Philosophical Film Festival in Krakow. Interview.
We had a chance to meet Erminia Passannanti, Italian poet, writer and connoisseur of Pasolini's works. She is the author o Il corpo e il potere. Le 120 Giornate di Sodoma di Pier Paolo Pasolini (2004), Il Cristo dell’eresia. Rappresentazione di Cristo nei film di Pasolini (2006), La ricotta. Il sacro trasgredito (2007) and is publishing with Joker the monograph Italian cinema and censorship by religion (2013). Erminia has written a doctoral thesis on the work of Franco Fortini and also cutated his theory of translation for the volume Realtà e paradosso della traduzione poetica (2000). As a literary translator, Erminia has curated and translated numerous books of poetry and fiction: (TS Eliot, La terra desolata), (Sylvia Plath, Limite), (Brontës Poesie, and Lettere Inedite), (RS Thomas, Liriche alla svolta del millennio, poesia), (Menna Elfyn, Angelo di Cella, poesia), (Leonard Woolf, A caccia di Intellettuali, saggio), (Hubert Crackanthorpe: Racconti contadini, narrativa nella forma di short-stories), (Robyn Llywelyn, Da porto abbandonato a bianco oceano, romanzo). She was among the guests of the festival. (Interview conducted by Edoardo Martinelli, Krakow University)
- NZ: How has your interest in film and Pasolini’s film begun?
E.P:
Pasolini was a kind of outrageous phenomenon, as a man, an artist and an
intellectual, or so he was generally perceived to be during his life time by a
great part of “emotionally” conservative Italians, no matter if from left,
centre or right. Following his brutal assassination, Pasolini entered the
sphere of the mythical, possibly because nobody else after him has stricken the
core of what is unspeakable within the Italian nation’s culture, society and
political life. I must admit, I feel some attraction toward intellectual and
spiritual dissidents, those who are able to convey counter-discourse. And, of
course, the scandal(s) surrounding a man like Pasolini - the scandal(s) created
by his opponents - could never
affect such degree of interest which I have felt in the work of this
significant Italian artist, whose poetry, cinema, essays writing I have found
more than worth exploring, and in many different directions. It cannot be
denied that Pasolini has exercised attraction on his audience and friends
- which included Elsa Morante,
Alberto Moravia, Attilio Bertolucci, Laura Betti and many others - also because
of the elements of scandal that used to surround his sociable figure as a
contemporary figure of Rome cinema
jet set, and a polymorphic genius.
How did I get involved in Pasolini’s work?
At the time of my doctoral studies in XXth Century Italian Literature (Ph.D.)
at University College London, while I was researching into Franco Fortini’s
interrelated writings as poet, literary translator and essayist, I came across
Pasolini’s critical essays, collected in Passione e ideologia
(1948-1958), Empirismo
eretico (1972), Scritti
Corsari (1975), Caos, to quote the main ones.[1]
I was researching into the literal arena of the 6os and 70s to explore the
intellectual debates around the Gramscian notion of the role of the
“intellettuale impegnato” (political engagement). In his political essays,
collected in Dieci inverni:
1947-1957. Contributi a un discorso socialista (1957), Fortini emphasized the deep ideological
crisis that had occurred among the Italian socialist intellectuals, following
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes in 1956, and asserted the autonomy
of literature from the kind of political militancy solicited by our much
debated artist, Pasolini.
My encounter with Pasolini was thus crucial
and unavoidable as Pasolini remained closely associated to Fortini by means of
a stimulating dialogue on politics, literature, society and the arts throughout
the Sixties and the Seventies, that is from the years of the economic miracle,
all the way up to the students and workers’ protest and the initial phase of
the so called “anni di piombo”, standing for the terrorist phase which involved
the extreme left (“Brigate Rosse”) and extreme right (“Settembre Nero”)
terrorist groups acting out mass massacres to destabilize the State. In this
historical context, it is important to mention Fortini and Pasolini’s
contribution to the most important literary newspapers and magazines of the
time, Officina, Nuovi
Argomenti, Politecnico, Tempo. Most importantly, it is essential to recall
Pasolini’s discussions with his readers, as mass-pedagogue, in the pages of the
magazine Vie Nuove
(conversations subsequently gathered under the title Le belle bandiere.
Dialoghi, 1960-65).
Despite the fact that these two most
important Italian opinion makers and intellectuals had broken their friendship
in the 1969 occasion of Pasolini’s controversial narrative poems, “Il PC ai
giovani” (1968) and “Vi odio cari studenti”, published in l’ Espresso (n. 24, 16.6.68),[2] speaking against the students and taking
side with the proletarian policemen, Fortini kept his eyes fixed on Pasolini’s
work until his death on the 2nd November 1975, given that these two
politically engaged intellectuals continued to address parallel issues, with
both of them exploring post- ’55 critical Marxism: with Fortini sharing much of
Adorno and Benjamin’s perspectives on society, culture and current affairs and
Pasolini getting involved into Marcuse, Reich, Ezra Pound, Gilles Deleuze and
Italian cultural anthropologist, De Martino, to quote a few referents. So deep
for this connection that Fortini published the book Attraverso Pasolini, a pivotal, powerful analysis of
Pasolini’s personality and work. The title itself that Fortini gave to his book
on Pasolini speaks of the strength and intimacy of such intellectual and human connection
which had ups and downs but also picks of solidarity and understanding. Fortini
was among the first critic recognizing Pasolini’s innovative poetry, from the
early verse of L’usignolo della chiesa cattolica, in which, according to Fortini, Pasolini introduced
the pastiche
(“rifacimento”), re-mixing in a modern context, as Fortini argued in his book,
I poeti del Novecento (Fortini,
1988 : 179), the Christian hymns and the pastoral iconography, Rimbaud and the
Art Nouveau. Having said that, my first real encounter with Pasolini as
filmmaker was through his film Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, which I managed to watch in England in an
uncensored version, sent to me under special concession by the British Film
Institute, which has kept such version in its archives during the long twenty
years or so on legal banning. After careful observation, I felt the need to
de-construct the structure of Salò, scene by scene, to make its narrative more readable,
and its allegorical, semiotic and symbolic use of literary and historical
referents more transparent. These referents were: Dante’s Inferno, De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, the German occupation, responsible for mass
massacres during the puppet nazi-fascist republic, established in the de
facto capital city of Salò
between 1943 and 1945.[3]
- NZ: Can you enlighten some of the most important features of Pasolini’s films?
E.P:
Pasolini’s films cannot be seen as a totally organic whole. They follow many
directions and with their author being a forerunner of postmodernism, they
noticeably cover different genres: realist drama, comedy, historical tale,
docu-fiction, surrealism, hyperrealism. Also the mood in Pasolini’s films
ranges considerably from political and cultural engagement, as in Comizi
d’amore and Teorema, to provocative anti-intellectualism, as
in “La trilogia della vita”, including Decameron (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (1972), Il fiore delle Mille e una
notte (1974)).
Pasolini as we know started his career as
filmmaker in the footsteps of Neorealist film directors Roberto Rossellini,
Vittorio De Sica. Indeed, the fiction film Accattone (1961) and the “lungometraggio” Mamma
Roma (1962) are generally
seen as bearing many stylistic and thematic features common to Neorealism,
taking to the cinema theatres the stories of the victims and the dispossessed.
However, Pasolini soon made big progresses in his choice of cinematic style,
following Fellini and Antonioni’s examples, by engaging into a new
expressivistic adaptation of the Soviet social realism. This evolution towards
the creation of a unique narrative style shifted the focus from cinema as
sociology to cinema as a way to put forward a critique of power structures also
by means of satire and parody. In fact with La ricotta (1963) Pasolini’s dissident discourse
against the Church in its relation with the culture industry under the new
liberal democratic “regime”, managed to cause himself and his producer Alfredo
Bini heavy censorial troubles for “offence of religion” (blasphemy), soon after
the film release. In the first months of 1964, the film was confiscated and
banned for “vilipendio alla religione di stato”, in other words, for having
attached the status quo (that is: the Democrazia Cristiana’s bourgeois
politicized Catholicism).
- NZ: What is your favourite Pasolini’s movie and why?
E.P:
I think my favourite film is La ricotta, one of the four episodes of the 1962 film Ro.Go.Pa.G (filmmakers Rosselli, Godard, Pasolini, Gregoretti). I
came across La ricotta
in the late Nineties thanks to my husband, who pointed out its existence to me.
I first discussed the anthropological worth of that episode with him and I got
progressively intrigued in its narrative style, metacritic discourse on the
cinema as language and means of socio-cultural critique, and provocation of the
status quo. Following this first interest, I engaged myself in deconstructing this film in view of a
publication. After I published La ricotta. Il sacro trasgredito (2007), I have also incorporated my
analysis in a wider monograph, entitled Italian cinema and Censorship by
Religion (Brunel
University, 2013). Following this first analysis, I became progressively
interested in how and why Pasolini has so intensely treated the figure of Jesus
in his films. I therefore faced in
the deconstruction of Pasolini’s film is Teorema (1968) and immediately after have edited a
new monograph, Il Cristo dell’eresia. La rappresentazione di Cristo nei film
di Pier Paolo Pasolini
(2008). I am fascinated by Teorema, as I have said at the conference. In this
story, Pasolini, by substantiating his new experimentalist style, outlines his
truly obscure rhetorical discourse about how people can be saved from the
modern process of moral disintegration by meeting with the sacred. The film
talks about mysticism, folk traditions, natural freedom, creativity, as opposed
to individual and collective un-freedom under the power of institutionalized
religion, the Capital, consumerism. This is, in my view, Pasolini’s stylistic
masterpiece where he first makes full use of visual semiotics and concretizes
his idea of cinema as poetic
language (as explained by the author in his essay “Il cinema di poesia”,
included in Empirismo Eretico. Separate comments deserve my interest in the film Salò, which are primarily related to Pasolini’s
anti-dogmatism (anti-totalitarism) and to his personal story as brother of
Guido Pasolini, a young partisan killed by other partisans for internal
oppositions, a detail which makes the entire film very interesting also at
the biographical level.[4]
- NZ: What was and is the impact of Pasolini’s works on Italian culture and society?
E.P:
It may be said that Pasolini has had a huge impact on the Italian intellectual milieu, especially because of his eclectic
vitality and creativity. However, I guess that people, who are uninterested in
experimentalist cinema and poetry, could not but feel disturbed by Pasolini’s
high rhetorical complexity which included contradictions and paradoxes. What’s
more, Pasolini used to provoke aversion, especially that of the Catholic
establishment, not only for his explicit anticlericalism and preference for
peasant Christianity, but by systematically highlighting the fallacy of our
national creeds and ideas, values and conventions, the corruption of our power
systems, on which also the Vatican’s official religious norms and practices are
based.
I would definitely cherish the idea that
our contemporary Italian society has had some benefit from Pasolini’s
insightful analysis of our embedded vices and qualities (the analysis he made
public in his essay writing)! But, in truth, “nemo propheta in patria”:
people are generally hostile to
prophets and rather are persuaded to persecute and misinterpret their words,
especially when they are unaligned with the ruling classes’ status quo. There
is no doubt that Pasolini deeply disappointed these social classes and their
interests, but, actually, he also disappointed the people from his own Party,
the PC, a party from which he was expelled and remained separated from, also
due to his dissident anti-dogmatic stance. This is clear in ‘Serietà e frazioni’, where he spoke against ‘la tendenza
eufemica del linguaggio comunista ufficiale’ (“the euphemistic tendency of the
Communist party’s official language”) (Pasolini, Il caos, n.51, 20 December 1969: 192)
- NZ: Let’s talk about your poetry career. Your first Ph.D.’s thesis (in Italian literature and Theory of translation) is about Franco Fortini and poetry translation. Can you tell more about your relationship with Fortini and his works?
E.P:
Thank you for asking me a further question about my academic engagement in Fortini’s poetry and essay writing.
I share with Fortini a passion for the interrelation of poetry, literary
translation and criticism. Back in 1989, after I graduated at the University of
Salerno in Foreign literatures at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, I
applied for, and obtained a scholarship from the “Istituto di Studi
Filosofici”, in Naples, where that same winter Fortini was about to run a
course in poetry translation. I had just published my translation of the
Bronte’s poems (1989) and submitted the book to Fortini’s attention. I was so
happy when I received a letter announcing that professor Fortini had chosen me
as one of his four “borsisti” (scholarship students).
I subsequently met Fortini during those
1988-1989 winter seminars, at the
end of which I found myself with lots of material, gathered in notes and sound
cassettes. I edited a compendium of all Fortini’s ideas on poetry translation
and in 1994, I published the book Realtà e paradosso della traduzione
poetica (which was the
title of the series of seminar in Naples). Once back in England, I decided to
use that vast material as the theoretical ground for my doctoral thesis. I
cannot deny that for many years I have looked at Fortini as a master in
translation practice (he translated for instance also Milton, Brecht, Eluard)
and theory. However, he has only relatively inspired my own poetry. I have to
say that I have been more deeply inspired by my first university thesis, in
which I focussed on the work of Sylvia Plath (Le metafore ossessive
nell’opera di Silvia Plath,
1988). Indeed, much of my university studies in Women studies have brought my
own verse very close to authors such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Amelia
Rosselli. How can I describe this influence? I feel a tide crossing my poetry
from side to side. It is a dream, a memory, a huge tsunami. And this tsunami,
this huge tidal wave – which, in a way, represents all of the world's cultural
traditions - has been for years my nightmarish, overwhelming representation of
life, in its clash against Art and Time.
- NZ: What is the secret of a good poetry translation?
E.P:
There is no special secret for a “good translation”. Literary translators find
there own ways to adapt a text to their own language, culture and sensibility
and this skill improves with experience and with the consolidation of their
personal preferences and choices. For certain. there are many elements which
help to achieve a good rendering of the original text into the target language.
For certain, along with linguistic training and cultural insight, passion and
vocation have a huge impact on the final text, whatever its genre, field,
addressees. In the arena of poetry translation, it is commonly believed that,
in order to attain a good competent and inspired translation of a poetic text –
and, with this, it is meant a translation which shows proficiency in
"second degree" poetry - one should be able also to prove expertise
in what is called "first degree" poetry, and produce good own poetry.
This may be true. However, I have seen good poetry translations accomplished by
non-poets, as in the case of Mister Brian Cole, translating XXth Century poetry
in Italian, German, Spanish. And I have seen established poets, who possibly
think very highly of their own craft, taking too much liberties on an other
poet’ text, to the point of exploiting its sense, and this may happen just
because of that wide-spread pre-supposition that a poetry translator must be in
the first place a poet. Anyhow, Fortini, whose lessons on poetry translations I
have edited in Realtà e paradosso della traduzione poetica, has, for me, the ultimate opinion on such
matter, as an extraordinary poet and literary translator.
- NZ: You edited two books of poetry Poesia del dissenso (Poetry of Dissent). Why this title?
E.P:
Poets, who hold explicit ideological positions, often find cultural walls in front of them, not only because readers
tend to favour lyric verse but because publishers, within the culture industry,
are often averse to political poetry, sometimes for mere commercial reasons. In
Italy, dissident political poetry showing for instance social concern has in
Fortini and Pasolini’s verse two of the most outstanding spokesman of their
times. In editing these two anthological books, I intended to offer precisely this:
a space for poetry with also a political, civil and cultural agenda. Basically,
the idea pursues Pasolini’s main themes of discussion on critical Marxism,
which can be summarized as follows: should the writer manifest his or her
ideology? What is the relationship between the writer and neo-capitalism? Must
the writer go after social concern (content) or poetry (form)? What is then the
relationship between ideology and style? (P.P. Pasolini, 1959, republished in Interviste
corsare, 1995) I have no
idea of what number of copies were sold of these two books. I gave up entirely
my royalty benefits to persuade the publisher to take the risk of this
editorial project.
- NZ: What does it mean making/writing poetry in the twenty-first century?
E.P:
I know what it means to write poetry primarily as a personal search of style, a
kind of scriptural research, which is, however, for me, part of the flow of the
epoch-making culture that evolves before and during our experience, a quest
that I personally conducted to convey ideas, proposals, to try to give an
aesthetic development to my ethical humanism. It 'also, of course, a way - or
at least it was - to give a lyrical form to existence and affective memory.
Let’s say that, as the daughter of two teachers with a strong inclination
towards the didactical use of poetry, I grew up with well established models:
by the age of four I could recite long poems by Leopardi and Carducci, Pascoli and Foscolo, and
by the age of twelve I had read Omero, Ungaretti, Quasimodo and Montale.
Pasolini has never been a model for my own poetry. I have read his poems only
after reading his essays and watching his (permitted) films, among which Uccellacci
Uccellini and Vangelo
secondo Matteo. However,
when I take a look at the poems included in Pasolini’s Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957), L’usignolo della chiesa
cattolica (1958), La
religione del mio tempo
(1961), Poesia in forma di rosa (1964), I can see that civil poetry has developed in my writings with
a similar concern for both politics, history and the Italian cultural and
religious heritage.
- NZ: Do you have a new publishing plan for the nearest future?
E.P:
I think I do. I hope to be able to make a fiction film on Mary, the mother of
Jesus at some point. I am planning to translate her personal “affabulazione”
into a kind of Gospel. I have already published a poetry booklet on this
subject and given a paper with my theories at the 2011 University of
Barcellona’s conference on “Cinema and the Sacred”. I consider Mary of Nazareth
inspirational as an artist. Our Catholic and Christian culture does not stop,
even now, after two centuries from the life and death of Jesus, to portray this
amazing woman as a powerful guide. In this, the Church is correct. Maria gave
value to Jesus - in a way she trained
him to be a prophet - and in this same way she gave value to herself. And so
did Jesus, giving form and meaning to the impact of his mother’s words (or
prophecies) on his vocation. I am interested in making a film on this
mother-son total interaction, which brought both Mary and Jesus to the extreme
consequences of a glorious and catastrophic epilogue. In a sense, I have
assumed Pasolini’s message in Teorema, that in our contemporary age, religion has become
internal, individualistic, therapeutic (in terms of self-accomplishment), and,
in most cases, freed from the limits imposed by cultural traditions and
legacies. But this is only a project: for now, it dwells only in my mind.
URL: NOWAZOFIA.
[2] Pasolini argues that he meant to
sympathize with the police, who are the children of the proletarian people,
rather than with the young gentlemen studying at the Faculty of Architecture of
the University of Rome leading the students’ protest in 1968. Here is
Pasolini’s additional commentary to his poem “Vi odio, cari studenti”. (“Nella
mia poesia “Vi odio, cari studenti” dicevo, in due versi, di simpatizzare per i
poliziotti, figli di poveri, piuttosto che per i signorini della facoltà di
architettura di Roma; nessuno dei consumatori si è accorto che questa non era
che una boutade, una piccola furberia oratoria paradossale, per richiamare
l'attenzione del lettore, e dirigerla su ciò che veniva dopo, in una dozzina di
versi, dove i poliziotti erano visti come oggetti di un odio razziale a
rovescia, in quanto il potere oltre che additare all'odio razziale i poveri -
gli spossessati del mondo - ha la possibilità di fare anche di questi poveri
degli strumenti, creando verso di loro un'altra specie di odio razziale; le
caserme dei poliziotti vi erano dunque viste come ghetti particolari, in cui la
qualità di vita è ingiusta, più gravemente ingiusta ancora che nelle
università. (Pasolini, Tempo illustrato, 17.05.1969).
[3] For the readers’ benefit: between1943 and
the end of the second world war in 1945 Salò on the Lake Garda, was the seat of
Benito Mussolini’s government, recognized by Hitler as the Italian Social Republic, now known
as the Repubblica di Salò. The governments seats were located inside several
villas, as also shown by Pasolini in his film. Villa Castagna was destined for
the police headquarters, Villa Amedei as the Ministry of Popular Culture, and
Villa Simonini as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
[4] For further details, please refer back to
my monograph, Il Corpo e il potere. Salò o l 120 Giornate di Sodoma di Pier
Pasolo Pasolini (Joker,
2004).
