A HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED PASOLINI POE
זה ארוך אבל שווה! תרגום השיר אינו מלא, משום שתפוז לא מאפשר יותר מ 6500 תווים, לכן מומלץ להיכנס לקישור המצורף!
זה ארוך אבל שווה! תרגום השיר אינו מלא, משום שתפוז לא מאפשר יותר מ 6500 תווים, לכן מומלץ להיכנס לקישור המצורף!
November 2 will be the 30th anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (right)-- and to commemorate his disappearance, DIRELAND is proud to publish here, for the first time ever in an English translation, a major Pasolini poem, "Victory." VICTORY by Pier Paolo Pasolini translated by Norman MacAfee with Luciano Martinengo Where are the weapons? I have only those of my reason and in my violence there is no place for even the trace of an act that is not intellectual. Is it laughable if, suggested by my dream on this gray morning, which the dead can see and other dead too will see but for us is just another morning, I scream words of struggle? Who knows what will become of me at noon, but the old poet is “ab joy” who speaks like a lark or a starling or a young man longing to die. Where are the weapons? The old days will not return, I know; the red Aprils of youth are gone. Only a dream, of joy, can open a season of armed pain. I who was an unarmed Partisan, mystical, beardless, nameless, now I sense in life the horribly perfumed seed of the Resistance. In the morning the leaves are still as they once were on the Tagliamento and Livenza—it is not a storm coming or the night falling. It is the absence of life, contemplating itself, distanced from itself, intent on understanding those terrible yet serene forces that still fill it—aroma of April! an armed youth for each blade of grass, each a volunteer longing to die. . . . . . . . . . Good. I wake up and—for the first time in my life—I want to take up arms. Absurd to say it in poetry —and to four friends from Rome, two from Parma who will understand me in this nostalgia ideally translated from the German, in this archeological calm, which contemplates a sunny, depopulated Italy, home of barbaric Partisans who descend the Alps and Apennines, down the ancient roads... My fury comes only at the dawn. At noon I will be with my countrymen at work, at meals, at reality, which raises the flag, white today, of General Destinies. And you, communists, my comrades/noncomrades, shadows of comrades, estranged first cousins lost in the present as well as the distant, unimagined days of the future, you, nameless fathers who have heard calls that I thought were like mine, which burn now like fires abandoned on cold plains, along sleeping rivers, on bomb-quarried mountains. . . . . . . . . . . . . I take upon myself all the blame (my old vocation, unconfessed, easy work) for our desperate weakness, because of which millions of us, all with a life in common, could not persist to the end. It is over, let us sing along, tralala: They are falling, fewer and fewer, the last leaves of the War and the martyred victory, destroyed little by little by what would become reality, not only dear Reaction but also the birth of beautiful social-democracy, tralala. I take (with pleasure) on myself the guilt for having left everything as it was: for the defeat, for the distrust, for the dirty hopes of the Bitter Years, tralla. And I will take upon myself the tormenting pain of the darkest nostalgia, which summons up regretted things with such truth as to almost resurrect them or reconstruct the shattered conditions that made them necessary (trallallallalla). . . . . . . . . . . . . Where have the weapons gone, peaceful productive Italy, you who have no importance in the world? In this servile tranquility, which justifies yesterday’s boom, today’s bust—from the sublime to the ridiculous—and in the most perfect solitude, j’accuse! Not, calm down, the Government or the Latifundia or the Monopolies—but rather their high priests, Italy’s intellectuals, all of them, even those who rightly call themselves my good friends. These must have been the worst years of their lives: for having accepted a reality that did not exist. The result of this conniving, of this embezzling of ideals, is that the real reality now has no poets. (I? I am desiccated, obsolete.) Now that Togliatti has exited amid the echoes from the last bloody strikes, old, in the company of the prophets, who, alas, were right—I dream of weapons hidden in the mud, the elegiac mud where children play and old fathers toil— while from the gravestones melancholy falls, the lists of names crack, the doors of the tombs explode, and the young corpses in the overcoats they wore in those years, the loose-fitting trousers, the military cap on their Partisan’s hair, descend, along the walls where the markets stand, down the paths that join the town’s vegetable gardens to the hillsides. They descend from their graves, young men whose eyes hold something other than love: a secret madness, of men who fight as though called by a destiny different from their own. With that secret that is no longer a secret, they descend, silent, in the dawning sun, and, though so close to death, theirs is the happy tread of those who will journey far in the world. But they are the inhabitants of the mountains, of the wild shores of the Po, of the remotest places. . . . . . . . . And yet, this is a day of victory. 1964
טוב נו, אולי בעתיד (מקווה הקרוב כשאהיה על אזרחי