I finished another novel last week, the second this year. I have a non-fiction book on A Clockwork Orange to complete editing before the month is over. In the brief interim between these tasks, a little poem of my own emerged, not for once a (mis)translation.
I don’t personally know what to make of it really, except that it came very quickly and almost complete, requiring only the careful editing eye of a poet friend to identify the couple of lines which needed tweaking. So, I tweaked, and here we are.
Make of it what you will. Normal service, such as it is, will be resumed in a bit.
The Reset Button
It’s an insult really, isn’t it, life
on the easy setting, thrown about
like privilege, a cut of envy. No,
life’s not fair and never will be. Is it
even possible to discern
the wailing at the hated mirror or
the late-night puking in the eyes
of the most-liked, the prettiest girl?
Money doesn’t mean you don’t have
problems. You just don’t have money
problems. Instead you struggle
with how others don’t have any and
how you think they’d like yours. Or
so I’m told through shiny embarrassed teeth
by people who have never loaned me any.
Every day, every single day, thousands
of men cross forests and deserts, sailing in
frail flotillas on oceans of desperate envy, to these
Yes, it’s another, perhaps overdue, (mis)translation. There have been others which I didn’t feel did justice to their progenitors, so it’s taken this long to produce one I was prepared to release into the wild. I really wanted to keep Pasolini’s own word solitude, not least because my favourite football stadium is also curiously called by that name. But it’s clear from the subject matter that what he’s discussing isn’t some kind of autonomous security so much as its opposite, a loneliness even within a crowd, and even when that crowd has an overtly amatory intent.
Pasolini, it is no secret to reveal, was an ardent, one might say addicted, pursuer of impersonal sex, especially among the back streets of Rome where, in the 1970s, such activity from a famous gay man could easily provoke a dangerous response. Indeed, it is generally considered, except by some conspiracists, that this is the way by which he met his horrific and premature end.
The poem I think speaks for itself, even when muffled and garbled by my mistranslation. There is little requirement for exegesis here, except perhaps in relation to the very final phrase, fratelli dei cane, which taken literally means brothers of dogs.
Decades on from Pasolini’s demise, I think he might appreciate the new acerbic allusion this phrase has accrued with the ascent of the right-wing Fratelli D’Italia party to rule in Italy. Their political opponents have, on occasion, used this as a term of abuse. It may even be the case that they are overtly quoting Pasolini. Solitudine is not, after all, an obscurely known text in Italy.
And if not this poem, it may be that they reference instead Pasolini’s Lettera del traduttore, or ‘translator’s note’ as we might say in English that he wrote to explain and introduce a (mis?)translation of his own – that of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The whole letter is worth reading from the point of view of anyone interested in mistranslation or indeed translation. As this academic article indicates, it revolves around a central metaphor of a translator as a dog gnawing and worrying at a bone. Translators therefore are a kind of fratelli dei cane, he suggests.
Solitudine gives us another more personal meaning for that phrase, however, one embedded in the risky sexual practices he sought on those dangerous back streets of Rome in the years of lead, when political extremists like the Red Brigades and their right-wing equivalent, not to mention various mafias, brought continual terror to the country, a terror only compounded for a famous gay man in overt pursuit of anonymous sex in a devoutly Catholic nation in dark, windy, trash-filled alleys.
Pasolini captures the risk and the addiction, that such pursuit held for him, but also the inherent hollowness it left inside. I hope I have managed to convey a sense of his words, partly a confession but also a kind of mental dérivethrough his own sexuality.
Mostly I’ve preserved his somewhat unorthodox orthography. Finally, I am happy to accept the status he anointed both of us with, that of a brother to the dogs. I have gnawed at the bone of his poem as he chewed at the Oresteia. I hope that I have not disgraced him.
Loneliness (mistranslated from Solitudine, by Pier Paolo Pasolini)
You have to be really strong to love loneliness; you need good, strong legs and extraordinary resilience; you can’t risk colds and flus and sore throats; you shouldn’t fear theft or murder; if you must stroll throughout the afternoon, even throughout the night, you need to know how to do it without thinking; there’s nowhere to sit; it’s some kind of winter; with a wind that cuts through the wet grass, through the damp and muddy stones and rocks; nowhere can comfort be found, there’s no doubt about that, and besides, there’s a whole day and night ahead with no responsibilities, no limits at all.
Sex is just an excuse. No matter how many encounters there may be - even in winter, when the roads are abandoned to the wind, among the expanse of trash piling up against distant buildings, there are many – they’re still only moments of loneliness; warmer and more alive is the kind body which anoints you then departs, whereas the lover who deserts you is colder and more deadly; this is what fills you with joy, like a miracle wind, not the innocent grin or shady arrogance of those who then depart; carrying away their youth, so enormously young; and in this way it’s inhuman because it leaves nothing behind, or rather, it leaves only the same mark in every season.
A boy with his first lovers is nothing less than the fertility of the whole world.
And the world comes to him like this, appearing and disappearing, like a shapeshifter. Everything else remains the same, but you could wander through half the city and never find it again; the act is over, repeating it becomes a ritual. And so loneliness grows bigger even if a whole mob was waiting for their turn: the disappearances grow – leaving is fleeing – and the next one looms over this one like a duty, a sacrifice to the death wish.
But as time passes, fatigue makes itself felt, especially just after dinner time, yet for you nothing changes: you just about manage not to scream or cry; and it would be serious if it weren’t just fatigue, and maybe a little hunger. Huge, because that would mean that your desire for loneliness could not be more satisfied, so what’s waiting for you if something no one calls loneliness is the true loneliness, the kind you could never accept?
There’s nothing in the world you could eat or drink, no possible satisfaction that’s worth this endless walking through these poor streets, where you have to be both strong and disgraced, a brother to the dogs.
