dinis Lopes.

Dedicated to those who trust their own minds in absolute and to those who, influenced by many manifestations of what C.P.Snow identified as traditional culture, cannot make the difference in between bad science and science, forgetting that any human activity is prone to be qualified as "bad". (A truly human adjective? Language is human.)

The context of the following text is a hard right dictatorship backed up by thechurch.

Interestingly enough, many of Galileo's theories are now proven to be incorrect.Unfortunately, yet naturally, due to his natural life-span, and ours, Galileo didn't live enough to witness his own errors. Errors which nevertheless gave wayto (more errors?) theories such as Einstein's relativity. To have a scientific mind seems therefore to be open continuously to reformulate our own opinions.

Let the text begin.

I am looking at your portrait, my old man of Pisa,

that portrait of yours who everybody knows,

in which your fair head awakens and blooms

over a modest piece of cloth.

That portrait in the Gallery of the Offices of your old Florence.

(No, no, Galileo! I did not say Holly Office.

I said Gallery of the Offices.)

That portrait in the Gallery of the Offices in ornate Florence.

Do you remember? The Vecchio bridge, the Loggia, the Piazza della Signoria

I know I know

The sweet banks of the Arno river at the lacklustre hours of melancholy.

How I long for those, Galileo Galilei!

Look. Do you know? There in Florence

a right hand finger of yours is kept in a reliquary.

Word of honour that it is!

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How the world goes around!

Perhaps there are even people thinking

that you have entered the calendar.

I would like to thank you, Galileo,

for the brightness of the things you gave me.

I,

and how many millions of men like me

who were enlightened by you,

I was going to swear what a nonsense, Galileo!

and I would swear betting my own head

without the least hesitation

that the bodies fall the faster

the heavier they are.

For is it not evident, Galileo?

Who believes that a bolder falls

as fast as a shirt button or as a beach pebble?

Such was the intelligence that God gave us.

I was now recalling, Galileo,

that scene in which you were sitting on a stool

and had before you

a bar of learned men, rigid, wearing toga and hood,

looking at you severely.

They were all preaching you,

that how it was possible that a man of your age

and of your condition

had become a menace

to Humanity

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and to Civilization.

You, embarrassed and culpable, bit your lips in silence,

and examined, full of piety,

the impenetrable faces of that line of wise men.

Your eyes used to the observation of satellites and of stars

descended from their heights

and landed, like bewildered birds I almost can seem them

on the pregnant faces of those most reverend creatures.

And you kept saying yes to all, yes sir, that all was exactly

as their highnesses desired,

and you would say that the Sun was squared and the Moon pentagonal

and that the stars danced and sang

hymns to the universal harmony at midnight.

And you avowed that you would never repeat,

not even to yourself, in the own intimacy of your thoughts, free and calm,

those abominable heresies

you taught and described

for the eternal damnation of your soul.

O Galileo!

Your learned judges, great lords of this tiny world, hardly know

that as they were, stiff on their armchairs,

were running and rolling through space

at thirty kilometres per second.

You were the one who knew, Galileo Galilei.

Hence your merciful eyes,

hence your heart filled with compassion,

compassion for those men who do not need to suffer, fortunate men

whom God freed from searching for the truth.

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Hence, stoically, meekly,

your resistance to all tortures,

to all anguishes, to all hindrances,

while they, from the height of their inaccessible heights,

came falling down,

falling,

falling,

falling,

always falling,

and always,

uninterruptedly,

in the direct reason of the square of the times.