[In the following excerpt, Jewell examines the poems "A na fruta," "Poesia informa di rosa," and "Nuova poesia in forma di rosa" in order to find a definition of Pasolini's poetic language.]

Pier Paolo Pasolini initiated his literary education writing lyric poetry. Commentators have found elusive, inherent poeticity throughout his work. In fact it is possible to view the poetic as a key to the complexity and diversity of a production which included novels, plays, journalistic essays, drawings and films. I wish to examine moments of Pasolini's poetic practice and theory in order to find a definition of poetic language pertinent to Pasolini's artistic corpus. My point of reference is the long "Poesia in forma di rosa," the title poem for a volume of collected verse from the years 1961-64. Two factors influenced my choice: the volume Poesia in forma di rosa is contemporary with the poet's first films and forms a point both of rupture and of transition and this volume in particular presents an interesting paradox. In it one follows the course of a "death" of poetry for-Pasolini, as he becomes "poeta sul marciapiede" 'streetwalker poet,' and yet, simultaneously, the birth of an incipient "Cinema di poesia" (title of his theoretical article), as the "poetic" moves out of poetry and into cinema. To determine what constitutes poetic language and its powers for Pasolini, I shall study not only "Poesia in forma di rosa" in its two versions, but shall begin by shifting backwards to his earlier dialect "formazione" and then forward briefly to his cinematic theories. The itinerary for my readings follows three thematically compatible poems, each containing image of the rose of Pasolini's titles. The first poem is "A na fruta," from Poesie a Casarsa (1942), the second is "Poesia in forma di rosa," and the third "Nuova poesia in forma di rosa" (the last two are both dated 1961-64).

It is best to include the entire poem and its Italian translation, as close analysis of "A na fruta" yields essential characteristics of Pasolini's poetics:

Lontàn, eu la to pièl
sblanciada da li rosis
i ti sos una rosa
ch'vif e a no fevela.

Ma quant che drenti al sen
ti nassarà na vòus
ti puartaràs sidina
encia tu la me crous.
Sidina tal sulisu
dal solàr, ta li s-cialis,
ta la ciera dal ort,
tal pulvin da li stalis …

Sidina ta la ciasa
cu li peràulis strentis
tal cour romai pierdút
par un troi di silensi.

A una bambina. Lontana, con la tua pelle sbiancata dalle rose, tu sei una rosa che vive e non parla.

Ma quando nel petto ti nascerà una voce, porterai muta anche tu la mia croce.

Muta sul pavimento del solaio, sulle scale, sulla terra dell'orto, nella polvere delle stalle …

Muta nella casa, con le parole strette nel cuore, ormai perduto per un sentiero di silenzio.

The volume's page presents two separated texts, one in the dialect of Friuli (the language of Pasolini's mother), and the other below it in Italian. It is important to note, by way of introduction, several facts concerning Pasolini's choice of the Friulan dialect. First, from the perspective of thehistory of culture, dialect was "consciously antagonistic toward the logos of standardized Italian, no one's mother tongue." Pasolini embraced the language and life of rural Friuli and its peasants as a counter-Italy in opposition to the fascistic myth of a unified empire and as an escape from the linguistic dictatorship of the day. Second, from the perspective of literary history, Pasolini's poems depart from the use made of dialect in both the bourgeois theatre, where dialect was the language of the audience, and in veristic narrative, where dialect has democratic and "realistic" connotations. Pasolini's poetic dialect is neither a communicative aperture nor the language of "reality," but what Mengaldo has called "una dialettalità introversa." Although a case can be made for anchoring Pasolini's use of dialect to a distinct literary tradition, a study of the specific textual characteristics of his dialect poems within both the thematic and symbolic structures is equally useful for an understanding of the foundation of his poetic practice.

The choice of "A na fruta" for close analysis is in some senses simply pragmatic. The poem contains a significant rose image and thus material for thematic comparison, with the pivotal "Poesia in forma di rosa." It also is a poem that provides insight into Pasolini's poetic theories. As regards the thematics, Pasolini made the roses of the early volumes La meglio gioventù and L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica into a poetic myth which might be linked to a long European lyric tradition beginning with the Roman de la Rose, and he made the rose into a figure which carried a number of more private associations. The rose throughout Pasolini's early poetry is in fact often associated with the figure of his mother. In one exquisite poem she discovers a delicate white rose left on the white sheets of her son's unmade bed. The rose becomes a special trait-d'union and Pasolini does not fail to exploit the connotation given in Christian iconography to the rose as Mary, the link between Heaven and Earth.

The poem "A na fruta" introduces a deceptively simple portrait of a young inhabitant (his mother as a young girl perhaps) of the idyllic realm of Casarsa, where Pasolini spent part of his youth. The speaker of the poem converses with the girl. A number of dynamic and provocative oppositions concerning this figure are established in the first quatrain and developed over the poem's fourteen lines. The girl's pale skin visually contrasts the red of the roses in "la tua pelle sbiancata dalle rose" (i.e., the skin appears whiter in comparison with the red roses). The poem then proceeds to attribute more abstract contrasting qualities to her: "tu sei una rosa che vive e non parla." The two traits of vitality and lack of speech initially seem puzzling, but the symbolic meanings become clearer when the poet explains the way in which the girl will paradoxically become mute when she gains a voice: "Ma quando nel petto ti nascerà una voce, porterai muta anche tu la mia croce."

The female figure's acquisition of a voice follows an itinerary not unlike that of the Passion it seems. However, Pasolini coupled the itinerary of redemption with the suggestion of the plucking of the rose. After the girl bears the cross borne also by the poet, she touches silence and loss suggestive of mere death and not the fullness of eternal life. As she begins to perform her Leopardian "opre femminili" in the third quatrain, her heart shall be "ormai perduto per un sentiero di silenzio." At the time of her sexual maturation, the girl becomes silent, despite her voice or her potential for speech. In this oppositional coupling of the two itineraries of Passion, the two separate paths lead to two views of life. One is the Christian view of the passage through life, implied in the symbol of the cross, in which true, eternal life comes from the individual bearing his own cross. The second is the itinerary followed by the girl and symbolized in the rose. Now the pattern of events of a movementto eternal life is reversed, and is linked also to the idea of the voice and speech.

The phrase "ti nascerà una voce" may provide a way of understanding Pasolini's unusual reversal of Christian symbolism. The notions of birth and voice would benefit from deeper and separate analysis, but can only be treated briefly here, as both pertain more to Pasolini's philosophy than to his poetics. Anna Panicale has pointed out that Pasolini views birth into the world as loss and expropriation, as an end to an infinity of possibilities and expectations present in a pre-existence which birth captures and wrestles into finite, coercive shapes. Because the path to death begins inexorably from the moment of birth, birth itself and existence come to signify to Pasolini the very impossibility of dreams and a future. Such is the fate of our "fruta." The negative implication in the phrase "ti nascerà una voce" become clearer when tied to the concept of birth outlined above. The birth of a voice is another, perhaps final step on the path away from the unbounded state or pre-life.

The topic of voice deserves further attention, since it sheds light on Pasolini's notion of a poetic voice, which is tied, as we shall see, to the rose image. The rose of the poem is in fact juxtaposed to speech. Pasolini writes "rosa che vive e non parla." The rose is on the positive side of juxtaposition of present vitality and the paradoxically silent and future voice. The rose symbolically evokes the qualities associated with a state which precedes (the opening word is 'Lontana") and is thus exempt from the parlare, from voice and, more globally, from language. From a psychoanalytic view, the rose suggests a vital unity which is lost when the child learns verbal language. Because the rose in Pasolini's early poetry is also associated with the mother and the rose of "A na fruta" contrasts with the onset of the voice, one could assert further that Pasolini links the separation from the mother indirectly with the onset of the voice in a manner reminiscent of Jacques Lacan's linking of the development of the psyche with the developments of language acquisition. If one regards the girl's silence not just as a possible early death but as repression both at a psychoanalytic and a societal level, one sees that to Pasolini the onset of language means beginning to learn the Rules, beginning to submit to the power of exterior authority (in Lacanian terms, the movement from the realm of the Imaginary to the Symbolic).

The choice of dialect as the vehicle for the poetry provides another link between the symbolic rose and the poetic as "pre-linguistic." First of all, the dialect poem is distant; like the girl/rose it is "afar" from Language, especially from the language of the hallowed (perhaps "dead") Italian lyric tradition. Contini justifiably writes of Pasolini's use of dialect as a "scandal," and Pasolini has variously been considered in some aspects Hermetic since Friulan is almost unintelligible to the majority of Italian readers, and Symbolist for his choice of a pure, private language as the language of poetry. The dialect poem is also literally distant from the Italian in a spatial sense: the printed page produces a peculiar effect, since the dialect demonstrates the traditional stanzaic shape and poetic traits, while the Italian text is relegated to the bottom of the page in smaller print and across several inches of white space which suggests the resistance between the two texts. In Pasolini's contradictory scheme of things, the dead language (Friulan and dialects are heading toward extinction) is the virgin, living one. Dialect is the language which deploys the poetic messages or form in music, meter, assonance, etc.; thus, poetry and dialect are inseparable and both counteract Language. Yet our understanding of the complexity of Pasolini's use of dialect grows if we take a further step and view the dialect and Italian texts as entering a dialectical relation.

Pasolini wrote the following in a note to an edition of his poems: "Le versioni in italiano a piè di pagina … fanno parte integrante del testo poetico: le ho perciò stese con cura e quasi, idealmente, contemporaneamente al frilano." While the bilingualism of the poetry indubitably is evidence of psychological struggle (between the "maternal" and "paternal" tongues) with social and cultural consequences, from the point of view of the reader, the poetic process is significantly imitated in the process of reading the double poems. The Italian text does not simply refer to some signifieds without first referring to some other verbal forms, the dialect ones. Each text refers to some words already formed in a text, rather than simply to some referent or to a stable, social, standard signified. That the Italian text sends the reader back to another anterior and more mysterious text is crucial. In this movement is the intersection of the thematics of regression and the poetics of regression. In an essay on Friulan poets Pasolini wrote of himself: "il suo regresso da una lingua all'altra—anteriore e infinitamente più pura—era un regresso lungo i gradi dell'essere…. Non potendo impadronirsi per le vie psicologicamente normali del razionale, non poteva che reimmergersi in esso: tornare indietro: rifare quel cammino in un punto del quale la sua fase di felicitàa coincideva con l'incantevole paesaggio casarsese."

The typographical juxtaposition on the page makes more explicit Pasolini's view of the problematic nature of translation. Just as in the movement of the formless into form something is always lost, so intranslation is something inevitably lost, or not grasped. One critic has even advanced the idea that the Italian text destroys the dialect. Pasolini warned his readers in a note to an early edition of words that "nel testo italiano, ho variamente tradotti, ma che in realtà restano intraducibili." Pasolini informs his readers that reality cannot be fully represented in all its originality, but he also presents a claim that dialect and poetry come closer to the real enigmatic text. Significantly, one word stands out in "A na fruta" because it passes untranslated from dialect into Italian and back: "rosa."

The particular linguistic status of the dialect helps us to understand why Pasolini holds it to be, as he has said, "più vicino al mondo." Tzvetan Todorov's [Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des sciences du language] classification of the principal and secondary meanings of language into typologies is useful in this regard. Todorov notes that a secondary meaning can result from what he calls a contiguity of signifiers, and what Charles Bally named evocation by milieu (e. g., pastiche). In "A na fruta," no matter what "sidina" denotes in dialect, the word would take on a special secondary meaning simply by virtue of its marked dialect status. This pinpoints why Pasolini attributes to dialect such an immediacy or closeness to reality: dialect is linked by its use in that milieu to the timeless world of the peasants of Friuli in a nearly Utopian way.

The second poem to be read here followed nearly ten years after "A na fruta," and is the one which gives its name to the volume Poesia in forma di rosa. The volume was written after Pasolini's well-known narrative poem, "Le Ceneri di Gramsci," after what has been called the "Roman period," which includes two novels written in the fifties and his earliest work in cinematic circles. During the years 1961-64, Pasolini's poetic and cinematic practices entered into complex exchanges, as the poet emerged, along with Christian Metz and Umberto Eco, as an important contributor to the debates at the Pesaro Film Festivals on the semiology of cinema. It is essential to understand that the volume Poesia in forma di rosa marks the disintegration of the poet's faith in the peasant world, or the sub-proletarians of the Roman novels, to withstand the onslaught of what Pasolini views as the homologizing forces of neo-capitalist consumerism, which came on the tails of the so-called "economic miracle" of the sixties in Italy. The latter is seen to blur class distinction, and hence to impede class struggle, turning even the peasantry into petit-bourgeois greedy for washing machines. The volume holds altogether new landscapes, often connected with travels in Pasolini's film directing to Guinea, Israel, and Africa which, to a certain extent, replaces Friuli and the Roman slums as the stronghold against the new forces of capitalism.

The volume is Pasolini's most autobiographical work, and draws the portrait of an alluring, powerful personality quite different from that of the influential public figure whose byline appeared on the front page of Corriere della sera. The poet mercilessly derides himself, ironically referring to himself as a "bestia ferita," a "Don Chisciotte di tre anni, un Orlando noioso." There are accounts of his night wanderings, of the judiciary proceedings he underwent. Fear of solitude and isolation pervades, with weeping confessions, which serve, as Enzo Siciliano has pointed out, to cure a division of self. The sense of marginality in the poet is so great that the narrative coherence of earlier poems of the fifties like "Le Ceneri di Gramsci" is eroded. At the same time, the probing of open wounds results in a strength when Pasolini holds up his own homosexual love, seen to separate him from the world, as "amore infecondo e purissimo." Single-handed, the self pitches a battle against the monster consumerism, with its mental and physical pollution. Pasolini alone must preserve everything that his young "fruta" had been, and ironically but half seriously he calls himself a "feto adulto."

"Poesia in forma di rosa" is nearly two hundred lines long and rather unwieldy. It was written in a modified terza rima, and is essentially a monologue with a tenuous narrative thread: a taxi ride from Fiumicino airport. Movement to disillusion constitutes a second narrative organization, reflected in a substructuring system, the form of the rose, as each of five roses or petals is plucked (each carries a certain thematic), until none are left. This "plucking of the rose" also suggests dismemberment of the poet, since the petals are said to be strewn on the taxi floor. The poet has become the place of oppositions and contradictions which form the subject matter of the poem. I shall have to limit my discussion of the thematic aspects, and focus on Pasolini's poetic language as it emerges here. It is useful to quote several stanzas:

Ho sbagliato tutto, Fiumicino
riapparso di tra nuvole di fango,
è ancora più vecchio di me.

I resti del vecchio Pasolini
sui profili dell' agro … tuguri
e ammassi di grattacieli …

È una rosa carnale di dolore,
con cinque rose incarnate,
cancri di rosa nella rosa

prima: in principio era il Dolore.
Ed eccolo, Uno e Cinquino.
La prima rosa seriore significa

ah, una puntura di morfina! aiuto!

This rose is hardly the earlier fragrant white rose on white sheets, for the poet immediately evokes carnality and disease. A strange contaminatio generates this new, hybrid rose. Pasolini adopts the liturgical language of the holy mystery of the trinity, and a primal grief/rose supplants the biblical verbum of gospel beginnings. The rose is "uno e cinquino," with familiar primal unity. It is of the beginnings, an age before the word became flesh (reminiscent of the birth of "A na fruta"; it is pre-articulation. Despite the different, growing number of branches of the Unity (five rather than three), this rose is still the rose of poetry, "che vive e non parla," although she has been thrown into the mud. Pasolini's words again verge on heresy, but provide a clue to the nature of his religiosity, defined by Scalia as "l'ossessione della crisi di ogni re-ligio."

Another characteristic of the functioning of the language of "Poesia in forma di rosa" parallels that found in "A na fruta." The concept of evocation by milieu has been mentioned in connection with Pasolini's use of dialect, along with the notion that signification comes about by referring to an anterior text. Clearly, in "Poesia in forma di rosa," the text evoked is St. John's Gospel. In the later poem, two texts in a problematic relationship (Pasolini's and the Bible) are not separated on the page as in the dialect poems, and stylization has slipped into parody. Nevertheless, the poetics and thematics of juxtaposition are present. The "sous-systèmes" of the poem call each other in turn into question, and their interaction says more than either could convey alone.

A brief excursion into stylistic analysis of the poem reveals something of what the various sub-systems are. There appear to be two different textual movements: one in the direction of disorder, and one in the direction of order. Within the first category fall the fractured narrative discourse, the chaotic rhythms of Pasolini's hendecasyllables, and the ironic modes which engage ambiguity. In the second category falls the patterning of the terza rima, a return, though subversive, to tradition. The terza rima provides an appropriate vehicle for the narrative precisely because of its nature as a continuum. The second movement to order is found in the rose as the main element of structure. An internal form, it generates poetry and content because each of its petals carries a thematic, and each is sequentially dismissed. Furthermore, each petal spans roughtly five tercets, except the central one which contains ten tercets. The two movements in different directions, to order and its opposite, cannot easily be made homologous or concentric, although in a "contest," the movement to order in the straightforward structure of the rose tugs hardest, and the rose provides a substantial, if artificial, alternate organization of meaning.

Pasolini's concept of the poetic word is further elucidated in the contents of the third petal of the poem, a lengthy narration in which barbarians dressed in the American shirts of charity overrun Europe in a future pre-history dubbed "la Nuova Preistoria." The mysterious account reads like a prophecy, though at one level it stages a future decline of Neo-capitalism. Pasolini spoke of the prophetic aspect of this work as his "cursus del Vecchio Testamento." His coupling of the poetic and the prophetic (a series of poems in the volume has the title "Profezie") reveals a new Pasolini-Jeremiah.

Maurice Blanchot writes that the prophetic word in the form of dreams, possession, the burning bush, "s'impose du dehors, elle est le dehors même, le poids et la souf-france du Dehors." The prophet's word also refers to a word already formed. In prophecy meaning is imperative, for "il n'y a pas de refuge contre ce sens qui partout nous poursuit, nous précède … The prophet and poet touch that totality of meaning and combat its reduction into the misleading Language. The imperative of meaning, and its difficult translation, is crucial to a comprehension of Pasolini's theory of the cinema as the written language of reality, what Pasolini calls the "magma," an overwhelming, beloved, impelling, and infinite exterior. In prophecy the word equals reality, though there may be a gap between the time of utterance and fulfillment. For Pasolini, the cinema and reality became synonomous. Anna Panicale is right when she states that Pasolini "chiede che la poesia si faccia uguale alia vita…."

Pasolini called his second rendering of "Poesia in forma di rosa" the "imbarazzanti calligrammes / del mio vile piagnisteo." The stanzas of this "Nuova poesia in forma di rosa" resemble rose petals, but the iconic nature of this representation should not be exaggerated, since some of Pasolini's earlier poems in L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica appeared in a similar form. A single word opens each stanza and is centered. Underneath, two or three words are centered, and so on, until the pyramid structure reverses its order and diminishes and the last line is composed of a single word. The number of words per line grows until, at the center, they flow into prose stretching to both margins, and are ordered back into a reverse hierarchy. This visual organization subverts the syntactic reading, in what Giovanni Pozzi calls "una crisi di rapporti fra immagine e segno." Again, Pasolini challenges language as the power to dictate meaning, and an alternative production of meaning emerges as the iconic signs acquire a new role, symptomatic, perhaps of Pasolini's increasing use of the cinematic medium.

The "Nuova poesia in forma di rosa" leaves little room for any poetic mystery in its contents. Significantly, the plucking of petals doubles as a reading of the petals. Openly declaring the rose to be a text, Pasolini grieves in the last stanza: "sfogliai una vana rosa." Bitter irony prevails, as he calls up Dante's text this time, the opening lines of the heady Paradiso XXXI: "In forma dunque di Candida rosa / mi si mostrava la milizia santa." Dante had contemplated tiers of illustrious souls in the Celestial Rose, angels swooping like bees to drink from the flower. Pasolini contemplates the motley troops of Italian literary life, his friends of the nineteen fifties and sixties: Leonetti "Da redattore rifatto formica": Roversi "come un monaco di clausura / diventato pazzo." Moravia who "ci lascia soli a dibatterci in questi spregevoli problemi letterari / vecchi come il cucco."

The dominance of the ironical mode signals a new direction in Pasolini's poetry. Later poems acknowledge the death of poetry. The poet lies down in solitude: "in ogni campo mona kateudo, eora tocca a altri" we read in Le poesie. Pasolini finds it fruitless to oppose poetry, with its connotations of freedom, to the pervasiveness of a system of repression by permissiveness and false sense of well-being. The koiné has consolidated its territory, and Pasolini seeks a new way to free poetry from its stylish service to the bourgeois class, which he feels has espoused and co-opted its problematic nature. In cinema, Pasolini will find a better instrument or technique to grasp the already formed and mysterious text of reality, to grasp and save it.

The subject of Pasolini's theory and practice of cinema is complex, and critics (especially his biographer Enzo Siciliano) have examined the significance of the poet's change of artistic medium at length. Pasolini's own views of his practice also evolved over a period of years. Factors worthy of note are: Pasolini's desire to protest against the Italian nation by choosing an artistic form he believed to be transnational; his belief that cinema is less institutional in its codes ("La sua operazione non può essere linguistica ma stilistica"); and his conviction that cinema, with its use of the image, provides a technique for "una specie di ritorno alle; origini: fino a ritrovare nei mezzi tecnici del cinema l'originaria qualità onirica, barbarica, originale, irregolare, aggressiva, visionaria."

Perhaps the most controversial of his theoretical tenets was the claim that cinema constituted the written language of reality. An extract from his article "Res sunt nomina" illustrates Pasolini's idea, testifying to the lyrical nature of even his theoretical writings: "Prendiamo questo Joaquim: egli si presenta ai miei occhi, in un ambiente (la spiaggia di Barra, sotto il Corcovado), e si esprime, prima con la pura e semplice presenza fisica, il suo corpo; poi con la mimica (il modo di camminare non solo espressivo in se, ma reso appositamente tale per comunicare certe cose in un certo modo all'osservatore), infine con la lingua orale. Ma questi tre mezzi non sono che tre momenti di un solo linguaggio: il linguaggio di Joaquim vivente…"

According to Pasolini, the cinema reproduces and best captures in images what has already been made a cipher, a pre-existing system. For him, Reality, now capitalized, forms an infinitely polysemous semiotic system, whose signs are objects subject to aesthetic organization, just as the signs of verbal language can be poetic. One has access to the text of Reality in several ways: Pasolini writes that the written-spoken language evokes Reality, referring to it "con tutto ciò di regressivo che ciò implica." This special form of translation stands in opposition to the cinema as "traduzioni per riproduzione." Antonio Costa finds that Pasolini tried to establish between visual and verbal signification the same kind of relationship which the poet previously posited between dialect and standard Italian. All systems attempting to capture the original text of Reality fall short, however, and "In realtà non c'é significato: perché anche il significato è un segno."

This endless chain of representing falls short of possessing what Andrea Zanzotto called Pasolini's "aldilà della lingua … quella totalità che il cinema vorrebbe essere e metaforizza." In his cinema Pasolini has changed the instruments of his incantation, but his activity is still that of a poet.