When, in the spring of 2004, I visited Pasolini’s grave in Casarsa, he whispered a few lines of verse to me. Although I poorly transcribed them as I cannot write in Italian and my ear filtered the words through the abruzzese dialect, my first language, I have corrected the errors in spelling and grammar with the help of Anna Foschi. Clearly no miracle occurred; clearly what I heard was totally imagined, but imagined through poetry. That is the way the muse spoke to me on that day.
Home again in Canada I woke up one morning dreaming of the pink house.
The pink house was his mother’s ancestral home; it was bombed out during the war and had to be rebuilt; he never lived in it again. But the region, Friuli, its dialect, the war, his homosexuality, formed the historical and personal vortex that shaped his identity, his political ideas, and all his creative work. I imagined I would write a novel based on what I had read in biographies and histories about Pasolini and those war years. But when I read the original source about his life, his own memoir of the period, what emerged was not a war story, but a coming-of-age one, a kind of gay Sorrows of Young Werther. It really surprised me how little the war figures in the narrative; the big war, World War II, is marginalized by the virtual war inside him between the moral imperatives established by church, community, and family and his sexual desire for boys. The coming-of-age story is the coming into difference. The bombings formed a mere backdrop to his tortured struggles with his sexuality.
The poems in this section, which make up the core of this book, are based on that memoir of his youth and the war years, Atti impuri, published in 1982, nearly a decade after his death. It was published in conjunction with the autobiographical novel or novella based on this period of his life, Amado Mio, whose protagonist is an allegorically named self, Desiderio. The same material, the same experience, but through thinly disguised third person narration.
My poems, this book, form a kind of novel in verse based on the experiences, feelings, Pasolini describes in the memoir. I do not judge him, he judges himself; when he is not rationalizing he sees his desire as sin, himself as the devil. When I first approached this material, I imagined writing the story perhaps from the point of view of his female friend at the time, Pina. But the sense of time I kept encountering in the memoir was that of poetry, not prose. The narrative seemed concentrated in the sense of the moment, circling around and around a few spots in time without the sense of progression characteristic of the novel; a lyrical sense of time: compressed, recurring, suspended, essential, eternity in an hour.
The book that launched Pier Paolo Pasolini as a writer was La Meglio Gioventú. The Flower of Youth, usually translated as The Best of Youth, was a volume of verse written in dialect and self-published in 1942. That he should choose to begin his writing career by publishing poetry, in a time of war, in a minority tongue, poems about peasant life, might seem an anomalous beginning for such a polemical writer, a writer who spent his entire life at the centre of political thought and culture in Italy. That he should continue to work on these poems throughout his life speaks to their centrality to his poetic project. Published in 1975, the year of his death, La Nuova Gioventú, The New Youth, is comprised of those original poems written in dialect during the war and the many permutations on them that he called the second form of La Meglio Gioventú.
These were the first and last poems that Pasolini wrote, pastoral poems written in a time of war, when his region was occupied by the Germans, and Mussolini, then a puppet leader, had been set up in Salò. His younger brother, Guido, took up arms and fought with the resistance while Pier Paolo took up the pen; along with his mother he set up a school to teach boys too young to go to war and began to write poetry in dialect. To write poems in dialect in a country where the ministry of culture outlawed the use of dialects was a form of resistance in itself.
But what can music do
Against the weapons of soldiers?
In Virgil’s Eclogues the iron age of war intrudes on the idyllic life of singing shepherds; that is the convention of the pastoral. This seemed an apt epigraph. My translation of the lines is assisted by David Ferry’s.
Although I have only encountered references to Pasolini having read Wordsworth, Blake seemed to me the poet with the closest parallel to what he does with his different versions of the Casarsa poems. However, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are separated by one year while Pasolini’s encompass the whole of his writing life. I translated La Meglio Gioventú for myself as a preparation to write this book, translation being, I believe, the closest a writer can come to another writer, but only my translations of his “The Day of My Death” are included here. I close my book with that poem in which Pasolini envisions his death, the first version written during the war years, the permutation on it published in the year of his death; my permutation on them is based on the reported circumstances of his actual death in Rome on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1975.