Stories from the City of God Read online

  PRAISE FOR STORIES FROM THE CITY OF GOD

  “The essays or ‘chronicles’ in this collection are slight but marvelous…powerful…moving…In Marina Harss’s lively translation, these ‘chronicles’ are more concrete and colorful than the furious polemics of Pasolini’s last years…to which they make an excellent prelude.”

  —The Nation

  “What’s ugly and squalid shows its beauty to Pasolini…The short pieces succeed as portraits of people and place during a certain time…The author opens up a window on hidden Rome, a part of the city that continues to exist in certain dodgy corners and presumably always will.”

  —Bloomsbury Review

  “The pieces in this collection suggest watercolor portraits of Rome and Romans as they were when Pasolini first moved to the city in 1949…a gorgeous account of Pasolini’s itinerary, migrating between zones of cultural privilege and ‘the lower depths.’…[T]hese occasional writings—some outtakes from his novels, others written for newspapers and journals—are suffused with an ecstatic love for the wiles and mannerisms, urban patois, and unconscious grace of the underclass. Pasolini’s lightness of touch and breadth of observation combine in a gestural prose with a revolutionary purpose.”

  —Film Comment

  Ebook ISBN 9781590519981

  A paperback edition of this book was published in Italian under the title Storie della città di Dio; Racconti e cronache romane (1950–1966).

  Copyright © Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1995

  Translation copyright © 2003 Marina Harss

  Production Editor: Robert D. Hack

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1922–1975.

  [Storie della città di Dio. English]

  Stories from the city of God : sketches and chronicles of Rome, 1950–1966 / Pier Paolo Pasolini; translated by Marina Harss.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-59051-048-8

  I. Harss, Marina. II. Title.

  PQ4835.A48S7613 2003

  853’.914—dc21

  2003040462

  v5.4

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise For Stories from the City of God

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  Editor’s Note

  PART I: SKETCHES OF ROME

  Trastevere Boy (1950)

  The Drink (1950)

  The Dogfish (1950)

  The Passion of the Lupin-Seller (1950)

  Delirious Rome (1951)

  Sunday at the Collina Volpi (1951)

  Chestnuts and Chrysanthemums (1951)

  36 From Monteverde Down to the Altieri Theater (1950)

  Santino on the Beach at Ostia (1951)

  Terracina (1950–1951)

  Riccetto Remembers (1955)

  Roman Deaths (1959)

  Women of Rome (1960)

  (Ri)cotta Cheese (1964)

  PART II: CHRONICLES OF ROME

  The Disappearing Wild Game of the Roman Countryside (1950)

  The End of a Post-War Era (1950)

  Rome and Giuseppe Belli (1952)

  Roguish Rome (1957)

  The Corpse’ll Stink All Week Long! (1957)

  Roman Slang (1957)

  I’d Never Seen Rome Like This (1954–1955)

  The City’s True Face (1957)

  The Concentration Camps (1958)

  The Shantytowns of Rome (1958)

  The Periphery of My Mind (1958)

  The Projects (1961)

  A Day in the Life (1961)

  The Other Face of Rome (1966)

  INTERVIEW:

  How Beautiful You Were, Rome (1973)

  Table of Dates

  Filmography

  Bibliography

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  “In the winter of 1949, I fled with my mother to Rome, as in a novel.” This is how Pier Paolo Pasolini later described, with his characteristic sense of drama, his move to Rome at the age of twenty-seven. With his escape from northern Italy, his Roman adventure began. A sexual scandal had destroyed his Friulian idyll, the first of a long series that would plague his life. He had spent his entire youth in the northern countryside, shielded to a great degree from the violence and repression of the Fascist regime, the war, and the subsequent destruction and poverty Italy experienced in this period. Yet once in Rome, he found himself poor and alone save for his beloved mother, in a city ravaged by war and then undergoing a period of intense change. He found his new home among the underprivileged, peripheral, marginalized classes who lived in the new projects built on the outskirts of the city, and in its ancient, rough, lower-class neighborhoods. He was witness to the beginning of a process that would transfigure the city into a modern, gentrified capital, a process that he feared and loathed and that finally drove him away. In his interview with Luigi Sommaruga that is included in this volume, Pasolini expresses his break with Rome in terms reminiscent of the end of a love affair: “It has changed, and I don’t want to understand it any more.”

  In this volume, we detect an emotional cycle that begins with the shock of freedom and love that Pasolini felt when he first arrived in Rome and concludes with the disgust, sadness, and alienation that he felt toward the end of his life. At his first encounter with the city, he was deeply moved and fascinated by the contrasts and layers that were, and to a degree still are, its most defining feature. In “Roguish Rome,” he writes, “Its beauty is a natural mystery. We can attribute it to the stratification of styles which at every angle offers up a new, surprising cross section; the excessive beauty produced by this superposition of styles is a veritable shock to the system. But would Rome be the most beautiful city in the world if it were not, at the same time, the ugliest?” When he speaks of beauty and ugliness, he is not simply evaluating architectural styles. What matters to Pasolini, the only thing that truly matters, are the people living in its various neighborhoods, slums, projects, and shantytowns. The beauty is to be found in the Roman ragazzo as well as in the sweep of the Tiber, and the ugliness lies in the torpor of the slums and the squalid lives of the people who live in them, and even more in the greed, oppression, and American-style commercialism that he sees taking over his beloved city and the whole country. For him, the greatest ugliness of all lies in the hypocrisy of power in all its forms, domestic and political. Thus a sense of place defines and completely infuses the mentality and attitudes of the people whose lives he witnesses, and both tentatively and passionately participates in.

  Pasolini’s vision of the city, then, is his portrait of its poor and marginalized, among whom he lived. They are people like Morbidone in “The Passion of the Lupin-Seller,” or the young man selling chestnuts by the Trastevere bridge in “Trastevere Boy,” and the boy who steals fish from the market in “The Dogfish.” At first, the author is drawn to these characters by need, as he admits in “The Periphery of My Mind.” “It was need, my own poverty, even if it was that of an unemployed member of the bourgeoi
sie, that drove me to the immediate human, vital experience of the world which I later described and continue to describe. I did not make a conscious choice, but rather it was a kind of compulsion of destiny.” Beyond this, Pasolini feels an enormous admiration for their ability to prevail against the onslaught of “modern” bourgeois culture that pushes them further and further toward the fringes. This affection, even love, tinged with erotic attraction, fascinates him with the inner working of the minds of his characters as if they held the key to a sublime understanding. He writes of the chestnut-seller in “Trastevere Boy,” “For my part, I would like to understand the mechanisms of his heart by which the Trastevere—shapeless, pounding, idle—lives inside of him. Where does the Tiber end and the boy begin?”

  His answer is language, and in particular, dialect and slang. Pasolini’s discovery of dialect marked a crucial moment in his youth, an awakening. This awakening occurred during the war, when he was nineteen and living in his mother’s rural home town of Casarsa in Friuli. “I learned Friulian as a sort of mystical act of love,” he said later in a 1969 interview. It became an almost religious, self-defining impulse to learn the local dialect and render a version of it in his writing. Through language, he deciphered a mysterious connection to the closed, pre-Christian world of the Friulian peasants, their relationship to nature and the outside world, and eventually, through an erotic relationship with a local boy, to his own sexuality. This experience of discovery would be repeated and expanded with the Roman underclass. In Casarsa, he began writing poetry and narrative sketches in Friulian dialect. At the time, his use of dialect was also a political statement; he was writing in a “lower form” of Italian at a time when the classical, heroic origins of Italian culture were being championed by the Fascist regime, which tried to suppress the identities of all subcultures and differences for the sake of national unity and the consolidation and centralization of power. For personal, esthetic, and political reasons, Pasolini instinctively placed himself on the outside, with the people he loved and their anomalous landscape and way of life. He was, at the same time, extremely self-conscious about his relationship to his chosen subjects and the use of their language. This operation of transcription of dialect was a conscious act and a political one, one that he knew might appear forced and artificial to his critics. His novels, The Ragazzi and A Violent Life, were, in fact, criticized by the Left for their ambiguous attitude toward their subjects and the manner in which he depicted the lives of the impoverished classes. One critic wrote of The Ragazzi, “Pasolini apparently depicts the world of the Roman sub-proletariat, but the real focus of his interest is his morbid taste for the dirty, abject, discomposed, and turbid.” Pasolini defends himself in the Sommaruga interview, saying that “because each person must write what he knows, I had to become the witness of the Roman borgata. Biographical need was combined with the particular tendency of my eros. Therefore, even after the sociological need is satisfied, I continue to live by necessity on the periphery.” He is linked to his subjects by his own marginalization, principally the result of his sexual desire.

  Similarly, Pasolini learned the secrets of Rome through the language of its poorest inhabitants. With the help of Sergio Citti, a young hustler he met on one of his slum-crawls, and other “informants,” he picked up their manner of speaking, their turns of phrase, and their rhetorical flourishes. To his mind, these linguistic forms revealed the reality of Rome, its psychology and cultural landscape. He described this highly self-conscious process in “The Periphery of My Mind,” “If someone were to follow me in my daily life, they would often find me in a pizzeria in Torpignattara or the borgata of Alessandrina, Torre Maura, or Pietralata, writing down expressions, exclamations, and words taken directly from the mouth of ‘speakers’ who I have invited to speak for this very purpose.” He transcribed phrases and verbal exchanges into his stories, and he devoted several essays to the relationship between these linguistic systems and the speakers’ landscape. He felt that only through such language could he approach their raw, direct and untranslated experience.

  How, then, does the translator deal with dialect and street slang? This is the first problem the translator encounters in these pieces, and it remains a principal concern throughout. All of the narrative sketches included in this volume contain examples of Roman slang, and many of the chronicles—mainly articles and essays—comment on the use of dialect. One of them, “Roman Slang,” is an analysis of several words and rhetorical forms typical of Roman lowlifes. Dialect is a difficult challenge to any translator, as one of many for those who would render Pasolini’s relentless, vibrant, poetic, and desperate style in English. There is nothing more alive than slang—it is the very heart of these texts, pumping life and immediacy into them. In it one hears the voice of the people of Pasolini’s Rome, and without it, the sketches wither. However, there is nothing more difficult to keep alive than slang once it has been transplanted into a new text. Constant interventions must be undertaken to preserve the vitality of the original, organic text, which can resist a new language like a body rejects a new heart. American English has its own slang, or rather slangs. They are utterly untranslatable, even from one region or social group to another, and lose all meaning once they cross the Atlantic. So it is easy to imagine that Pasolini’s slang, which is from a time, place, and social world far removed from its current translator and reader, would be doubly opaque. These very challenges of its translation draw it close to the experience of translating a kind of hermetic poetry. The process of rendering this dialect into another tongue, then, is a process of recuperation, of research, of historical and cultural curiosity, and of love perhaps, for language, Pasolini’s language, and the language of Pasolini’s subjects. Through this process the author and his translator create their own capacity to render humor, imagery, class, place, and humanity.

  In translating these pieces, I have employed several approaches, each of them imperfect, each tailored to a specific situation. In the case of typical Roman exclamations, for example, I have often chosen to leave the words in the original dialect, supplying an explanation in a note. On one level, exclamations are the same in every language. They are meant to call attention to themselves, to punctuate the conversation, to surprise, to call out to another person. They are in some ways intelligible to the reader, even if he or she does not know exactly what the words mean. At least, such is my hope. Of course, their effect is enriched by the knowledge of what the words mean and also by their context. For example, Roman slang employs words associated with death much more than, say, Northern Italian slang, which tends more toward blasphemy and sexual imagery. “Ammazzalo!” is a typical Roman exclamation of surprise or awe. It means, literally “Kill it!” “Li mortacci vostra” is an insult against a person’s dead relatives, but is used quite casually to tell someone to go to hell, and, in its more familiar form, “li mortacci tua,” to greet a close friend one has not seen in a while. It expresses surprise, pleasure, and consternation all at once.

  My hope is that the constant repetition of some of these exclamations will give the reader a sense of familiarity with them, so that their meaning will seem clear. In other cases, I have tried to reflect the tone, if not the exact words used by the speakers. As Pasolini writes in “Roman Slang,” “What a Roman admires above all is a person’s oratory skill, his linguistic inventiveness, or at least his vivid usage of slang expressions.” I have tried to render this bluster, wit, and aggressive posture with English alternatives not specifically defined as slang, which might assign a specific time, location, and social group to them, in order to communicate the attitude of the speaker. Humorous nicknames, extremely popular among ragazzi, are also an interesting case. Wherever possible, I have tried to find English equivalents that reflect their double meaning. In these ways, I have attempted as unobtrusively as possible to bring the reader in close proximity to the linguistic world of the characters.

  In part, I have been helped by the fact that a few of
these expressions, and even more so, the attitude of the Roman ragazzo are still very much alive. Despite Pasolini’s disappointment with the Americanization of his adopted city, to the outsider, Rome still maintains this popular, rough, and linguistically inventive aspect. In neighborhood markets and pizzerias only slightly removed from the city center, you can hear people calling to each other, insulting each other with some of the same words and spirit that Pasolini so lovingly collected and grafted into his stories. I read these stories while living in Rome, and through them became aware of the manner of speaking of the people around me, in an inverse experience to Pasolini’s own. Aspects of this dialect still exist, and through it, one can catch a glimpse of Pasolini’s vision of the city of God.

  Marina Harss, New York, 2003

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Walter Siti is a Professor of Italian Literature at L’Aquila University. His best known works concern Neo-Realist poetry and the twentieth-century novel. He also wrote two novels, Scuola di nudo, in 1994, and Un dolore normale, in 1999. He is the editor of the complete prose works of Pier Paolo Pasolini for Mondadori and of his poetry for Garzanti.

  The stories, essays, articles, and reportages collected in this volume are “Roman” in at least two ways: in the sense that they were written after Pasolini’s arrival in Rome (and mostly in the early years after his arrival, when he was metabolizing his encounter with this seductive and shocking city), and in the sense that Rome is their frame of reference. (A partial exception is “Terracina.”)

  Almost all the stories were published in newspapers and magazines, but this does not help us in classifying and describing them. The distribution of the texts in Pasolini’s archive (now at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence) is more illustrative. These files were organized by Pasolini himself with file names written by him. One of them, entitled (Articles, essays, etc.) and Little Roman stories 1950, contains “Trastevere Boy,” “The Drink,” “The Passion of the Lupin-Seller,” “Chestnuts and Chrysanthemums,” and “From Monteverde Down to the Altieri Theater.” In these stories the desire to “read into the thoughts” of young people is strongest; they are characterized by a lyrical, introspective tension like such stories from the Friulian period as “The Speakers,” and they are shaped as artistic prose.