Enzo Siciliano Pasolini: A Biography.
Translated from the Italian by John Shepley.
Random House, 435 pages, $20
Pier Paolo Pasolini Poems.
Selected and translated from the Italian by Norman MacAfee, with Luciano Martinengo.
Foreword by Enzo Siciliano.
Random House, 231 pages, $10.50
Enzo Siciliano’s biography, in which Pasolini and his setting are inseparable, brings it all back to me. Rome in the early Sixties: the spectacular kitsch of Bernini’s Piazza Navona and of his St. Theresa in sexual ecstasy; the drumhead Castello St. Angelo looming like thunder across the Tiber, with its dungeons and its topside angel; Fellini getting endless takes of his Swedish Venus rising from the foam in the Fontana di Trevi; the torpid afternoons and the endless, mindless evenings; the pizza capricciosa gatherings on Saturday nights, to which the anti-American Italians were always late and the Americans didn’t mind because, to a man, they believed that every German was responsible for Hitler, no Italian was responsible for Mussolini. And the chatter-chatter-chatter in the trattorias: the onstage smile, the mistrust under the skin, the want of saving courtesy, the fanatical aversion to reflective silence. Remembering all this and much more (Baroque or uncooked), I am not as surprised as I might otherwise have been to learn that for twenty-five years a considerable number of Italians took Pasolini seriously as a politicalpersonality when, the truth is, he was a poet at war with time and with the sexual fate thrust upon him by random yet
