Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Divine Mimesis (1975–) [ES, EN]

“Written between 1963 and 1967, The Divine Mimesis, Pasolini’s imitation of the early cantos of the Inferno, offers a searing critique of Italian society and the intelligentsia of the 1960s. It is also a self-critique by the author of The Ashes of Gramsci (1957) who saw the civic world evoked by that book fading absolutely from view. By the mid-1960s, Pasolini theorized, the Italian language had sacrificed its connotative expressiveness for the sake of a denuded technological language of pure communication. In this context, he projects a ‘rewrite’ of Dante’s Commedia in which two historical embodiments of Pasolini himself occupy the roles of the pilgrim and guide in their underworld journey.

Densely layered with poetic and philological allusions, and illuminated by a parallel text of photographs that juxtapose the world of the Italian literati to the simple reality of rural Italian life, this narrative was curtailed by Pasolini several years before he sent it to his publisher, a few months prior to his murder in 1975. Yet, many of Pasolini’s projects took the provisional form of “Notes toward…” an eventual work, such as Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Scouting in Palestine), Appunti per una Oresteiade africana (Notes for an African Oresteia), and Appunti per un film sull’India (Notes for a Film on India). The Divine Mimesis has a kinship to these filmic works as Pasolini himself ruled it ‘complete’ though still in a partial form.

Written at a turning point in his life when he was wrestling with his poetic ‘demons,’ the true center of gravity of Pasolini’s Dantean project is the potential of poetry to teach and probe, ethically and aesthetically, in reality. “I wanted to make something seething and magmatic,” Pasolini declared, “even if in prose.”

In this first English translation of Pasolini’s La divina mimesis, Italianist Thomas E. Peterson offers historical, linguistic, and cultural analyses that aim to expand the discourse about an enigmatic author considered by many to be the greatest Italian poet after Montale.”

First published as La divina mimesis, Einaudi, Turin, 1975.

English edition
Translated by Thomas Erling Peterson
Publisher Double Dance Press, Berkeley, 1980
139 pages
HT Ken, via c0st1c

Review: Thomas Sanfilip (Literary Yard 2016).
Commentary: Manuele Gragnolati (2012).

Publisher (2014 EN edition)
WorldCat (EN)

La divina mímesis (Spanish, trans. Julia Adinolfi, 1976)
The Divine Mimesis (English, trans. Thomas Erling Peterson, 1980, 4 MB)
Introduction to 2014 edition of EN translation

The Birth of Digital Populism: Crowd, Power and Postdemocracy in the 21st Century (2015) [EN, IT]

“The Five Star Movement led by Grillo & Casaleggio had an unexpected success in the Italian general elections of February 2013, deeply disrupting the panorama of Italian politics. This book seeks to explore some of the features characterising the emergence of a new political phenomenon: digital populism. We asked Italian and English thinkers from different political and disciplinary backgrounds to contribute to an analysis of some fundamental points behind the rise of populism and the digital relations between masses, power and democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The book features nine interviews carried out between May 2013 and February 2014 with Luciana Parisi, Tiziana Terranova, Lapo Berti, Simon Choat, Godani Paul, Saul Newman, Jussi Parikka, Tony D. Sampson and Alberto Toscano.”

Published in January 2015
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
84 pages

Five Star Movement on Wikipedia
Editors

PDF: English, Italian
Issuu: English, Italian

Lucio Magri: The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century (2009/2011)

A fascinating analysis and account of the decline and fall of Western communism by a participant observer.

Twenty years have passed since the Italian Communists’ last Congress in 1991, in which the death of their party was decreed. It was a deliberate death, accelerated by the desire for a “new beginning.” That new beginning never came, and the world lost an invaluable, complex political, organizational and theoretical heritage.

In this detailed and probing work, Lucio Magri, one of the towering intellectual figures of the Italian Left, assesses the causes for the demise of what was once one of the most powerful and vibrant communist parties of the West. The PCI marked almost a century of Italian history, from its founding in 1921 to the partisan resistance, the turning point of Salerno in 1944 to the de-Stalinization of 1956, the long ’68 to the “historic compromise,” and to the opportunity—missed forever—of democratic transformation.

With rigor and passion, The Tailor of Ulm merges an original and enlightening interpretation of Italian communism with the experience of a militant “heretic” into a riveting read—capable of broadening our insights into contemporary Italy, and the twentieth-century communist experience.

First published as Il Sarto di Ulm, il Saggiatore SPA, Milan, 2009
Translated by Patrick Camiller
Publisher Verso, 2011
ISBN 1844676986, 9781844676989
434 pages

review (Donald Sassoon, The Observer)
review (John Green, review31)

publisher
google books

PDF