Pasolini finds a new voice in French

To commemorate 50 years since the celebrated Italian poet was murdered, France has, for the first time, published a translation of his final prose collection

Getty Images

Italian writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini at his home in Rome, on 23 April 1971.

Pasolini finds a new voice in French

Antoine Jockey

last update on 03 Nov 2025

On the cover of the first edition of his final poetry collection, Trasumanar e organizzar, the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini included a foreword that begins with the following statement: “The true readers of this book are those capable of attributing to it a certain objectivity.

Admittedly, this applies to all poetry books in Italy, but it is especially necessary in this case because, at least in its first half, the book is composed of ‘documents’—either private (bearing witness to a life), or literary (bearing witness to linguistic and intellectual development).”

Could it be this deliberately ‘non-poetic’ aspect of the collection that explains why it remained beyond the reach of poetry translators for so long? The question is not posed to excuse an indefensible neglect, but rather to understand why it has taken over half a century, and the resolve of translator Florence Pazotto, for the work to become accessible in French.

Her translation arrives at a fitting moment, not only because it addresses a long-standing and unjust oversight, but also because its recent release in Paris by Éditions LansKine coincides precisely with the 50th anniversary of Pasolini’s murder, which, to this day, remains cloaked in mystery.

Italian poet, Marxist and openly gay Pasolini loved this neighborhood. Necci @Necci1924 was a bar which was expanded to a little haven. There he loved to write. #migration #Research pic.twitter.com/IoVLB0F2WA
— profhuq/সম্তলৗ হক (@profhuq) July 3, 2023

Cantos of Purgatory

Trasumanar e organizzar is divided into two main parts, each comprising several sections, and contains 63 poems written by Pasolini between 1968 and 1970, most of which were originally published in various literary journals. These are relatively long poems, with many addressing key events of the time and public figures, while others focus on central figures in the poet’s personal life, such as Ninetto Davoli, his longtime companion, or the singer Maria Callas, who took on the only acting role of her career in his film Medea, and with whom he shared an intimate relationship that bordered on love.

Pazotto notes that Pasolini initially considered naming the collection after one of its poems, The First Six Cantos of Purgatory, with the addition and Other Communist Poems, before ultimately settling on Trasumanar e organizzar. Of this title, he once explained: “‘Trasumanar’ is used in the mystical sense of an asceticism that defies description—unspeakable, because it is a meta-historical experience. I pair it, with ironic parody and phonetic play, with ‘organizzar’, which is its antithesis, because it refers to worldly, pragmatic action, and can also suggest party organisation, undeniably of a revolutionary kind.”

Pazotto also notes that ‘trasumanar’ derives from Dante, who used the word only once, in the opening canto of Paradiso, while ‘organizzar’ is taken from Antonio Gramsc

Dante’s presence is strongly felt throughout the collection, especially through The Divine Comedy, most clearly in The First Six Cantos of Purgatory, Project of a Poem, as well as in numerous direct and indirect quotations and the recurring themes of the father and the guide. Gramsci, by contrast, is never mentioned by name. Yet several poems speak directly to the Italian Communist Party, which the poet once joined but was later expelled from due to his libertine lifestyle.

There are things the system cannot assimilate or digest, and poetry is one of them. We can read a poetry book a thousand times, but we will never consume it.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The poems were written during a pivotal period in Pasolini's life and creative career. On the one hand, his relationship with his close friend Davoli began to shift after Davoli informed him of his intention to marry. On the other hand, a bond of friendship and deep complicity developed between him and Callas during the filming of Medea in 1969, a relationship that would inspire nine poems featured in Trasumanar e organizzar.

Moreover, Pasolini, who had "ceased to harbour illusions about poetry" without ever ceasing to write it, underwent, during this period, a renewal that was both linguistic and internal. He observed: "The final element in my linguistic and inner renewal is a humorous stance toward reality, something I had never experienced before."

Indeed, the texts of Trasumanar e organizzar reflect a sense of irony through which the poet engages with the violent upheavals shaking his country and the world, as well as with events in his personal life. This humour allowed him to expose prevailing cynicism, the distortions and banalities of political discourse, alienation, standardisation (or what we would now call globalisation), and the disintegration of the sacred, of poetic expression, and of political thought, all under the influence of a consumerist system he described as 'totalitarian'.

Alamy — Pasolini's face painted on a tank in the Piazza del Teatro India in Rome at sunset.

Orality in contact with reality

These texts also mark a departure from the style that had emerged in Pasolini's earlier collections, a style that conveyed a sense of continuity. Here, he adopts a markedly different approach: one that is non-poetic, strikingly close to orality, and in direct engagement with events, which had become increasingly elusive and, therefore, more difficult to grasp. The language shifts towards reportage, but also incorporates stammering, repetition, Latinisms, and the Roman dialect, especially that of the city's impoverished outskirts.

This is a mode of writing often directed at a specific person or group. It is urgent and vibrant, sharply attuned to places, events, and to figures of Pasolini's time, whether historical, mythological, biblical, or literary. It is a form of expression that uses the body to rupture the prevailing silence, confronting the erasure of reality with reflections, sensations, and intense emotion.

In structuring its resistance, it draws on wildly disparate materials, as powerfully demonstrated in the poem Patmos, where a long list of victims from the fascist bombing of Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969 is placed alongside passages from the Book of Revelation and a scathing poetic interrogation of President Giuseppe Saragat.

In 1969, Pasolini described this collection as "unwanted poetry; poetry that resists consumption." The statement resonates even more deeply when placed alongside his broader view of poetry: "Poetry is not a consumer good... On this point, sociologists are wrong and must admit it. They believe the system absorbs and digests everything. This is not true. There are things the system cannot assimilate or digest, and poetry is one of them. We can read a poetry book a thousand times, but we will never consume it."

Trasumanar e organizzar is a poetic experience of rare power; one whose value and relevance have not faded, even after more than half a century

And yet, fully aware of the consumerist nature of modern society and conscious that "very few people read a poetry book from beginning to end," Pasolini, in his foreword to Trasumanar e organizzar, advises the "understandably impatient reader" to begin with the following sections: Trasumanar e organizzar, Stained Pact, Lame Poems, and Demonstration, which he considered "the most interesting."

Aware, too, that "some readers only ever read a single poem from a collection," Pasolini recommends, in such cases, The Poetry of Tradition—written as an open letter to the youth of his generation, warning them against numerous dangers, chief among them: "Youth passes quickly / You shall reach your middle years and then old age / without having enjoyed what you had a right to enjoy(…) And thus you shall realise that you served the very world / Against which you "carried on the struggle."

The poem ends on a bitter yet lucid note: "In growing old I saw your heads fill with sorrow; / inside them swirled a muddled idea, an absolute certainty / The presumption of heroes destined never to die – / O unfortunate children, you had within reach, / a wondrous victory that didn't exist!"

«Non c'è cena o pranzo o soddisfazione del mondo, che valga una camminata senza fine per le strade povere, dove bisogna essere disgraziati e forti, fratelli dei cani.»

-Pier Paolo Pasolini, Trasumanar e organizzar pic.twitter.com/es6LZhamss
— buğra (@eraslanmbe) August 24, 2020

A rare poetic experience

Trasumanar e organizzar should be read in its entirety, without exception, for what awaits the reader is a poetic experience of rare power; one whose value and relevance have not faded, even after more than half a century. It is a work that shakes the reader with the force of its voice and the weight of its substance, pulling them from the numbing banality that surrounds us today. It offers a clear, unflinching vision of our bleak reality, while also presenting a distillation of the most significant formal innovations that transformed poetry over the last century.

If a single poem from the collection were to be recommended for the reluctant reader, it would be Presence, which closes the volume. Not only because it contains Pasolini's final words, but because it reveals how the poet's piercing insight into the wretched state of the world never stripped him of his innocence, his freshness, or, above all, his astonishing capacity for love.

The poem ends with these lines: "The divine wind that does not heal, but indeed makes one sicker and sicker; / and you try to stop her, the girl who wanted to turn back, (…) / you grab onto anything you can / and it makes one want to kiss you."

This closing moment returns us to the title of the collection, and, in particular, to the word 'trasumanar', borrowed from Dante. It signifies a transcendence of the human condition from within the human being, a transformation made possible only through love. For Dante, it was the love of Beatrice; for Pasolini, it was the love of Callas, and of femininity as an absolute principle.

+ / -