I got an email from Bob Farace the other day. Bob lives in New York and can trace his family back to Minori, a small village just east of Amalfi. He wrote to tell me he enjoyed Vroom with a View and how it reminded him of a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The poem is called Il Pianto della Scavatrice – The Tears of the Excavator.
Bob sent me a small section of the poem, translated by Norman MacAffee.
I’d like to share it with you:
Only loving, only knowing
matter, not past love
nor past knowlege. Living
matter, not past love
nor past knowlege. Living
a consummated love
is agonizing. The soul no longer grows.
And in the dark enchanted heat,
down here along the curving
river with its drowsy sights
of the city touched with lights,
the night still echoes with a thousand lives;
while the estrangement, mystery, misery
of the senses cut me off from
the world’s shapes, which were till
yesterday my reason for living.
Bored, tired, I return home, across
dark marketplaces, down sad streets
near the river docks between shacks
and warehouses mingling with the countryside’s
last fields, where there’s a deathly
silence, though farther along, at Viale Marconi,
at Trastevere Station, the evening’s
still sweet. To their neighborhoods,
their slums, the young return on light
motorbikes, in overalls and workpants;
but propelled by festive fire,
with a friend behind on the saddle
laughing and dirty. In the night
the last customers stand talking
loudly, amid the little tables of nearly
empty but still brightly lit cafés.
