It's the kind of puzzle I obsess about.
The noose really resonates with Americans, what with the history of lynch mobs and lynching, refreshed by having nooses hung as a reminder of those days in the old and segregationist South. It can only mean one thing, we like to think, when hung that way.
When I think "South" in Italy, I think of Cambria and Sicily. Not rural Georgia and not Oklahoma. The cultural allusion is there, to be sure, rather like we know about "Go Red!" for Manchester United or bowing when you're in Japan or biting something salty after a shot of vodka in Russia. It's known. But it's those other guys' cultural allusion, the other guy's history, not ours.
Moreover it's hung by la Forza nuova, which is a xenophobic nationalist group that speaks of "invasion". Would a xenophobic group really rely on a foreign allusion to make its point? Well, maybe, if it's a well known allusion and a big enough point. The more educated you are the more likely the allusion will stick out, esp. against a Congolese. Are xenophobic nationalists all that educated? Dunno. Enough doubt to chuck my ethnocentric preconception.
Immigrazione. Il cappio dei popoli.
Ad ogni terra il sua popolo, ad ogni popolo la sua terra.
Immigration. The noose of the peoples. To each land its own people, to each people its own land.
Yeah, I like my really literal translation. I can fix it if the assumptions pan out, but it's best not to start with ethnocentrism as a premise. If it meant "the noose of the people," esp. with the existence of different peoples in the next line, it wouldn't say "dei popoli." This noose is immigration, and it belongs to "the peoples." Yes, it may be a bit of a pedantic translation, but I really hate carrying my own ethnic presuppositions into other languages.
The phrase "dei popoli" is really "of the peoples"--made more prominent by the use of "people" in the tagline where it's implied that there are more peoples than just one. So the noose is "of" more than just one people. At least that's likely. If it was something like "the noose of the Italian people for Kyenge" it would be "il cappio di popolo." Singular. Don't know what to make of it.
There's a nice idiom, "noose around your neck" means something like "you're hands are tied." So if immigration is a noose around the peoples' neck, it means to place them in subjugation, to oppress or repress them.
The court's decision a year ago was the "judges' noose" for Berlusconi. It hobbled him, kept him from power and from doing anything. Cappio dei magistrati.
The EU conditions on Greece was a "cappio al colo dei popoli europei"--a noose on the neck of the European peoples.
In fact, the Forza nuova last August had a very similar protest. A married couple was in trouble with the "credit institutions" and, as a result, committed suicide. In response, one night in August last year, sans the rope, posters appeared that said, ""BANKS = The Noose of the Peoples." (Banche = il cappio dei popoli.) With a notice issued to the press that they were in solidarity with the couple. There was nothing racist about this. Heck, sounds like OWS almost. The only difference was that they plastered the walls with the posters. That got them in trouble--defacing property.
So if you want to hang your posters without getting in trouble for defacing property, how do you do it? Hmmm ... Look at the picture. Rope. Noose. And hanging from the noose is your poster, saying "Immigration the noose of the peoples." You get your poster and you nearly pun, while avoiding defacing property. Too clever by half, if you ask me. They stepped in it.
They're anti-immigration, and that's bad enough. I'm not sure that they were thinking Deep South and lynching. I think that this event, however, will make that allusion a bit more salient in Italian as the press try to tar them with meaning only that, though. Americans will immediately assume their usual "American exceptionalist" view and assume everything is culturally American so most American translators won't even question their cultural assumptions.
Thanks. I learned something.
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