Three Poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini

PN Review 157, May - June 2004

Translated by John Gallas

Rome, Evening

Down the streets of Rome go trolleybuses,
trams full of men heading home: but
you're going out somewhere, in a hurry,
obsessed, like some longsuffered work
waits for you, when the rest go home.
Dinner is nearly done, and the breeze
smells of sullen family warmth
leaked through a thousand kitchens and
the long, lit streets
where shinier stars look down.
In the smarter streets there's peace,
shut-up, smug and
vile: what they all want,
to fill every evening of their lives.
Ah, you don't want that: to be
innocent in a guilty world...
So you're going down, down the bent,
dark road that goes to Trastevere:
and here, unmoving, disturbed, like something
unburied from the mud of different lives –
someplace for men who can still grab one more
day back from death and sadness –
all Rome is at your feet...

I get off, cross the Garibaldi Bridge
close to the wall, my knuckles
against the gnawed stone rim,
hard in the careful warmth
that night breathes on the vaults
of warm planetrees. Leaden, flat attics
and their sallow blocks cram
the washed-out sky on the far bank:
a dull tread of concrete slabs.
And I see, walking down the
crackbone pavement – no, smell –
the great family land,
wild, dull, stamped with
aged stars and dinning windows:
dim and humid, summer gilds it
with a foul stink the wind,
splashing down from Lazio fields,
pours over busrails and housefronts.

And down here the embankment stinks
with a crowded heat so
closeabout it is its own place:
Sublicio Bridge as far as Gianicolo –
the stench laces the drunkenness
of the life that isn't life.
The unclean signs – old trampdrunks,
ancient whores, packs of nobody's
boys that have come and gone:
unclean human clues,
man-infected, that expose them,
violent and quiet, their low, innocent
pleasures, their haveless ends.

Bellsong

When evening ebbs in these fountains
my home is a run colour.

I am gone, I remember the frogs,
the moon, the sad whirr of crickets.

Vespers ring and waste on the fields:
I am dead to the bellsong.

Don't worry, stranger: my sweet flight aches
over the empty land. I am a ghost of love

who comes back to his home that was gone.

My Deathday

In some city, Trieste or Udine,
    along some limetreed street,
in spring, while the leaves
    are shifting colour,
    I'll fall down dead
under a throbbing sun,
        blond, tall,
and shut my eyes
and leave the shining sky alone.

Under a hot-green limetree
    I'll fall down in death's
dark, ungathering
    the limes and the sun.
    And beautiful boys
will run in the light
        I've lately lost
hareing from school
all tousled.

---

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 – 1975) was an Italian poet, writer, filmmaker and translator, who also established himself as a visual artist, actor and journalist. Pasolini is considered one of the definitive intellectuals in 20^th century Italy as an artist and as a political figure.

John Gallas was born in New Zealand in 1950. He came to England in the 1970s to study Old Icelandic at Oxford and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool, Upholland, Little Ness, Rothwell, Bursa, Leicester, Diyarbakir, Coalville and Markfield, as a bottlewasher, archaeologist, and teacher. His books are published by Cold Hub Press (NZ) and Agraphia (Sweden). He is the editor of two books of translations – 52 Euros and The Song Atlas – also published by Carcanet. He is a Fellow of the English Association and was 2016 Orkney St Magnus Festival poet.

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