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November 2 will be the 30th
anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini – and to commemorate his
disappearance, one of his major poetic works Victory has been
published for the first time ever in English translation.
The English language première is on
the
website of the veteran American gay journalist Doug
Ireland, a devoted Europhile who spent many years working in
France.
“I am very privileged to publish
this poem,” Ireland said today.
Translation of the poem was done by
Norman MacAfee, himself a distinguished poet.
In addition to being the
English-language translator of Pasolini’s poems, MacAfee has also translated
the letters of Jean-Paul Sartre and Les Miserables. His books
include The Death of the Forest, an opera to music of Charles Ives,
The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now (New York: Basic
Books/Boulder: Westview, 2004), and A New Requiem (poetry, 1988).
MacAfee has written, especially for
DIRELAND, an introduction to this never-before-published Pasolini poem, in
which he describes its history and explains some references in it that might
otherwise escape some English-speaking readers.
Ireland has written extensively on
Pasolini, reporting in the past few months on the controversy that still
surrounds the death of the famed poet.filmmaker.
“Pasolini was a hugely influential
polymath of postwar Italian culture,” Ireland explains. “Although many
outside of Italy know him only as a brilliant, idiosyncratic filmmaker, he
was also the greatest Italian poet of his generation, as well as a novelist,
playwright, literary critic, political columnist and painter, who frequently
celebrated homosexuality in his writings and films.”
Of Pasolini’s more than 50 books,
only a handful have been translated into English.
The official version of Pasolini’s
1975 murder – that he was killed by a teenage hustler and juvenile
delinquent, Pino “the Frog” Pelosi – is now completely discredited.
“Even the court that sentenced
Pelosi to just seven years in jail after he confessed to the murder noted at
the time the enormous differences between the confession and the forensic
evidence, which indicated multiple persons were involved in the killing,”
Ireland points out.
“This past May, Pino the Frog
recanted his 1975 confession in an interview on Rai 3 Italian television,
saying the 30-year-old murder was committed by three men with Sicilian
accents, who beat the poet to death after they discovered Pasolini having
sex with Pino, and who shouted anti-gay and anti-communist epithets
“In the wake of Pino the Frog’s
recantation, and after demands by parliamentarians and the mayor of Rome,
the investigation into Pasolini’s murder was officially re-opened – only to
be rapidly shelved in early October.
“The police were, after all, being
asked to investigate their own earlier bungling of the case, and after three
decades the trail to the real culprits had gone cold,” he pointed out.
Click
here to read Pasolini's poem Victory
and MacAfee's special introduction
LINKS
Doug Ireland
website |
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