Chartbook #210 – The Partisans descending from their graves – Pasolini’s “Victory”, April 25th 1964

April 25th is the commemorative day for the final liberation of Italy from fascist rule. It is the occasion for memorials of various stripes. On the left it is the Partisans who stand at the heart of collective memory.

In Italy as elsewhere in Europe, the Communist and Socialist parties were the main forces in the resistance. Their memorial day carried a powerful memory of the sacrifices made by those who fought, moment of liberation and the possibilities that seemed open then. But, as the years passed, European society was marked not so much simply by Cold War restoration as by a whirlwind of neocapitalist transformation. With spectacular economic growth, urbanization, motorization and the birth of consumer society, a social and economic revolution had arrived. But, not the one that was imagined in 1945. The commemoration of the liberation and the radical and revolutionary tradition thus took on an increasingly ambiguous and bittersweet aspect.

No one reflected on this transition more urgently than the polymath, poet, filmmaker, activist, critic Pier Paolo Pasolini.

On 25 April 1945 Pasolini was 23. He had been, as he described himself, a partisan without arms. His brother who had joined the liberal-socialist partisans associated with the Party of Action, was killed in an ambush by Communist-aligned partisans. Piero Paolo Pasolini himself went on to join the Communist Party but was expelled. The party was scandalized by his open homosexuality and left Pasolini to face relentless legal persecution.

The collection of poems that earned Pasolini fame in 1957 was, not for nothing, entitled, Gramsci’s Ashes.

For Gramsci’s Ashes and much more, I highly recommend The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini with a truly marvelous introduction by Stephen Sartarelli which merits a long essay all of its own. As he makes clear, Pasolini sought to weave the very forces of history and history’s disintegration into his poetry. Pasolini’s struggle was to “remain “equal to a present reality [attualità] that one does not possess ideologically.”” A struggle made all the more difficult by the fact that history itself was disintegrating and taking on new forms in the face of the onslaught of neocapitalism.

In the poem Victory, written for April 25 1964, Pasolini reflects in a haunting fashion on the appearance of the ghosts of the Partisans amongst the transformed world of “postwar” Italy.

The poem is available in translation, online at the ZNetwork website.

VICTORYby Pier Paolo Pasolinitranslated by Norman MacAfee with Luciano MartinengoWhere are the weapons?I have only those of my reasonand in my violence there is no placefor even the trace of an act that is notintellectual. Is it laughableif, suggested by my dream on thisgray morning, which the dead can seeand other dead too will see but for usis just another morning,I scream words of struggle?Who knows what will become of meat noon, but the old poet is “ab joy”who speaks like a lark or a starling ora young man longing to die.Where are the weapons? The old dayswill not return, I know; the redAprils of youth are gone.Only a dream, of joy, can opena season of armed pain.I who was an unarmed Partisan,mystical, beardless, nameless,now I sense in life the horriblyperfumed seed of the Resistance.In the morning the leaves are stillas they once were on the Tagliamentoand Livenza — it is not a storm comingor the night falling. It is the absenceof life, contemplating itself,distanced from itself, intent onunderstanding those terrible yet sereneforces that still fill it — aroma of April!an armed youth for each blade of grass,each a volunteer longing to die.. . . . . . . . .Good. I wake up and — for the first timein my life I want to take up arms.Absurd to say it in poetry— and to four friends from Rome, two from Parmawho will understand me in this nostalgiaideally translated from the German, in this archeologicalcalm, which contemplates a sunny, depopulatedItaly, home of barbaric Partisans who descendthe Alps and Apennines, down the ancient roads. . .My fury comes only at the dawn.At noon I will be with my countrymenat work, at meals, at reality, which raisesthe flag, white today, of General Destinies.And you, communists, my comrades/noncomrades,shadows of comrades, estranged first cousinslost in the present as well as the distant,unimagined days of the future, you, namelessfathers who have heard calls thatI thought were like mine, whichburn now like fires abandonedon cold plains, along sleepingrivers, on bomb-quarried mountains. . . .. . . . . . . . .I take upon myself all the blame (my oldvocation, unconfessed, easy work)for our desperate weakness,because of which millions of us,all with a life in common, could notpersist to the end. It is over,let us sing along, tralala: They are falling,fewer and fewer, the last leaves ofthe War and the martyred victory,destroyed little by little by whatwould become reality,not only dear Reaction but also the birth ofbeautiful social-democracy, tralala.I take (with pleasure) on myself the guiltfor having left everything as it was:for the defeat, for the distrust, for the dirtyhopes of the Bitter Years, tralla.And I will take upon myself the tormentingpain of the darkest nostalgia,which summons up regretted thingswith such truth as to almostresurrect them or reconstruct the shatteredconditions that made them necessary (trallallallalla). . . .. . . . . . . . .Where have the weapons gone, peacefulproductive Italy, you who have no importance in the world?In this servile tranquility, which justifiesyesterday’s boom, today’s bust — from the sublimeto the ridiculous and in the most perfect solitude,j’accuse! Not, calm down, the Government or the Latifundiaor the Monopolies — but rather their high priests,Italy’s intellectuals, all of them,even those who rightly call themselvesmy good friends. These must have been the worstyears of their lives: for having accepteda reality that did not exist. The resultof this conniving, of this embezzling of ideals,is that the real reality now has no poets.(I? I am desiccated, obsolete.)Now that Togliatti has exited amidthe echoes from the last bloody strikes,old, in the company of the prophets, who, alas, were right — I dream of weaponshidden in the mud, the elegiac mudwhere children play and old fathers toil —while from the gravestones melancholy falls,the lists of names crack,the doors of the tombs explode,and the young corpses in the overcoatsthey wore in those years, the loose-fittingtrousers, the military cap on their Partisan’shair, descend, along the wallswhere the markets stand, down the pathsthat join the town’s vegetable gardensto the hillsides. They descend from their graves, young menwhose eyes hold something other than love:a secret madness, of men who fightas though called by a destiny different from their own.With that secret that is no longer a secret,they descend, silent, in the dawning sun,and, though so close to death, theirs is the happy treadof those who will journey far in the world.But they are the inhabitants of the mountains, of the wildshores of the Po, of the remotest placeson the coldest plains. What are they doing here?They have come back, and no one can stop them. They do not hidetheir weapons, which they hold without grief or joy,and no one looks at them, as though blinded by shameat that obscene flashing of guns, at that tread of vultureswhich descend to their obscure duty in the sunlight.. . . . . . . . .Who has the courage to tell themthat the ideal secretly burning in their eyesis finished, belongs to another time, that the childrenof their brothers have not fought for years,and that a cruelly new history has producedother ideals, quietly corrupting them?. . .Rough like poor barbarians, they will touchthe new things that in these two decades humancruelty has procured, things incapable of movingthose who seek justice. . . .But let us celebrate, let us open the bottlesof the good wine of the Cooperative. . . .To always new victories, and new Bastilles!Rafosco, Bacò. . . . Long life!To your health, old friend! Strength, comrade!And best wishes to the beautiful party!From beyond the vineyards, from beyond the farm pondscomes the sun: from the empty graves,from the white gravestones, from that distant time.But now that they are here, violent, absurd,with the strange voices of emigrants,hanged from lampposts, strangled by garrotes,who will lead them in the new struggle?Togliatti himself is finally old,as he wanted to be all his life,and he holds alarmed in his breast,like a pope, all the love we have for him,though stunted by epic affection,loyalty that accepts even the most inhumanfruit of a scorched lucidity, tenacious as a scabie.“All politics is Realpolitik,” warringsoul, with your delicate anger!You do not recognize a soul other than this onewhich has all the prose of the clever man,of the revolutionary devoted to the honestcommon man (even the complicitywith the assassins of the Bitter Years graftedonto protector classicism, which makesthe communist respectable): you do not recognize the heartthat becomes slave to its enemy, and goeswhere the enemy goes, led by a historythat is the history of both, and makes them, deep down,perversely, brothers; you do not recognize the fearsof a consciousness that, by struggling with the world,shares the rules of the struggle over the centuries,as through a pessimism into which hopesdrown to become more virile. Joyouswith a joy that knows no hidden agenda,this army — blind in the blindsunlight — of dead young men comesand waits. If their father, their leader, absorbedin a mysterious debate with Power and boundby its dialectics, which history renews ceaselessly —if he abandons them,in the white mountains, on the serene plains,little by little in the barbaric breastsof the sons, hate becomes love of hate,burning only in them, the few, the chosen.Ah, Desperation that knows no laws!Ah, Anarchy, free loveof Holiness, with your valiant songs!. . . . . . . . .I take also upon myself the guilt for tryingbetraying, for struggling surrendering,for accepting the good as the lesser evil,symmetrical antinomies that I holdin my fist like old habits. . . .All the problems of man, with their awful statementsof ambiguity (the knot of solitudesof the ego that feels itself dyingand does not want to come before God naked):all this I take upon myself, so that I can understand,from the inside, the fruit of this ambiguity:a beloved man, in this uncalculatedApril, from whom a thousand youthsfallen from the world beyond await, trusting, a signthat has the force of a faith without pity,to consecrate their humble rage.Pining away within Nenni is the uncertaintywith which he re-entered the game, and the skillfulcoherence, the accepted greatness,with which he renounced epic affection,though his soul could claim titleto it: and, exiting a Brechtian stageinto the shadows of the backstage,where he learns new words for reality, the uncertainhero breaks at great cost to himself the chainthat bound him, like an old idol, to the people,giving a new grief to his old age.The young Cervis, my brother Guido,the young men of Reggio killed in 1960,with their chaste and strong and faithfuleyes, source of the holy light,look to him, and await his old words.But, a hero by now divided, he lacksby now a voice that touches the heart:he appeals to the reason that is not reason,to the sad sister of reason, which wantsto understand the reality within reality, with a passionthat refuses any extremism, any temerity.What to say to them? That reality has a new tension,which is what it is, and by now one hasno other course than to accept it. . . .That the revolution becomes a desertif it is always without victory. . . that it may not betoo late for those who want to win, but not with the violenceof the old, desperate weapons. . . .That one must sacrifice coherenceto the incoherence of life, attempt a creatordialogue, even if that goes against our conscience.That the reality of even this small, stingyState is greater than us, is always an awesome thing:and one must be part of it, however bitter that is. . . .But how do you expect them to be reasonable,this band of anxious men who left — asthe songs say — home, bride,life itself, specifically in the name of Reason?. . . . . . . . .But there may be a part of Nenni’s soul that wantsto say to these comrades — come from the world beyond,in military clothes, with holes in the solesof their bourgeois shoes, and their youthinnocently thirsting for blood —to shout: “Where are the weapons? Come on, let’sgo, get them, in the haystacks, in the earth,don’t you see that nothing has changed?Those who were weeping still weep.Those of you who have pure and innocent hearts,go and speak in the middle of the slums,in the housing projects of the poor,who behind their walls and their alleyshide the shameful plague, the passivity of thosewho know they are cut off from the days of the future.Those of you who have a heartdevoted to accursed lucidity,go into the factories and schoolsto remind the people that nothing in these years haschanged the quality of knowing, eternal pretext,sweet and useless form of Power, never of truth.Those of you who obey an honestold imperative of religiongo among the children who grow with hearts empty of real passion,to remind them that the new evilis still and always the division of the world. Finally,those of you to whom a sad accident of birthin families without hope gave the thick shoulders, the curlyhair of the criminal, dark cheekbones, eyes without pity —go, to start with, to the Crespis, to the Agnellis,to the Vallettas, to the potentates of the companiesthat brought Europe to the shores of the Po:and for each of them comes the hour that has noequal to what they have and what they hate.Those who have stolen from the common goodprecious capital and whom no law canpunish, well, then, go and tie them up with the ropeof massacres. At the end of the Piazzale Loretothere are still, repainted, a fewgas pumps, red in the quietsunlight of the springtime that returnswith its destiny: It is time to make it again a burial ground!”. . . . . . . . .They are leaving . . . Help! They are turning away,their backs beneath the heroic coatsof beggars and deserters. . . . How serene arethe mountains they return to, so lightlythe submachine guns tap their hips, to the treadof the sun setting on the intactforms of life, which has become what it was beforeto its very depths. Help, they are going away! — back to theirsilent worlds in Marzabotto or Via Tasso. . . .With the broken head, our head, humbletreasure of the family, big head of the second-born,my brother resumes his bloody sleep, alone among the dried leaves, in the sereneretreats of a wood in the pre-Alps, lost inthe golden peace of an interminable Sunday. . . .. . . . . . . . .And yet, this is a day of victory.1964Translation copyright © 1982, 2005 by Norman MacAfeeCopyright © 1964 by Aldo Garzanti Editore

If you would like to read Victory in print along with other fascinating poems and essays I recommend In Danger. A Pasolini Anthology by Jack Hirschman published by Citylights.

Pasolini was killed in 1975 in mysterious circumstances. For those interested, this documentary is fabulous.

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