A Pasolini Dossier

November 1-2, 2005 was the 30th anniversary of the assassination of perhaps one of the most notoriously brilliant creators since the end of World War II. Pier Paolo Pasolini was a poet on the page and in his voice, as well as a poet of the art of film-making, a novelist, a playwrite, a visual artist and, underlying all these genres, a polemical and provocative intellectual of the first order. He confronted and encountered almost every major social and cultural problem of Italian life after World War II, foresaw with startling accuracy that consumerism would become the fascism of the future and one which would both rival and even surpass the fascism of the Thirties, and understood the profound importance of African, Indian and other Third World peoples in relation to human reason as a weapon in that horrific future in which we all now live.

One of the major cultural crimes of this past generation has been‹despite the publication of five books of his poems in the U.S., and the recognition of his genius as a filmmaker--the paucity of translations of his intellectual production. In that respect, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco has asked me to oversee an anthology of Pasolini¹s thought--in essays and poems--in order to set his intellectual dynamism before an American audience. This Dossier will give a taste of that anthology but will also include articles and a poem about Pasolini that will not appear in the City Lights book.

Pasolini was a fighting intellectual, if ever there was one. He was also a homosexual, expelled from the Communist Party in his youth for his activities as a gay but who never renounced Marxism. He was murdered at the age of 53 by a teen-age pickup, Pino Pelosi, allegedly in a rough-trade sexual encounter. Pelosi, having confessed to the crime, spent a number of years in prison, and then, last year, claimed he was not the killer, that a gang of others had done Pasolini in, in a political killing (which countless Italians had believed to be the case from the start). The mystery of Pasolini¹s death is conjecturally ongoing.

This Dossier begins with an Introductory note by the poet and translator of Pasolini, Pasquale Verdicchio. The Note is intended to clarify points in the three pieces that follow, i.e., Pasolini¹s famous "I Know" litany, his J¹accuse against Italian capitalism and its corruption, and two essays, "Poetry & Prophecy of the Left" and "The Death Penalty for the Poet of the Massacres," by the poet and author of The Heresy of Pasolini, Gianni d¹Elia. Following those will be a Pasolini poem, "Fragment to Death" also translated by Verdicchio; then an essay on Pasolini as Punxolini, "The Erotic Spasm of a Diaaboical Angel" by Francesco W. M. Palmieri; then Pasolini¹s last interview, "We Are All in Danger," made with Furio Columbo in the evening before the poet was murdered, also translated by Pasquale Verdicchio and finally my own ³The Arcane of the Days of the Dead,² written for the 30th anniversary of the death of this great force of creation. -- Jack Hirschman