Pier Paolo Pasolini’s love affair with the city of Rome began in 1950, when he was in his late 20s. He had come there from Casarsa, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, after a scandal involving three boys in the small town of Ramuscello. His adored, and adoring, mother Susanna was, as always, with him. He lived for a year or so with a family named Castaldi at Piazza Costaguti while Susanna worked as a live-in maid for another family called Pediconi a few doors away.
During those first paradisiacal months he befriended Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani (who published one of his poems, an impassioned farewell to Friuli, in Friulian dialect, in the literary journal Botteghe Oscure, which Bassani edited) and Carlo Emilio Gadda. Then, in the spring of 1951, he was offered a teaching job in the Francesco Petrarca school in Ciampino, on the far outskirts of Rome, which his biographer Enzo Siciliano describes as a “shantytown”. He was offered a salary of 27,000 lire a month. Modest as it was, it ensured that Pasolini and Susanna could afford to rent a house in the Rebibbia district. They put respectable Rome behind them for a while and settled in Ponte Mammolo, which was as rough and rundown as Ciampino. Their neighbours were the dispossessed.
This move to the malign suburbs was to change Pasolini’s creative life for ever. The language that regaled him every day had little in common with accepted, and acceptable, Italian. There were words from Calabria, from Naples, from Sicily and Sardinia. He wrote them down as soon as he heard them. His pupils in the ruined building in Ciampino were aged between 11 and 13, and they all came from families who were just about surviving. One of them, a boy named Vincenzo Cerami, would later become a poet, novelist and screenwriter.
Pasolini read Dante to the children, and encouraged them to collect the songs and nursery rhymes their parents had passed on to them when they were very young. By the time he finished teaching, in 1953, he had gained enough confidence to write in Romanaccio (literally, “ugly Roman”), the dialect of the slums, “the privileged language of the poor, blessed by God”, as he once claimed.
Ponte Mammolo and Ciampino are miles apart, and Pasolini had to ride on three different trams to get between them. It was on these journeys that his new vocabulary increased. He dressed casually, like a “premature beatnik”, according to Siciliano, in order not to give the appearance of being a middle-class intruder. He became known to the boys he met as Giacche Palànce, because of his facial resemblance to the American actor Jack Palance.
One friend in particular, Sergio Citti, whom Pasolini first encountered in 1951 when Citti was 18 and newly released from a reform school, was to exert a lasting influence on him. Citti, who knew Romanaccio at first hand, was intelligent enough to appreciate its nuances. He was Pasolini’s lexicographer during the years which saw the publication of Ragazzi di Vita and Una Vita Violenta (A Violent Life) and the making of his first film Accattone (1961).
Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of Elena Ferrante’s remarkable novels, has given her translation of Ragazzi di Vita the unpromising title The Street Kids. The book has appeared in English before as The Ragazzi and The Hustlers. Neither is satisfactory, but the one Goldstein has chosen strikes me as being even less appropriate. It is redolent of a certain sentimental cosiness, as demonstrated in those very popular Hollywood B-movies of the 1930s, 40s and 50s: starring a group of young actors know as the Dead End Kids or the Bowery Boys, including Leo Gorcey, whose every utterance contained a malapropism. It’s certainly true that Pasolini’s ragazzi have their lighter moments, especially when they are playing football or diving into the Aniene in Lazio. They can be chirpy on occasions, when they have sufficient lire for a bowl of pasta or some cheap wine, but it is never less than clear that these are youngsters who have been pretty horribly brutalised.
Pasolini’s first novel opens in the last days of the second world war. Rome is in a ruinous condition. The military police are everywhere. The Germans are still a presence. Then, in the second chapter, it is 1946, but there is little sense of a promising future. Riccetto, Agnolo, the chronically sick Marcello, Alvaro, Caciotta and the rest have to live day by day, by their wits. A school, housing several families, suddenly collapses. (Was Pasolini thinking of his old school in Ciampino?) Riccetto, the principal character, is about as antiheroic as it’s possible to get – stealing money from the blind and from vulnerable old women; selling himself in the gardens of the Villa Borghese – yet he attains a certain heroic grandeur, so intent is he on surviving in a society that offers scant opportunity for survival.
It is very much to Pasolini’s purpose that Riccetto appears at the beginning and the end of Ragazzi di Vita. At the start, we see him taking communion “in his long grey pants and white shirt” from the priest Don Pizzuto, prior to being confirmed by the bishop, along with the other good little white-shirted boys. Instead of staying on to celebrate this monumental day in a young Catholic’s life, he does a bunk to meet up with his pals. At the end, he walks away from a tragic accident, alone and seemingly impregnable.
The book was written while neorealism – in both literature and film – was still in fashion in Italy. Films such as Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and the great novels of Cesare Pavese, which have been curiously overlooked in Britain, remain important works from that period. Pasolini’s novel is neorealistic in essence, but when it was published in 1955 it managed to displease many critics of a Marxist or liberal persuasion who, it was assumed, would be the most likely to praise it. There is nothing in the narrative, they pointed out, to suggest that these wasted lives might be changed for the better – as they would be under communism, of course.
The church took a different, predictable stance, declaring the novel obscene. It is a rare talent who can unite both the right and the left in such vehement hatred, but Pasolini managed to do so up until his terrible death in 1975 and beyond. Ragazzi di Vita was banned briefly, and a case brought against the publisher Garzanti, which was thrown out of court, but it sold well, being reprinted several times for over a decade.
In an interview in the Paris Review, William Weaver – the translator whom Calvino, Bassani and Umberto Eco entrusted with their work – admitted that the only translation he was unhappy with was the one he made of Pasolini’s Una Vita Violenta. The street-talk strained his linguistic skills to the utmost. Goldstein, in tackling its predecessor, has faced a similar problem. She uses words like “twerp” and “twit” – this last in the mouth of Amerigo, a heartless and brutal criminal – which sound far too posh and frivolous. She renders osteria as “tavern” throughout. When, pray, or even forsooth, did anyone last enter a tavern? Not in my lifetime, methinks. Surely the all-encompassing “bar” would have been a wiser, even more accurate, choice.
The word froscio, which can’t be found in standard Italian-English dictionaries, she translates as “faggot” and froscetto as “fag”. These won’t do, not least for historical reasons. If “queer” is good enough for William Burroughs, it’s totally appropriate in the scene where the desperate, effeminate man is overcome with lust at the sight and size of Riccetto’s crotch. “Faggot” is too theatrical, too camp, and far too familiar from hundreds of American novels. We are in the 1940s, when to be queer was to be an outcast – which is what the man is, and the boys who are taunting and humiliating him are outcasts, too.
I reread The Street Kids alongside my copy of the original, which dates from the 1960s. It was strange to see the word “culo” spelt with a “c” followed by three asterisks. Such primness in a work the church deemed obscene is sweetly comic. Pasolini offers many variations on culo, which becomes “ass” here, and has his boys say “vaffan’” (“go fuck yourself”), which is common in colloquial Italian.
Goldstein’s translation works best when Pasolini is at his simplest, with beautiful descriptions of the city by day and night, and those passages in which he accounts for Marcello’s illness and Amerigo’s ascent into something resembling dignity. She tends to be a word-for-word translator, which has its risks, as in this plonker of a sentence: “At the same time, however, he did not, by being a serious youth, give up the other temptations and occupations of a smartass son of a bitch, such as the others continued to be.”
Ragazzi di Vita comes with a glossary in Italian, to remind readers of their ignorance of street talk. When the boys seem to be singing about clogs, for example, they are actually serenading prostitutes, of whom there are many in the tableaux-like narrative. In recent years, critics of a romantic inclination have taken to print to declare that Pasolini presaged his own violent murder in the two novels he wrote in the 1950s. What is certain is that in Ragazzi di Vita and Una Vita Violenta he presented, in prose of an often incomparable beauty, the view from the bottom of the human heap. No one else has done it with such fervour or such grandeur. It was his religion to do so.
