Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ninetto Davoli Translation from Italian & Commentary by Peter Valente [These poems are part of a sequence whose central focus is Pasolini’s love for the young actor Ninetto Davoli.
At what point was Pasolini, exactly, remembered? Pier Paolo Pasolini flirted with immortality via his untimely death in 1975, at the age of 53, when he was run over several times in his own car. As to who was driving the car, history suggests it to be either Giuseppe Pelosi, a 17 year old male prostitute (and we wonder how he met this prostitute), or, more likely, as Pelosi’s own statement suggests, three people with southern Italian accents, who attempted to insult Pasolini by calling him a “dirty communist.” Can one be insulted whilst dying for something they believe? And can such an autonomist Marxist be rediscovered by today’s ecstatic media environments?
The short answer to this second question: well, it’s happening. If always a hero of the underground, there’s no doubt that Pasolini is going through a moment this year, with University of Chicago Press publishing a book of his selected poetry in August. In July, Verso will also be publishing his screenplay St. Paul in English for the first time, accompanied by a foreword by Alan Badiou and there has been a steady acknowledgement of excitement across a number of cultural protagonists. But whatever, it’s easy to become a celebrity when you’re dead.
![Paolo Paolo](http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fc/b6/69/fcb669a40801b4a6b60106c21afca6a9.jpg)
But what of the poems? Pasolini wrote in Friulan, a Romance language spoken by just 300,000 speakers in the Friuli area of northern Italy and the dialect of Pasolini’s mother’s home region. His use of it is an attempt by the poet to return his work to the Romantic, peasant history that it came from; a “radical solution to the problem of decadence,” as one commentator notes. Their imagery is of the earth, and of a youth that is borne of the earth. Children are mothers, are olive branches. “The sad voice / of my sigh / forever dies / across the darkened fields.” They project a landscape where God is the (dialectic) opposite to Capital.
Spirit and the world, in these poems, is one. This embrace of the soul and the world is, perhaps, a radical materialism. The question of whether these are worlds to be lived in, or just relics, is the question Pasolini leaves us.
Indeed do we still have spirits, souls, worlds, homes, natures, today? Or are they, too, with “Our father far away / in heaven’s womb.” By. Olive Sunday SON Mother, I watch in dismay as the wind dies darkly past my twenty years of Christian life.
Evenings, wet trees, children shouting far away, this, Mother, is the village I’ve left behind. MOTHER (in Heaven) Why has my womb borne not a tear to weep for my blessed son? I should be your mother, star-bright tear, and at the vespers’ gentle sound, I should rock you in my lap. He who weeps for you is always alone in the village, dark amid the soft green fields, the fires and the ancient walls! CHILD-MOTHER (carrying olive branches round the village) Easter’s midday chimes are ringing! The leaves are bright, the sky is fresh. Want some olive branches?
Easter evening’s bright, the sky is fresh. Introduction Harry Burke Poems Pier Paolo Pasolini Drawings Milano Chow Excerpted from The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli, with a Foreword by James Ivory. English poems © by 2014 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Italian poems © The Estate of Pier Paolo Pasolini. All rights reserved. By arrangement with Garzanti Libri/Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol, Milano.
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