I felt like translating this partly because it’s just sweet and heartwarming – and considering it’s from 2009 I thought the explicitly (if slightly simplistically) pro-trans element was pretty cool. But also because after nearly two years of begging my former day job employers to internalise the fact that “Does not have a verbatim equivalent =/= untranslatable” I felt like putting my money where my mouth is.
This is one of those relatively rare situations where the Italian way of expressing a thought is much shorter than the English one: “Here’s to those who” - “A chi” – lit. “to who.” If translated literally, not only is the English longer but the impersonality tends to make the latter part of the sentence sound weird and awkward – e.g “to those who as soon as they stop want to set out again” makes sense, but you wouldn’t SAY it, would you? So I went with this approach, even though the original doesn’t actually use any form of the word “you”, and even though it means only the chorus fully expresses “a chi”. I think it captures the spirit better - if you recognise yourself in any of the descriptions, the song’s for you.
