An Interview with Pier Pasolini

Jean-Michel Gardair, 1971.

In the following interview, originally published in 1971, Pasolini discusses the poetic renewal that inspired Trasumanar e organizzar.

Pasolini the filmmaker had overshadowed for some time Pasolini the writer. Then, however, not only six tragedies and a collection of essays were published one after the other, but with Trasumanare e organizzar a poetic silence that had lasted since Poesia in forma di rosa (1964) was broken.

Jean-Michel Gardair: Was this silence due to circumstances or to some “poet’s block”?

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Let’s say that after Poesia in forma di rosa I had the feeling of having exhausted a certain linguistic world, the pleasure of certain choices, certain words. I didn’t give up immediately, or rather I first tried to renew myself at any cost, but for this will power is not enough. There is no renewal without an interior renewal. Time is needed. So, meanwhile, I preferred to express myself through others: my actors, the characters of my tragedies. And when, about two years ago, I started to write poems again, I realized that the poetic renewal I had hoped for and pursued in vain had happened spontaneously. Most of the words and figures that were the base of my former poetry had completely disappeared from this last collection.

JMG: Isn’t it due also to a widening of your cultural horizons?

PPP: You know, my cultural horizons in fact have shrunk. I am no longer the avid reader I was ten years ago. The cinema made me less civilized, less cultured, like all filmmakers. No, I am just older. And I discovered that getting older means having less future ahead, which in turn means being freer. It is the obsession with the future that keeps man from being free. He creates for himself thousands of duties to evade his intolerable freedom. In the same way, it is always the notion of future that perverts ideologies, Catholicism as well as Marxism or McLuhan-style liberalism, with its mythical perspective of undefined well-being. So for me it has been less an enrichment through new experiences and readings than freeing myself from the inevitably hypocritical, deceptive and unscrupulous young man who spoke in my first poems.

JMG: How does this evolution manifest itself in your poetry?

PPP: First through a certain humor. In my former films and novels, there could be comical touches, but never humor. It is due to a fact I could barely explain to myself:

having lost most of my illusions, I am nevertheless living, acting and writing as if I still had them. For example, even if I no longer believe in the revolution, I want to stay on the side of the young who fight for it. Writing poems is another illusion, yet I keep writing even if poetry stopped long ago being the marvelous classical myth that exalted me as an adolescent. For a young poet of the forties or fifties, it was unthinkable to write for his contemporaries: he wrote inevitably for posterity with all the rhetoric that it involves.

JMG: In what ways are your poems formally different?

PPP: They are mostly written in the style of a diary, poems as notes, some sincere, direct, and others in bad faith, I mean composed with the esthetic feeling of writing notes.

JMG: What are they about?

PPP: I tried to classify them myself, although they are really a single poem, continuously resumed and interrupted. But it is possible to discern three relatively homogeneous groups. First the “civic” poems, dedicated for instance to Pope Pius XII as the promoter of a religion close to the Hitlerian ideology or to the Jewish law, one based on faith and hope but not at all on charity; to Panagoulis, to Rudi Dutschke’s attack, to the deaths of Ho Chi Minh and Kennedy. A second group, more decidedly political, is about the ambiguity I just mentioned of my ties with the revolutionary youth of today, the leftist movement, etc. And a third group is a diary of my most intimate life that I have the impudence to show off in public. But, in a curious way, there are also a great number of poems inspired by my friendship with Maria Callas.

JMG: But to go back to your poems and to end with the question we should have started with, could you explain the title of your last collection?

PPP: “Trasumanar” is the term by which Dante designates the ineffability of the mystic askesis in Paradiso. “Organizzar” is of course its caricatural opposite. In fact I don’t believe anymore in dialectics and contradictions, but in pure oppositions. I don’t pretend at all to transcribe in verse the ineffability which only life permits us to live and apprehend. And since I myself am neither a mystic nor a saint, I don’t have any experience of what a seventh-heaven rapture might be. But I am more and more fascinated with the exemplary union accomplished by the major saints, St. Paul for instance, between active and contemplative life. And it is that double face of the human, that double aspiration of the imaginary to both embody and reflect itself, that I try to capture through these notes torn from my daily life.

Jean-Michel Gardair , „An Interview with Pier Pasolini“, Stanford Italian Review, Vol. II, No. 2, Fall,

1982, str. 46–8. „Entretien avec Pier Paolo Pasolini“, Le Monde, 26. II 1971.