Une manière d’ange était assis sur le bord d’une fontaine. Il s’y mirait, et se voyait Homme, et en larmes, et il s’étonnait à l’extrême de s’apparaître dans l’onde nue cette proie d’une tristesse infinie.
                        —Paul Valéry

The vulnerability of the poem is the vulnerability of the body. The vulnerability of the poem is a form of sacrifice. David, pognèt tal pos. He leans over the well, crouched over the pool of water, and we read: ti voltis viers di me il to ciaf zintìl—you turn your noble head towards me. Crouched over the pool of living water, yes, but David is not Narcissus. He beholds the image in the pool, yet neither desires nor praises himself in it, or, if he does, that entanglement does not consume him, for, unlike Narcissus, he wastes no vain kisses on the deceptive waters. He turns his noble head. The body moves, wholly cognizant, wholly body, a body that embraces the weight of its materiality. Of Narcissus Ovid writes: visae correptus imagine formae / spem sine corpore amat, corpus putat esse, quod umbra est—seized by the image of the form he has seen /  he loves a bodiless hope, and thinks that what is but shadow is a body.

Pasolini addresses Narcissus in an earlier poem in the same volume, Il nini muàrt (The dead boy), writing: jo ti recuardi, Narcìs, ti vèvis il colòur / da la sera, quand li ciampanis / a sùnin di muàrt – I remember you, Narcissus—you were the color / of the evening—when the church-bells / toll for the dead. David is not Narcissus, yet perhaps we, the readers, are; perhaps we too believe that what is but shadow is body, at least when we gaze into the language of the poem. And when we gaze into the language of the poem are we not also captivated by the image of the form we see there, do we not also fall in love with bodiless hope?

The poem, David, appeared in Pasolini’s 1954 volume, La meglio gioventù, the first section of which, Poesie a Casarsa, is a revised version of the homonymous volume published in Bologna in 1942. The title of the 1942 version, Per il «David» di Manzù, refers to one of the early works of the Bergamasque sculptor, Giacomo Manzù (1908-1991). In the earlier poem Pasolini had written: tu vòltis fèr il ciâf—you turn your still head. The ekphrastic drive to represent sculptural contradiction—the appearance of movement in the still bronze—and the attempt to capture it in those two words, vòltis (you turn) and fèr (still, immobile), disappears in the later version, where Pasolini replaces fèr with zintìl, in Italian gentile, calling to mind an entire lineage of European literature and thought that stretches back to the Provençal gentil, through Al-Andalus towards North Africa and on to Baghdad.

Yet there, implicating the viewer, the speaker, and ultimately the reader in the scene, stands the phrase: viers di me, towards me. I am reminded here of Rilke’s Archaic Bust of Apollo: denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht—for there is no place / that does not see you. Ti voltis viers di me, and there is no place that does not see me. The gesture implicates us in the sacrifice. A recognition? An accusation? A response? Offering becomes responsibility. The language in which we see ourselves— visae correptus imagine formae. To be seen. Examined. Diagnosed, perhaps.

Yes, there is an offering, there is a sacrifice. That ciaf zintìl has un ridi pens tai vuj—a solemn laughter in his eyes. A young body brimming with the pure lightness of life contains a laughter not untouched by a shadow of the specter of death. For David is like un toru ta un dì di Avrìl / che tal li mans di un frut ch’al rit / al va dols a la muàrt—a bull on an April day / who, in the hands of a laughing boy, / walks mildly to his death. We know, of course, that ‘Death is the mother of beauty’. Wallace Stevens taught us that. We feel it in Stephen Sartorelli’s translation of that final line, ‘gently bound for slaughter’, a reading which calls to mind the binding of Isaac and the bitter sweetness of sacrifice.

The vulnerability of the poem is embodied in the lightness of style that characterizes Poesie a Casarsa, the lightness of the sacrificial smoke, the pleasing aroma of the wholly burnt sacrifice rising to heaven, the lightness of the pleasing aroma of incense rising to heaven. David: Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice (Psalms 141: 2). The lightness of the poem is the lightness of song. A song of ascents. David: Out of the depths have I cried unto thee (Psalms 130: 1). The lightness of the poem is a garment draped about the shoulders, covering even the head and whispering words into the ear of the body’s ponderousness, the lightness of Friulano itself, the lightness of bronze, a lightness not unlike the pleasing smoke of the sacrifice, not unlike the lightness of song, or the lightness of air.

The lightness of air. The air that I feel coming from Provence. That air from Provence in the lightness of these lines from Peire Vidal that Pasolini set as an epigraph to Poesie a Casarsa:

 Ab l’alen tir vas me l’aire
Qu’ieu sen venir de Proensa;
Tot quant es de lai m’agensa,[…]

Drawing in breath, I inhale the air
That I feel coming from Provence;
Everything from there pleases me, […]

It is the same air that one breathes in the passage from Veneto to Friuli, the air that Pasolini described in the text Il Friuli, written for radio transmission in April of 1953: ‘The landscape does not seem to change, but if the traveller is astute, he smells something in the air’.

[…] it is especially the smell—wafting into the emptied compartment—which is different. The smell of a Romance earth, of a marginal zone. Upon the sweetness of modern Italy there is something of the rigid, fresh reflection of an alpine Italy, still stupendously recent in its neo-latin flavour.

Conspicuous here is the explicit linguistic reference in the epithets—odore di terra romanza, and dal sapore neolatino. Post-war Italy, in the years of the economic miracle, the ascendency of the technocratic bourgeoisie of the industrialized North, and the spread of its technical-scientific language, was losing this neo-latin flavor, this odore di terra romanza invoked in David by the word zintìl, as Pasolini would write ten years later, in the article Nuove questioni linguistiche (1964).

Arriving at Udine, Pasolini mentions the poetry of Pietro Zorutti (1792-1867), a poet who wrote in the bourgeois Friulian dialect of the city:

[…] in order to see [Zorutti’s landscape] one must perform an act of translation, that is, reduce Zorutti’s low and good-natured tone to images, concretize in vision that simple and fortunately representative ‘spirit’ of his.

Here, in the process of translating his own Friuli into a text for radio transmission, a text that depends for much of its effect on the translation of visual images into evocative language, Pasolini invokes translation in the opposite direction, suggesting that one must translate the tonal qualities of Zorutti’s verse into images, ‘concretize [them] in vision’, in order to be able to see his landscape. He continues with a discussion of the translation of landscape into language in the works of Carducci, Pascoli, Ippolito Nievo, and others, before ending with a series of folk songs. Pasolini notes that

… we are not dealing with poetic equivalents of iconographic or ex voto art. The thing is much more poetic. We are dealing with the highest, most perfect translation in linguistic terms of the data of the landscape: but in an indirect manner, by means of an absolute cohabitation and coexistence of the people who sing with the land in which they sing. […] Geographical nature translated into human nature, the most perfect Friuli is in the songs of the people of Friuli.

Thus translated into language, ‘geographic nature’ into ‘human nature’, the landscape reaches a state of greater perfection. While at first scent this might reek of idealism, Pasolini’s phrase involves rather the social practice of a community and its relation to the material conditions of its existence—it is a question of the relation of the people who sing with the land in which they sing, where the people who sing does not connote idealist notions of ‘the nation’, the ‘folk-mind’ or an ahistorical ‘spirit of the people’, but represents what Marx called ‘sensuous human activity’, or social practice, and the land does not stand for a political or ideological abstraction, but for an element in the social production of a particular community. Note Pasolini’s insistence on ‘translation’, rather than the more orthodox ‘reflection’, or a simplistic development from labor to speech, an insistence on the interconnectedness of labor and language as sensuous human activity.

Translation is, of course, a treacherous practice, yet one that is ubiquitous and inevitable, if, in the words of George Steiner, ‘inside or between languages, human communication equals translation’. There is a movement—from source text to translation, from speaker to listener, from word to interpretation, from sculpture to verbal text, from one form of social practice to another—that inevitably, whether we are dealing with a ‘translation’ or with a so-called ‘original’ text, points back to an originating source, an absence which the non-translation always attempts to hide. Translation overflows all banks, oversteps all bounds, overturns all proprieties of ‘fidelity’ and ‘equivalence’ that bourgeois subjectivity, confusing itself with its own specious construct of objectivity, would demand of it. This is what Johannes Göransson refers to as ‘mimetic excess’ in his comment on translating Ann Jäderlund’s translation of Celan and Bachmann.

In David, Manzù’s sculpture is paradoxically more present to the poem in its absence; it is as if, in changing the title from Per il «David» di Manzù to David, the erasure of any direct reference to Manzù’s work in the text itself created a space for the sculpture to be translated into the language of the poem. The first line of the original version, Di fadîe, fantàt, l’è blanc il tò paîs—Your land is white with fatigue, young boy—becomes more descriptive of the statue itself: Pognèt tal pos, puòr zòvin—Leaning over the well, poor youth. At the same time, the transformation of the vocative address from fantàt to puòr zòvin, where the two substantives are synonyms, results in the addition of the adjective puòr (poor), a word whose valence moves in two directions: toward a naked, dusty boy crouched at a well in ancient Israel, and toward the interpretive position of the viewer.

The location established in the first line is also translated from il tò paîs (your village, country, land, town) to il pos (the well). These two words whose presence/absence interfuses the two versions of this poem, paîs and pos, differing only in their vowels’ breath, also evoke the first poem in the volume, Dedica: Fontana de aga dal me paìs. / A no è aga pì fres-cia che tal me paìs. / Fontana de rustic amoùr—Fountain of water of my village. / There is no water cooler than in my village. / Fountain of rustic love. The source of water here is not a well, but a fountain. Yet the two are closely associated in the description of the beloved in the Song of Songs, traditionally attributed to Solomon, the son of David. Here is verse 4:15, in which the beloved is described: Fontana che irrora i giardini, pozzo (pos, in Friulano) d’acque vive e ruscelli sgorganti dal Libano—A fountain that waters gardens, a well of living waters and streams flowing from Lebanon.

The longing of the poet for his beloved, whose eyes are like doves’ eyes, whose hair is like a flock of goats, whose teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep, whose two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies; and of the troubadour for his lady, evoked both by the word zintìl and by the epigraph from Peire Vidal, are translated into longing for the fantats who appear and reappear throughout Poesie a Casarsa. This translation of desire from the ‘normal’ language of heterosexual relations as found in the traditions referenced here, into the ‘abnormal’ or ‘perverse’ language of homosexual desire parallels Pasolini’s decision to forgo writing in Italian—the ‘normal’, ‘correct’, standardized, national language, imposed on a ‘backward’ populace by the Fascist regime in its cursed rage for order, a language which Fascist desire needed to ‘defend’ against the corruption of ‘dialect’ just as it would need to ‘defend’ against the corruption of homosexuality—in favor of the ‘abnormal’, substandard ‘dialect’ of Friulian, like all dialects believed to be corrosive to the linguistic and social unity of the state and the development of a national culture.

The vulnerability of desire is the vulnerability of translation. The vulnerability of translation is a form of sacrifice. David, pognèt tal pos, leaning over the well, crouched over the pool of living water, head turned, or turning, looking over his shoulder as if startled, made suddenly aware of the approaching viewer’s footsteps, the weight of a body in movement making rhythmic contact with the ground—as if the poem itself were turning toward the reader, attentive that we not sneak up from behind, saying, perhaps softly enough that it alone can hear the whispers, or perhaps in a voice barely audible to us: ‘I hear you there, dear reader; I hear you approaching with your shadowed expectations and your insistent, ghostly desires.’

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Eric T. Racher lives and works in Riga, Latvia. His work has appeared in Exacting Clam, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, ballast, and elsewhere.
X: @Eric_T_Racher    Bluesky: @ericracher.bsky.social