ITALIAN POETS AND WRITERS OF THE 20TH CENTURY
HEAD OF PROJECT MARCO SABATINI
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI THE POET
BY GABRIELLA SICA
EDITING BY ALESSANDRO BUONOMO
DIRECTED BY GIANNI BARCELLONI
THE 1920S
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born on 5th March 1922, in Bologna,
his father Alberto's birthplace. His mother Susanna Colussi was Friulan,
from 'Casarsa della Delizia'. His brother Guido was born in 1925.
Poet of Ashes - I'm someone who was born in a city full of arcades, in 1922.
I remember some details of Bologna where, when I was one year old,
I always I wanted to go home by a horse-drawn cab,
and I wouldn't move unless they took me home by cab.
However, I haven't got many other memories.
I don't remember, you know, the buildings, the arcades etc.,
but I started dreaming of them when I was three.
Dreams which... You know, those kinds of dreams
which recur every month, every two months, every few weeks
where I saw Bologna how it really was,
always with its colours, its arcades or its buildings.
And in those dreams I lost my mother
and so I went out looking for her,
and I looked for her exactly along... along the roads which...
Those were terrible dreams, because I had lost my mother and went out looking for her.
How come I've fallen to a world of prose, when you were a little sparrow,
a skylark, and, mute to history, a rose - oh young mother -
your heart was? In this apparent order of the world, am I accepted?
My father was a nationalist, if not a fascist,
and his faith in God was purely formal, he only went to the Church on Sundays,
to the big mass, the mass for the middle-class and the rich.
My mother's faith, on the other hand, was rustic, rural,
like her grandmother's, who was my great-grandmother;
she had a very poetic way to live her faith, never conventional,
never confessional.
When I was seven,
I wrote my first poems using the most precious among the Italian words.
I was a second grade student and my poetry was about
nightingalls and greene instead of nightingales and vegetables.
THE 1930S
The Pasolinis move around for a while, then return to Bologna in 1936.
As a student, Pier Paolo mostly reads Foscolo, Carducci and Ungaretti.
'LICEO CLASSICO' GALVANI: III B
I was a bit inconstant, I mean, I was a straight B student
however I had some inconstancies.
In Greek, for example, sometimes I got Bs, other times I got Cs.
But what I loved the most was Latin instead of Greek
and I'd rather translate it orally than in writing.
We read The Eclogues in the class in a loud voice, in Latin
and we translated them at once. I liked it a lot.
Professor Antonio Rinaldi was a temporary teacher,
and not knowing what to do with us - he was also very young -
he read us a poem by Rimbaud.
At that very moment, l became an antifascist.
HE ATTENDS THE LESSONS OF ROBERTO LONGHI, ART CRITIC
- This is the 'Portico della Morte' - The 'Portico della Morte',
- the marvellous place of my life - That's Nanni road.
Yes. The 'Portico della Morte' reminds me of Dostoevsky’s 'Idiot',
it reminds me of Shakespeare's 'Macbeth',
in short, of all my early readings. When I was fifteen
I started buying my books there. And it was beautiful,
because never again does one enjoy reading, as when they're so young.
You know how pure I was... how much I loved a life which was too beautiful for me...
how determined to defend, and to love I used to be...
You said your father and your mother didn't get along well.
How did that affect you and your brother?
My brother... I don't know, I think he reacted normally,
I mean, as always happens in normal cases:
a father and a mother don't get along, their children accept the situation.
To me, it was a tragedy.
A real tragedy.
You used to be like me: fresh clothes and new shoes. Oh, sweets Sundays!
Your mother changed her face a thousand times with you, a little boy and a young man.
My father... It's hard for me to speak of him, because
he was a very different man from me
and we had a very difficult relationship.
The typical relationship between a father and his son
when such a relationship is dramatic.
Dramatic in the sense that... First of all unconsciously,
due to reasons that Freud would explain better than me,
and also, then, because of an objective incompatibility of character.
My father was a rather old-fashioned man, an Officer,
he was totally opposite to...
he saw things in a completely different way from me, in those days and also today.
Therefore we had different ideologies, characters, etc.
But it's not completely fair of me to say that, now,
because we were different, we really were,
unconsciously, perhaps, I was an enemy to him
and he was an enemy to me, unconsciously,
but then it was him who almost pushed me
to choose the path I chose.
THE 1940S
In 1942 Susanna and her sons moved to Casarsa,
the place where Pier Paolo used to spend his summer holidays.
Pier Paolo Pasolini - Poems to Casarsa
(HE DECLAIMS ONE OF HIS POEMS IN FRIULAN)
# Casarsa, in the light of a never ending summer,
# as white and dry as lime, I see it close to me
# and me as a child, with trousers and T-shirts on my trembling flesh. #
Actually, the first dialect I've ever used was Friulan.
It was Friulan, and I started using it when I was 17 or 18.
I had an extremely literary background
with philological tendencies
and, in particular, it was the background of the Italian 'Ermetismo'.
(IN FRIULAN) # Fountain of water from my country.
# No water is fresher than in my country.
# Fountain of rustic love. #
Evidently, the way I see the things of the world, the objects,
is non-natural, non-laic.
I always see things as if they were almost a miracle.
Everything is a miracle to me. I mean, my view of the world
is always shapeless, let's say, non-confessional,
but somehow religious.
That's why I put that way of seeing things in my works.
# Yet, Church, I had come to you.
# Pascal and the songs of the Greek people
# I held tightly in my hand, as ardent as if
# the rural mystery, quiet
# and deaf, in the summer of '43,
# among the suburbs, the grapevines and the pebbly shore
# of the river Tagliamento, were at the centre
# of the earth and the sky.
# With a torn throat, heart and abdomen,
# in the distant paths of the hollows,
# I spent the hours of the best of human times,
# the whole day of my youth,
# a love, whose sweetness still makes me cry,
# among the shattered books, a few bluish flowers
# and the grass, the candid grass among the sorghums,
# I gave to Christ all my naivety and blood. #
After all, I started writing books as if it were a kind of pleasant
yet, at the same time tragic, exile.
A kind of prison where
I could perform the acts and the operations of my narcissism
surrounded by the mulberries, the vineyards and the green meadows of Friuli
and at the same time
a place where I could brood over the pain for my brother's death
which had occurred the year before, right at the end of the war.
He was a partisan.
- Did the two of you get along well? - Yes.
I mean, we argued a lot, as brothers usually do,
however, basically we loved each other a lot and got along very well.
- He was a partisan, wasn't he? - He was a partisan.
- And you weren't. - Well, I wasn't an armed partisan,
I was, let's say, a partisan by ideology.
I was on his side, we were in touch... we wrote to one another,
I wrote some articles for his partisan newspapers, etc.
He was armed and he fought,
because he was serving in the army in those days, in those years.
I've seen him leave with his handbag, where, inside a book by Montale, he tightly held
among some cloths, his revolver, in the white air and earth.
His shoulders, narrowed by a jacked which had been mine, his young nape...
The first contact took place because of the struggles
between the labourers and their masters,
those whom the labourers used to call their masters,
that is, a kind of surviving feudalism in Friuli.
I was on the labourers' side
and it was thanks to that kind of...
of instinctive choice that I took the path
I'm still following, that is, the path of Marxism,
of total opposition to my society.
I lived a kind of religious experience
in the rural world
where my mother, my grandparents, my ancestors came from.
Religion is
essentially a rural phenomenon
or, if not only rural, it's an archaic phenomenon in the least,
common among peasants and craftsmen.
Now, this archaic world of peasants and craftsmen is going to an end
it's disappearing and being replaced by a new type of culture and civilization,
the capitalistic, middle-class culture.
I'd like to point out that those who are abandoned and lonely in this world
actually, are the peasants.
The middle-class isn't characterized by loneliness,
it's rather characterized by a mass-life.
But of course, I don't mean to say,
I think, that religion is so linked to the rural world
that when the rural world disappears also religion disappears.
Obviously, religion represents an eternal moment,
a human category, the mystery, in short...
The unknown, the anguish, etc.
And therefore, of course religion won't disappear with the rural world.
For me the Gospel is a highly intellectual piece of work
a great piece of work of thought,
cheering, fulfilling, integrating
regenerating, I don't know how to say it...
It has its own schemes... But consolation?
Do we really need consolation?
Consolation is the same as hope.
IN '45, HIS THESIS ON GIOVANNI PASCOLI
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI - ANTHOLOGY AND LYRICS BY PASCOLI
PASOLINI EDUCATOR AND TEACHER AT CASARSA
The Ascension, the most sublime moment of the whole evangelical history,
the moment when Christ leaves us on our own, looking for him.
That statement by St. Paul... here it is:
# God chose what is foolish in the world,
# to shame the wise,
# and God chose what is weak in the world,
# to shame the strong.
# And He chose what is low and despised in the world,
# even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. #
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI - A COUNTRY OF STORMS AND PRIMULAE
I kept writing poetry till I was 27 or 28,
right before going to Rome.
THE 1950S
Pasolini discovers the suburban Rome and the humble and ancient Italy of the Apennines.
Almost all the neorealist works
are based on the idea that the future will be better.
It will be better because
a revolution - of what kind, nobody knows - will take place.
It is the rediscovery, as I said at the beginning, of Italy.
It's the first time that Italy looks at itself
without rhetorical veils, without falsehood, etc. etc.,
with the pleasure of rediscovering itself
and with the pleasure, also, of reporting its own defects.
And that was a common feature.
# Sudden, 1952 passes by Italy.
# Only the people has a true feeling of it,
# never removed from time, modernity doesn't dazzle it,
# although more and more modern is the people,
# spread in the suburbs, in the neighbourhoods, with a newer and newer youth
# new to the old song
# repeating, naive, what it used to be.
# The first sweet sun of the year scorches
# the arcades of the towns of province,
# the villages which still taste of snow,
# the Apennine herds:
# in the showcases of the chief towns,
# the new colours of paintings, the new clothes, as in clear fires
# say how new today the world is, what different joys it gives out... #
Dialect was a common problem in Neoralism.
What language did De Sica's characters speak
in 'Bicycle Thieves'? They spoke the Roman dialect.
Therefore, the main problem of Neoralism was a linguistic problem.
And that linguistic problem, above all regarded the assumption of dialect
and how to consider dialect on the same level as the national language.
We first met about 12 years ago,
while bathing in the rivers, here in Rome
in a suburb of 'Pietra Alata'.
But facing an age which is new, at least as regards the evolution of Italian
this age when young people from the Roman suburbs speak, yes, the dialect,
but at the same time, they also speak a slang which is typical of Rome only,
but when they use the slang which is typical of the Roman suburbs,
they also use some words in the slang let's say, of Nice or Marseille,
or even, sometimes, of Northern Africa.
But while using these linguistic particularisms,
at the same time they use expressions, even ironically, but they use them all the same,
they heard on the radio, on those media which help the spreading
of a particular, not common, language.
And sometimes, even fragments of the literary language,
and no one knows where they heard them.
That is, this living mixture of languages
is what has struck me, and is what I try to put in my novels.
# Among the dark orchards, in the lazy sun
# Adalbertos komis kurtis!, the little boys of Ivrea shout,
# and in the Tuscan valleys, among the screams of the swallows:
# Hor atorno fratt Helya!
# The clergy puts, rough, the holy violence on the rough hearts
# and enslaves them to a fierce infancy in the provincial feud,
# the God-imposed empire: and the people sing.
# A great concert of chisels on the Capitol, on the New Apennine,
# on the Villages whitened by the Alps,
# the towering travertine sounds,
# in the new space where Man is free:
# and the labourer 'Dov andastù jersera…'
# repeats, with his soul spread in its Gothic world.
# The slave world rests among the people. And the people sing. #
This road we're going along,
with this dismantled and ancient pavement,
is worth nothing, is worth almost nothing, it's a humble thing,
it can't compare to certain works of art,
marvellous, of the Italian tradition.
Yet I believe this road which is worth nothing, so humble,
is to be defended with the same strength, with the same good will,
with the same rigour as the works of art by a great author are to be defended.
…At the same time,
the patrimony of the anonymous popular poetry has to be defended
as the auteur poetry,
as the poetry by Petrarca, or by Dante, etc. etc.
I'd say that the renewal started with the Resistance,
that is with the discovery of the real Italy,
let's say even with Neoralism.
However, according to me, the best products came later,
and perhaps, though I say it myself, they came
when the 'Officina' magazine was founded.
We tried to reduce poetry to prose,
that is, to fill poetry with new contents which wouldn't resemble either poetry
or a generic and superficial social protest,
but a deeper ideology, total, complete, a true vision of the world.
ASHES OF GRAMSCI It is not typical of May, this impure air
which the dark, foreign garden makes even darker, or dazzles
with blind clearness... this sky of drivels,
like a veil on the yellowish attics, in immense semicircles.
As for the rhyme, the Latin didn't know the rhyme.
We, instead, the Neo-Latin,
we can no longer do without rhymes,
when it comes to poetry.
# Child of the people, you who sing
# your new song here in Rebibbia, on the miserable shore of the Aniene,
# singing, you're celebrating, it is true,
# the ancient, the festive lightness of the simple.
# But at the same time, you're raising the hard certainty
# of the imminent revolt, among the unaware hovels and skyscrapers,
# an happy seed in the heart of the sad, popular world.
# In your unawareness, it's awareness that history wants from you,
# that history whose Man has got nothing but the violence of his memories,
# not a free memory...
# And by now, maybe, he has no other choice,
# than give the strength of your happiness to his longing for justice,
# and in the light of a beginning age
# the light of those who are what they don't know. #
The people I love the most,
are the people who haven't even finished primary school,
that is absolutely simple people...
But don't see this statement of mine as rhetorical.
I'm not saying it for rhetoric's sake. I'm saying it because
the lower middle-class culture, at least inside my nation,
but perhaps also in France and in Spain
is something which always leads to corruption, to impurity.
While an illiterate, someone who has only attended primary school,
has always got that certain grace which then goes lost in culture.
And by the way, they can have a high degree of culture all the same.
# The land we work is quite near:
# a few herds of beefs,
# a bunch of houses among tomato plants,
# ivy and poor dimes.
# Every now and then a brook, on the ground level,
# appears among the branches of the elms loaded with grapevines,
# as black as a drainage.
# Inside, on the train which runs half empty,
# the cold autumn veils the sad wood, the wet rags:
# and if outside is heaven, inside here is the realm of the dead,
# who went from a kind of pain to another - without even suspecting it. #
THE 1960S
These are still the years of the poems, but, above all, they're the years of the cinema,
which Pasolini considers the Bible of the poor. These are also the years of the theatre.
WORKS OF PIER PAOLO PASOLINI - PASSION AND IDEOLOGY
In the meantime I switched to films. I partially abandoned literature
or at least I abandoned the novel,
not the poetry,
to devote myself almost exclusively to the cinema.
It happened in the 60s
and not without reason, because the 60s were the years
of a deep crisis the Italian culture went through.
Italy was going from a phase of paleocapitalism
to a form of neocapitalism.
# Sometimes, inside us there is something
# (you know it well, because it's poetry)
# something obscure which makes our lives bright:
# an internal weeping,
# a sort of homecoming, swollen with dry, pure tears. #
I gave to this switching of mine
from literature to cinema, various explanations.
The first was the most obvious, that is
I thought I wanted to change technique.
All my literary production is characterized by the fact
that I've often changed literary techniques
and I thought cinema were a new technique.
Then I understood that wasn't true,
because cinema isn't a literary technique, but a different language,
it's a system of signs which is valid for all the possible nations of the world.
Now, what is the main characteristic of this system of signs?
That it represents reality
not through such symbols as the words,
but through reality itself.
FROM 'ACCATTONE'
Therefore it's not as if I've changed the literary technique:
actually I have changed... The language.
And, perhaps,
that implies a kind of protest of mine
against the Italian literary language,
even against the Italian language tout court
and perhaps even against the society
which speaks that language.
In a certain sense, I wanted to switch to cinema in order to change nationality.
But you don't know what an average man is...
He's a monster,
a dangerous criminal.
Conformist,
colonialist,
racist, slave trader...
A mediocrity!
Here we are half way to the Mount of the Beatitudes.
Perhaps, the crowd who was to listen to Christ was gathered here.
And up there,
where that little church with a black dome is, perhaps Christ
spoke to the crowd.
What impressed me the most
was the extreme smallness, the poverty, the humility of this place.
And... to me who had thought of this place,
of this Mount of the Beatitudes,
as one of the most fabulous settings for my film,
among all the spectacular places in Palestine,
I felt an unbelievable impression
of smallness, I repeat, of humility. A great lesson of humility.
Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth:
I came not to send peace, but the sword.
For I came to set a man at variance against his father,
and the daughter against her mother,
and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
And a man's enemies shall be they of his own household.
He that loveth father or mother more than me,
and he that loveth son or daughter more than me,
is not worthy of me.
He that findeth his life, shall lose it:
and he that shall lose his life for me
shall find it.
This was more or less the view of Jerusalem
from another perspective, yet similar enough
to the view which Christ and the Devil saw, perhaps,
from the pinnacle of the Temple.
And this is the Garden of Gethsemane.
Here are the olive trees, full of agonizing simplicity.
And this one here is a cave,
which actually looks like a modern cave,
but substantially
it has to be very similar to the one where Christ was born.
Of course, now it's inhabited
by some poor Arabs.
Poor beggars, longing for the miracle of a coin.
We're approaching Nazareth,
leaving Galilea to the north.
Wait, I think I remember a few lines I wrote
during that unforgettable journey:
# Perhaps there was something here, but you,
# disappearing, made that little thing
# which your world down here was, disappear
# leaving it as if burnt by your fire. #
Looks at those little boys, look at them well.
Which ones do you like better? These little boys here or
the little boys you would call 'spoilt boys'?
I like these ones better.
Unfortunately I was one of the 'spoilt boys'.
My father was an Officer, my mother a teacher...
Then I went, let's say, to Rome
and I saw a world I had never seen before,
that is the subproletarian world.
- Do you know what it is? - No.
- Don't you know what it is? - No.
It's the world of the people who work
where there are no industries.
In Milan, workers are proletarians.
In Rome, where there are no industries, in Naples, in Sicily...
the subproletarians live, instead
because there are no factories, no industries.
And there, a characteristic, particular, special kind of world is,
the Third World. Do you know what the Third World is?
You don't? Tell the truth. What is it?
You ask so many questions!
It is the pre-industrial world, like Asia, Africa,
South America. Well, the Third World starts from here,
see, where those little boys are. From there towards Africa, towards Asia
is the Third World.
And so I, who was a spoilt boy,
when I got to Rome, I was
surprised, marvelled, inspired, by the presence, by the apparition
of this world I didn't know.
And then I took an interest in it, like in every other really impressive thing.
Poets write of that. Poets write of the things which impress them.
# Another stroke of the thumb to beauty,
# it shapes other cheekbones, it can be felt in other foreheads, it draws other napes.
# But Beauty is Beauty, and it doesn't lie:
# here it's reborn among curly and flat-nosed souls,
# among skins as sweet as silk,
# and wonderfully grown limbs. #
Actually Italian was only a literary language
for many centuries, that is until 10 or 20 years ago.
While French, for example became a national language
for political, bureaucratic, state reasons,
Italian became a national language, understood all over Italy,
I repeat, for purely literary reasons.
And this literary prestige started in Florence,
within a historical situation which was very different from the present.
The three great fathers of Italian that is Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio
were imposed to the rest of the Italian population
for reasons of literary prestige.
That is, nowadays Italian
is strictly unitary from a linguistic point of view,
that is, a paper in Milan is written more or less in the same Italian as a paper in Palermo,
but when the Italians open their mouths and speak,
they speak a particular kind of Italian each, which is regional, urban, individual.
But the linguistic centre of Italian, however,
it has to be said, is no longer literary and is no longer Florence,
but it's technical, or technological, and it's Milan.
I mean, Italian is unified, according to me,
above all by a technical kind of language. Let's take the word 'refrigerator',
it's a language that all Italians use:
from the housewives in Milan to the housewives in Palermo, they all use the word 'refrigerator'.
That is, technical words are a kind of cement, I don't know how to say it,
of patina, that is levelling and unifying Italian.
# And, dear Attilio, the industrial pact...
# nothing can resist it.
# Don't you see how weak it sounds,
# the defence of the laic or communist friends,
# against the vilest account.
# Intelligence will never count, never
# in the judgment of this public opinion,
# not even on the blood of the lager you will get
# from one of the millions of souls of our nation
# a clean judgment, entirely indignant.
# Every idea is unreal, unreal every passion
# of this people, disassembled for centuries,
# whose sweet wisdom
# helps them live, and has never set them free. #
I want to represent the myth of Oedipus,
but a myth which is really a myth,
archaic, distant in time, almost wild.
In fact the customs resemble,
more than those in ancient or Mycenaean Greece, they resemble
the customs of the Sumerians or of the Aztecs,
or even of the savages of Equatorial Africa.
And why is that? Why, I mean, am I setting in more distant times the myth of Oedipus
and with a sense of humour,
which probably the public will notice
only in a vague and inaccurate way?
Because the myth of Oedipus is a myth I'm interested in,
violently, but it is a myth away from my life,
I look at it in detachment.
And then, of course, humour and myth
are two ways of detaching ourselves from reality.
I'm no longer involved in the oedipal myth,
it is away from me.
# To show my face, my skinniness,
# to raise my lonely, childish, voice
# makes no more sense.
# Cowardice, accustomed to watch others die in the most atrocious ways
# with the strangest indifference.
# I die,
# and that also hurts me. #
The figure of speech which I use the most in my works
is what Fortini calls 'syneciosis'
or what could be called 'oxymoron', that is
to define things by opposition:
'blonde and dark-haired girl', for example.
Now, since oxymoron is a central figure of speech in my works,
this defining by opposition,
this incurable contrast,
probably gives my works
the impossibility to be consumed in a normal way.
# I'm asked for a courage which totally escapes reality,
# which belongs to a different story.
# They want me to be a shabby-furred lion who roars
# against the servants or against the abstractions of the exploiting power
# Ah, but my passions aren't like sports,
# my naive anger is not a competitor. #
I believe in progress. I don't believe in development,
and above all in this kind of development.
Because... And it's that kind of development, at least, which gives my cheerful nature
a tremendously sad, almost tragic side.
Because... Exactly because I'm neither a sociologist, nor a professor.
I do something very strange,
I'm a writer.
I'm directly interested in historical changes.
Today, that is April 1967, things are very different.
Civilization is no longer preindustrial,
rural, religious etc. etc.,
but it is an industrial civilization, with a mass culture,
different types of relationships from those due to nature etc. etc.
Therefore, at this point one also wonders
if they can keep writing poetry.
As regards me, I haven't written any poetry for two or three years.
Oh yes, I could read a couple of lines where I express
a kind of impossibility to make a true speech on reality
in that the relationship with reality is suffocated
by impossibility, which a poet can never see, or win.
Here are the lines:
# This only can shout
# a prophet who doesn't have the strength to go out of a fly,
# whose strength lies in his degrading diversity.
# Only saying, or shouting, this
# my fate can be free
# and start my speech on reality. #
We understand the agricultural metaphors
of the Gospel
but talk to someone who was born in these years, and educated in these years,
about bushels, fallows, scales...
In short, part of the agricultural terminology
is for them incomprehensible, you need to translate it for them.
Some of them don't even understand the meaning of certain words.
What I mean to say is that the Gospel and Christ
are expressions of an archaic, rural world
which has survived for two thousand years
because up to 20 years ago, after all the world was more or less still the same.
There was still the passing of seasons,
the farmers tilled the soil,
they waited for spring to return and there was the eternal return,
the problem of Good and Evil etc. etc.
But in the last 5 or 6 years in Italy,
in other countries even earlier,
all that has been overturned.
Production is no longer a cyclical fact of the soil.
Production is a cyclical fact
of a second nature, that is the nature of industry.
# And 'alba pratalia araba',
# 'Alba pratalia, alba pratalia',
# The white meadows.
# So I woke up in Italy one morning
# with this idea of the tired millennia fixed in my brain.
# The white meadows of the Town Hall
# of the Diocese,
# of the Tuscan or Cisalpine desks
# those evoked by the Latin of the hard, sweet, Salimbene.
# The world that fits in a text,
# countries encircled by a town wall,
# river veins that are no more than ditches
# reflecting the supreme acacia flowers,
# the ruins
# worn out by rustic rains and liturgical suns
# in whose light Europe looks so small,
# only rests on the reason of men
# and lives a life of its own,
# made of habit, and lean classicism.
# One cannot escape, I know,
# blackness lies on those white meadows,
# among the sheaves of the sharecroppers,
# in the loneliness of the little squares
# in the patrimony of the great styles, throughout our history. #
For some time, as a boy,
I believed in the revolution, as the young people believe in it nowadays
Now I'm starting to believe in it a little less,
in this palingenesis, so to speak. I'm going through this apocalyptic moment,
I know I see a painful world in front of me, and things are getting worse.
# You have faces of spoilt boys, blood will tell out.
# You have the same bad look in your eyes.
# When yesterday, in 'Valle Giulia', you fought against the police,
# I was on the side of the police,
# because the policemen are poor men's children,
# they come from subplaces, rural or urban, that is,
# they are teens like you, dear all
# intoxicated by the victory against the young policemen
# who are forced to be servants. #
An author, when he's disinterested and passionate
is always a living protest.
As soon as he opens his mouth
he protests against conformism,
against what's official, against the government, against the nation,
in short, against everything which is accepted by the majority.
Therefore, as soon as he opens his mouth an artist gets committed,
because when he opens his mouth he is always against the tide.
There's an evident correlation between
the project of Theorem and my verse.
The middle-class characters of Theorem, however
live to the extreme consequences
the situations which I live on a static level and embryo stage,
as this poem shows, for example:
# I am equal to what I am in practice
# if I was made to stay at the feet of the world,
# not here among the masters, in a roundabout
# where Corfu and the land of Mazzoni
# down there, spotted with clouds,
# and Rome, with the Tevere like one out of a thousand Jordan rivers, get mixed up.
# I had to return poor, unknown, boy.
# In fact, I don't know how to be father, a master.
# My influence, my fame, is ridiculous.
# Father, what's happening to me... #
THE 1970S
These are the years of the 'pirate' and 'Lutheran' Pasolini,
heretical protagonist and interpreter of his time
in the newspapers
Alone, or almost, on the old shore among the ruins of ancient civilizations
Ravenna, Ostia or Bombay - it's the same - with scraping Gods,
old problems - like the class struggle - which get dissolved...
Like a partisan who died before May in 1945,
I'll start to decompose little by little,
in the agonizing light of that sea, a poet and a forgotten citizen.
Success is always a bad thing for a man.
At first it can be exciting,
it can satisfy certain vanities,
but actually, very soon,
it clearly becomes a bad thing for a man, success.
After all, the destruction of the ancient world,
or rather of the real world, is taking place everywhere.
Unreality spreads
through the property speculation of neocapitalism.
Instead of beautiful and human Italy, though poor,
there is by now something indefinable, which doesn't even deserve to be called 'ugly'.
The regime is a democratic regime, etc. etc.
However the acculturation, the homologation
that Fascism couldn't achieve at all,
today's power, that is the power of the consumer society, instead,
can achieve it perfectly.
destroying the various particular realities,
subtracting reality
to the various, to the various ways of being men
which are typical of Italy,
which Italy had produced through history in a very diversified way.
You said that growing old, one becomes happy.
Why?
Because the future is shorter, and therefore there's less hope,
and that's a great relief.
CHIA, THE LAST SHELTER
Song of a dead man. The sun gilds Chia with its pink rays
and the Apennines taste like warm sand. I'm a dead man from here
who's coming back today, 5th March 1974,
on a joyful day.
I have got no hope,
therefore I don't even imagine a future world.
The word 'hope' is definitely missing in my dictionary.
Therefore, I keep fighting in order to live a partial truth
moment by moment, hour by hour, month by month,
but I don't make long-term plans because I don't believe them anymore.
On 2nd November 1975 Pasolini was killed
by a male prostitute on the littoral of Ostia
In name the of the simple men
whom poverty has kept pure.
In the name of the grace of the future centuries
In the name of the scandalous
revolutionary strength of the past.
WE WISH TO THANK GRAZIELLA CHIARCOSSI, DINO PEDERIALI
AND GIUSEPPE ZIGAINA FOR THEIR KIND COLLABORATION
MUSIC BY JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
CONCERT BWV 1057, TRIO SONATA BWV 1039, CANTATA BWV 106
# Subtitles: lyliakar #