Boys Alive, page 1
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (1922–1975) was born in Bologna and spent a peripatetic childhood following his father, a soldier, from one posting to the next. During World War II, Pasolini lived with his mother in Friuli, moving with her to Rome in 1950 after being charged with “corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places.” It was in Rome, while working as a teacher at a private school, that Pasolini began to write Boys Alive (1955)—a novel that was hailed as a masterpiece by prominent Italian writers and condemned as pornographic by Marxist critics and the conservative judiciary of Milan. In the decades that followed, he published many more novels, books of poetry (in both Italian and Friulian), essays, and plays. He also became a screenwriter and filmmaker, collaborating with Federico Fellini on Le Notti di Cabiria (1957) and La Dolce Vita (1960) and directing The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964), The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), and Theorem (1968), which Pasolini had first published as a novel earlier the same year. A figure of controversy due to his antiestablishment political views and homosexuality, he was brought to trial at least thirty-three times. He was brutally murdered under mysterious circumstances on the beach in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome.
TIM PARKS has written eighteen novels, including Europa, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and, most recently, Hotel Milano. He is the author of many works of nonfiction, most notably Italian Neighbors, Teach Us to Sit Still, and Out of My Head, and has translated the works of Alberto Moravia, Giacomo Leopardi, and Niccolò Machiavelli, among others. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He lives in Milan, Italy.
BOYS ALIVE
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
Translated from the Italian by
TIM PARKS
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1955, 1988, 1996 by Garzanti Editore s.p.a.; copyright © 1999, 2000, 2005, 2009 by Garzanti S.r.l., Milano, Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol
Translation and introduction copyright © 2023 by Tim Parks
All rights reserved.
First published in Italian under the title Ragazzi di vita by Garzanti Editore.
Cover image: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Two Youths; © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1922–1975, author. | Parks, Tim, translator.
Title: Boys alive / by Pier Paolo Pasolini; translation by Tim Parks.
Other titles: Ragazzi di vita. English
Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2023] | Series: New York
Review Books classics | Identifiers: LCCN 2023007829 (print) | LCCN 2023007830 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681377629 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681377636 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Street children—Italy—Rome—Fiction. | Gangs—Italy—Rome—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PQ4835.A48 R313 2023 (print) | LCC PQ4835.A48 (ebook) | DDC 853/.914—dc23/eng/20230224
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007829
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007830
ISBN 978-1-68137-763-6
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
1. The Ferrobedò
2. Riccetto
3. A Night in Villa Borghese
4. Ragazzi Di Vita
5. Hot Nights
6. A Swim in the Aniene
7. In Rome
9. The Gaunt Gossip
INTRODUCTION
RAGAZZI di vita. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s original title for his first novel—literally, “Boys of Life”—brings together youth and vitality. But in Italian a donna di vita is a prostitute. So what are we to expect in these pages? Call boys? Hustlers? The title of Pasolini’s second novel would again include the word “life”: Una vita violenta. And again there is a dark side, as if life could hardly be separated from sinister and dangerous forces.
Both novels are set in Rome, both feature adolescents from the underclasses housed in the sprawling developments that sprung up around the city during the Fascist era and in the years immediately after the Second World War. Characters invariably speak the fierce and distinctive Roman dialect, whose mannerisms, blasphemies, and obscenities spill over into the more literary third-person narrative. In an essay published posthumously, Pasolini described this dialect as the only “revenge” of the common people, “depository of a view of life that is . . . virile: uninhibited, vulgar, cunning, often obscene, free from any moral ballast.” And he gives two examples of this ethos: “When I told a boy it was hardly polite to spit on the floor in a pizzeria, he shrugged and with his blond baby-Cain face told me: ‘I do my life; I don’t give a damn about anyone else.’” On another occasion, when the author complains about an old drunk urinating on the sidewalk, a young friend observes: “It’s life.”
Ragazzi di vita was published in 1955. Pasolini was thirty-three. He had not grown up in Rome and was not a native speaker of its dialect. The elder of two sons, his father a Fascist army officer and compulsive gambler, his mother a schoolteacher, he was born in Bologna. But the family moved about with his father’s military postings, and for one period, when his father was jailed for gambling debts, they went to live in his mother’s home village, Casarsa della Delizia, some fifty miles northeast of Venice. It was here that Pasolini would later escape, again with his mother, when Allied bombing targeted northern Italy in 1942. His father at this point was a prisoner of the British in Africa; his younger brother, Guido Alberto, had joined the partisans fighting against Fascism. But Pasolini pursued his literary studies for the University of Bologna, researching a thesis on the nineteenth-century lyric poet Giovanni Pascoli. He was also intensely active writing poems in the dialect of Friuli and short stories that were rural, lyrical, and sentimental, as well as joining his mother in offering free schooling to pupils in the wartime circumstances. In the summer of 1943, at the age of twenty-one, he began to talk explicitly to friends about his homosexuality and fell in love with one of his pupils.
The move to Rome, a turning point in Pasolini’s life, was more a desperate escape than a career choice. In 1945 his brother had been murdered along with several of his comrades by a rival group of partisans aligned with Tito’s Yugoslav forces and opposed to working with the Americans and British. “My mother and I were half-destroyed by grief,” Pasolini remembered. Shortly afterwards, his father returned from the war paranoid and alcoholic: “He drove us mad, he roared and fretted.” Father and son fought: “The battle was ferocious: if a man were to fall ill with cancer, then recover, he would have the same memory of his illness that I have of those years.” By this time, Pasolini was teaching at a state school, intensely active in the local Communist Party, and already the published author of four small collections of poems. However, on August 29, 1949, returning from a village fair, he involved three underage boys in some kind of group masturbation. When the story got out he was pursued by the local anti-Communist authorities and put on trial. He lost his teaching job and was expelled from the Communist Party. In January 1950, he and his mother abandoned his father and set off for Rome.
The impact of Rome, its lively, aggressive dialect, its postwar squalor and violence, thus occurred exactly as Pasolini found himself forced to acknowledge that the path of respectability was no longer open to him: “Like it or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud . . . or even Oscar Wilde.” Urgently looking for teaching work, walk-on parts in films, literary journalism, anything to achieve independence and security, he was immensely attracted to the young men of the underclass around him who cared nothing for bourgeois values, who lived intensely, carelessly, refusing to be hampered by scruple and convention. As early as 1950 he published the story “Il Ferrobedò” which, much reworked, would become the first chapter of Ragazzi di vita: during the last lawless days of the German occupation of Rome, a young boy, fresh from his first communion, joins the crowds looting the Ferrobedò, a huge factory producing reinforced concrete.
Ragazzi di vita would be accused of not really being a novel. “It’s impossible to summarize the plot decently,” Pasolini confessed to its eventual publisher, Livio Garzanti, “because there is no plot, in the conventional sense of the word.” Simply, the narrative would follow a group of boys, principally Riccetto (a nickname that means “curly”) “from the chaos and hopes of the first days of the Liberation through to the reaction of 1950–51.” During this time the protagonists would pass “from infancy to early youth, or rather . . . from a heroic, amoral age to an age that is already prosaic and immoral.”
Pasolini follows this brisk description with a number of reflections on the responsibility of Fascism for having built “those concentration camps that are Rome’s outlying housing developments” and again of the postwar government “which hasn’t solved the problem.” He even goes on to speak of framing his narrative with two parallel incidents, one in the early pages where the young Riccetto generously saves a drowning bird, the other toward the end where he does nothing to rescue a drowning boy, trapped as he is in “the selfishness a
Reading the novel, one can’t help feeling that this reassuring account of its underlying values was little more than an alibi, a false passport that would enable the author to get his writing before the public. The literary and movie scene of the time was dominated by what came to be known as neorealism, bleak, haunting stories of urban and rural deprivation which tended to suggest that suffering was largely a question of political corruption and capitalist greed; the prevailing mood was socialist and it was important to appear concerned about the underprivileged. Such sentiments never emerge in Ragazzi di vita. On the contrary, Pasolini revels in the vitality of the squalid world he so lavishly and energetically evokes. The lyricism and literary allusion of earlier efforts is now bent to conjuring up an urban inferno as vast and hideous as it is colorful and dynamic. One has the impression of a writer who has finally found his subject and style and is rejoicing in it, delighted to throw all caution and respectability to the wind. The only occasion when his characters show any class consciousness comes when the two losers, Begalone and Alduccio, find themselves too broke to pay for a prostitute and see a sports car drive by: “Fucking poverty, what shit!” Begalone declares for the benefit of the neorealists. “You think it’s fair, him all spiffed up with that sweet pussy, loaded with cash, and us: zilch? Big-shot bastards! But their time is up. The world’s changing!” Socialist revolution will mean always having the price of a whore.
If there is no grand plot, nevertheless a clear organizing principle soon emerges: Pasolini’s narrative voice moves like a heat-seeking missile, infallibly locking on to situations of great intensity, conflict, and comedy. Possessing nothing, his young characters fight to survive and to live. At all costs they must have fun; boredom is death. And if food and fun must be paid for, then money will be found: looting, hustling, scavenging, stealing. Once found it is immediately squandered on smart clothes and smart shoes, or it is drunk away, gambled away, or simply lost. In everything the characters are both accomplices and antagonists. They need one another, perhaps care for one another, and compete ferociously. Every boy aspires to be the toughest, the shrewdest, the most unscrupulous punk on the block. Boasting and exhibitionism are the norm. Each must be the best swimmer, have the biggest dog, wear the sharpest clothes. Challenge and mockery abound. Bullying is rife. Schadenfreude is a constant consolation. To be cheerful and in the money is also to possess a weapon, to make someone else feel down and defeated. As each new episode begins—a warehouse heist, an evening’s gambling, a search for sex—the reader can only tremble, waiting for disaster to strike, which perhaps it does, and then again perhaps it doesn’t, but in any event never where or when or how you expected. Nothing is predictable.
This is partly because our characters’ days and nights are so very long. The novel may unfold over five years, but in these pages it is always summer, as if Pasolini were not interested in his protagonists when they were, so to speak, “hibernating,” perhaps at school or forced by the cold to stay home; only in the interminable scorching emptiness of the Italian summer when the call to live and to live intensely is most powerful. The weather plays its part, inducing states of extreme irritableness, or sunstruck stupor, driving the boys to water, to the crowded beach at Ostia, the filthy banks of the Tiber, the dangerous currents of the Aniene, forcing them to live mainly at night, indeed all night, roaming the city in search of action, any action, hanging on to the platform of a first tram in the gray dawn light so as not to pay. Then the heat explodes in apocalyptic downpours; lightning plays over the tenement blocks, weirdly illuminating the chaos of ruins, shantytowns, and building sites. Pasolini is in his element: “his love of summer” he wrote in a poem about himself, “was perhaps the most powerful feeling in his life.”
Meantime, any possible drift toward the symbolic or the surreal is held at bay by constant and extremely precise topographical references; streets, districts, schools, hills, factories, parks, and apartment blocks are all and always rigorously named. Follow the action on Google Maps, if you will. At the same time these names often gesture to other ancient narratives: Via Donna Olimpia, Monte di Splendore, Via Nomentana—the contrast between antique glory and contemporary decadence could hardly be starker. The characters’ nicknames—when speaking in dialect Italians frequently use nicknames—also bring in other suggestions and ideas: Guaio means trouble, Picchio is a thump or a woodpecker, Caciotta is a cheese, Lupetto a young wolf, Borgo Antico the title of a popular song. Songs abound. When happy, Pasolini’s characters cannot resist singing, usually at the top of their voices. There are quotations from Dante and from Gioachino Belli, a much-celebrated eighteenth-century dialect poet. Sometimes it seems Pasolini’s text is as busy with literary hints and allusions as his characters are intent on cheating, seducing, and doing harm to one another
Which brings us to the issue of translation. “Mimicking a dialect infiltrated with literary prose is the riskiest, most exhausting and exasperating writing endeavor you could ever take on,” Pasolini remarked. On the other hand, when his publisher Garzanti worried that some readers might find his text too difficult, he explained that “the dialect words are absolutely essential for me . . . they give me the fun I need to grasp and capture my characters.” For the translator there is the problem that the postwar dialect Pasolini was using is not only near incomprehensible at times but that it locates the characters’ speech in place and time. One cannot transfer his characters’ dialogues into the demotic of, say, New York’s Bronx or London’s Whitechapel, since the action is very specifically taking place in Rome, not New York or London, and in the late 1940s, not in our own time. To use a specific British or American idiom would be a distraction. Even the frequently described gesticulation of the characters is a specifically Roman gesticulation. All the translator can do is feel for a mix of the fiercely colloquial and the evocatively literary that is as generic and non-place-specific as possible, trusting that Pasolini’s insistence on Rome and his lavish descriptions of its districts and street life will do the rest.
There remains a further issue with the status of the Italian text itself. When Pasolini sent his finished manuscript to Garzanti, the publisher lost his nerve and insisted the author remove obscenities and graphic descriptions of sex, and tone down the dialect. “So I’m in the midst of a half-dead text to correct and castrate,” Pasolini despaired. Offensive words were reduced to an initial letter followed by suspension points, whole scenes were cut, others were doctored and neutered. In recent years, since the original manuscript still exists, there have been calls to republish the novel in its original form. But Pasolini clearly took advantage of this unwanted edit to refashion and rewrite many aspects of the text that had not proved problematic for Garzanti. It thus becomes hard to say which text might be considered “definitive.” On just two occasions, where the cuts Pasolini made were so radical and so poorly hidden that the reader cannot help sensing that something is “missing,” I have taken the liberty of translating from the earlier version; these moments are signaled with footnotes that offer the version normally published.
Despite all this self-censorship Ragazzi di vita provoked a scandal and its author and publisher were put on trial for obscenity, thus guaranteeing the book notoriety and sales. “Perhaps,” observes the Italian critic Vincenzo Cerami, “what really upset people was not the strong language, but the very idea of . . . giving a literary dignity to the lowest of the low.” Eventually absolved after many celebrated intellectuals had testified on his behalf, Pasolini went on to become one of the foremost intellectuals, cultural critics, novelists, and film directors of his time, writing scores of coruscating analyses of Italian public life. Interested readers wishing to savor the milieu conjured up in Ragazzi di vita might usefully look up his movie Accattone (Scrounger), an adaptation of the novel Una vita violenta—the extraordinary urban landscape of suburban Rome in this period, the vitality of Pasolini’s characters and the urgency and precariousness of their existence is conveyed with an immediacy that one can then fruitfully take back to reading the novels.
