De Italiaans filmregisseur, dichter en schrijver Pier Paolo Pasolini werd geboren in Bologna op 5 maart 1922. In 1939 ging hij studeren aan de universiteit van Bologna. Hij publiceerde zijn eerste gedichtenbundel (Poesie a Casarsa) in 1941. Tijdens de toen aan de gang zijnde WO II werd hij in het leger opgenomen en raakte hij later in Duitse krijgsgevangenschap waaruit hij echter wist te ontvluchten. Na de oorlog werd hij lid van de Communistische Partij van Italië; het lidmaatschap werd hem echter een paar jaar later weer ontnomen toen hij er openlijk voor uitkwam homoseksueel te zijn. Na zijn studies in Bologna kwam hij begin jaren vijftig definitief in Rome terecht, samen met zijn moeder. Zijn vader, een officier in het fascistische leger, was op dat moment al overleden. Zijn jongere broer was als partizaan tijdens de oorlog gesneuveld. Moeder en zoon konden aanvankelijk de eindjes moeilijk aan elkaar knopen. Ze woonden in een verpauperde buitenwijk van Rome, onderwerp van zijn spraakmakende novelle Ragazzi di vita (1955), en later van de film Accatone. Voor zijn novelle kreeg hij behalve literaire lof ook kritiek vanwege het obscene karakter van het betreffende werkje. Nadat hij eind jaren vijftig al enige schreden had gezet op het gebied van de film, debuteerde hij 1961 met zijn eerste eigen, hierboven reeds vermelde, film Accattone.

Hieronder volgt, bij wijze van uitzondering,  een zeer lang gedicht van Pasolini, dat hij schreef in de tijd dat hij ook bezig was met de belangrijke film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo. De schrijver Pasolini is achter de filmmaker ten onrechte wat verdwenen. Hij schreef zowel in het Italiaans als in het Friulisch.

 

Victory

Where are the weapons?
I have only those of my reason
and in my violence there is no place

for even the trace of an act that is not
intellectual. Is it laughable
if, suggested by my dream on this

gray morning, which the dead can see
and other dead too will see but for us
is just another morning,

I scream words of struggle?
Who knows what will become of me
at noon, but the old poet is “ab joy”

who speaks like a lark or a starling or
a young man longing to die.
Where are the weapons? The old days

will not return, I know; the red
Aprils of youth are gone.
Only a dream, of joy, can open

a season of armed pain.
I who was an unarmed Partisan,
mystical, beardless, nameless,

now I sense in life the horribly
perfumed seed of the Resistance.
In the morning the leaves are still

as they once were on the Tagliamento
and Livenza—it is not a storm coming
or the night falling. It is the absence

of life, contemplating itself,
distanced from itself, intent on
understanding those terrible yet serene

forces 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 time
in my life—I want to take up arms.
Absurd to say it in poetry

—and to four friends from Rome, two from Parma
who will understand me in this nostalgia
ideally translated from the German, in this archeological

calm, which contemplates a sunny, depopulated
Italy, home of barbaric Partisans who descend
the Alps and Apennines, down the ancient roads…

My fury comes only at the dawn.
At noon I will be with my countrymen
at work, at meals, at reality, which raises

the flag, white today, of General Destinies.
And you, communists, my comrades/noncomrades,
shadows of comrades, estranged first cousins

lost in the present as well as the distant,
unimagined days of the future, you, nameless
fathers who have heard calls that

I thought were like mine, which
burn now like fires abandoned
on cold plains, along sleeping

rivers, on bomb-quarried mountains. . . .
. . . . . . . . .
I take upon myself all the blame (my old
vocation, unconfessed, easy work)
for our desperate weakness,

because of which millions of us,
all with a life in common, could not
persist to the end. It is over,

let us sing along, tralala: They are falling,
fewer and fewer, the last leaves of
the War and the martyred victory,

destroyed little by little by what
would become reality,
not only dear Reaction but also the birth of

beautiful social-democracy, tralala.

I take (with pleasure) on myself the guilt
for having left everything as it was:
for the defeat, for the distrust, for the dirty

hopes of the Bitter Years, tralla.
And I will take upon myself the tormenting
pain of the darkest nostalgia,

which summons up regretted things
with such truth as to almost
resurrect them or reconstruct the shattered

conditions that made them necessary (trallallallalla). . . .
. . . . . . . . .
Where have the weapons gone, peaceful
productive Italy, you who have no importance in the world?
In this servile tranquility, which justifies

yesterday’s boom, today’s bust—from the sublime
to the ridiculous—and in the most perfect solitude,
j’accuse! Not, calm down, the Government or the Latifundia

or the Monopolies—but rather their high priests,
Italy’s intellectuals, all of them,
even those who rightly call themselves

my good friends. These must have been the worst
years of their lives: for having accepted
a reality that did not exist. The result

of 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 amid
the echoes from the last bloody strikes,
old, in the company of the prophets,

who, alas, were right—I dream of weapons
hidden in the mud, the elegiac mud
where 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 overcoats
they wore in those years, the loose-fitting
trousers, the military cap on their Partisan’s

hair, descend, along the walls
where the markets stand, down the paths
that join the town’s vegetable gardens

to the hillsides. They descend from their graves, young men
whose eyes hold something other than love:
a secret madness, of men who fight

as 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 tread
of those who will journey far in the world.
But they are the inhabitants of the mountains, of the wild

shores of the Po, of the remotest places
on the coldest plains. What are they doing here?
They have come back, and no one can stop them. They do not hide

their weapons, which they hold without grief or joy,
and no one looks at them, as though blinded by shame
at that obscene flashing o
f guns, at that tread of vultures

which descend to their obscure duty in the sunlight.
. . . . . . . . .

Who has the courage to tell them
that the ideal secretly burning in their eyes
is finished, belongs to another time, that the children

of their brothers have not fought for years,
and that a cruelly new history has produced
other ideals, quietly corrupting them?. . .

Rough like poor barbarians, they will touch
the new things that in these two decades human
cruelty has procured, things incapable of moving

those who seek justice. . . .

But let us celebrate, let us open the bottles
of 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 ponds
comes 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 inhuman
fruit of a scorched lucidity, tenacious as a scabie.
“All politics is Realpolitik,” warring

soul, with your delicate anger!
You do not recognize a soul other than this one
which has all the prose of the clever man,

of the revolutionary devoted to the honest
common man (even the complicity
with the assassins of the Bitter Years grafted

onto protector classicism, which makes
the communist respectable): you do not recognize the heart
that becomes slave to its enemy, and goes

where the enemy goes, led by a history
that is the history of both, and makes them, deep down,
perversely, brothers; you do not recognize the fears

of a consciousness that, by struggling with the world,
shares the rules of the struggle over the centuries,
as through a pessimism into which hopes

drown to become more virile. Joyous
with a joy that knows no hidden agenda,
this army—blind in the blind

sunlight—of dead young men comes
and waits. If their father, their leader, absorbed
in a mysterious debate with Power and bound

by its dialectics, which history renews ceaselessly—
if he abandons them,
in the white mountains, on the serene plains,

little by little in the barbaric breasts
of the sons, hate becomes love of hate,
burning only in them, the few, the chosen.

Ah, Desperation that knows no laws!
Ah, Anarchy, free love
of Holiness, with your valiant songs!
. . . . . . . . .
I take also upon myself the guilt for trying
betraying, for struggling surrendering,
for accepting the good as the lesser evil,

symmetrical antinomies that I hold
in my fist like old habits. . . .
All the problems of man, with their awful statements

of ambiguity (the knot of solitudes
of the ego that feels itself dying
and 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 uncalculated

April, from whom a thousand youths
fallen from the world beyond await, trusting, a sign
that has the force of a faith without pity,

to consecrate their humble rage.
Pining away within Nenni is the uncertainty
with which he re-entered the game, and the skillful

coherence, the accepted greatness,
with which he renounced epic affection,
though his soul could claim title

to it: and, exiting a Brechtian stage
into the shadows of the backstage,
where he learns new words for reality, the uncertain

hero breaks at great cost to himself the chain
that 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 faithful

eyes, source of the holy light,
look to him, and await his old words.
But, a hero by now divided, he lacks

by now a voice that touches the heart:
he appeals to the reason that is not reason,
to the sad sister of reason, which wants

to understand the reality within reality, with a passion
that 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 has
no other course than to accept it. . . .
That the revolution becomes a desert

if it is always without victory. . . that it may not be
too late for those who want to win, but not with the violence
of the old, desperate weapons. . . .

That one must sacrifice coherence
to the incoherence of life, attempt a creator
dialogue, even if that goes against our conscience.

That the reality of even this small, stingy
State 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—as
the songs say—home, bride,

life itself, specifically in the name of Reason?
. . . . . . . . .
But there may be a part of Nenni’s soul that wants
to say to these comrades—come from the world beyond,
in military clothes, with holes in the soles

of their bourgeois shoes, and their youth
innocently thirsting for blood—
to shout: “Where are the weapons? Come on, let’s

go, 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 alleys
hide the shameful plague, the passivity of those
who know they are cut off from the days of the future.

Those of you who have a heart
devoted to accursèd lucidity,
go into the factories and schools

to remind the people that nothing in these years has
changed the quality of knowing, eternal pretext,
sweet and useless form of Power, never of truth.

Those of you who obey an honest
old imperative of religion
go among the children who grow

with hearts empty of real passion,
to remind them that the new evil
is still and always the division of the world. Finally,

those of you to whom a sad accident of birth
in families without hope gave the thick shoulders, the curly
hair 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 companies
that brought Europe to the shores of the Po:

and for each of them comes the hour that has no
equal to what they have and what they hate.
Those who have stolen from the common good

precious capital and whom no law can
punish, well, then, go and tie them up with the rope
of massacres. At the end of the Piazzale Loreto

there are still, repainted, a few
gas pumps, red in the quiet
sunlight of the springtime that returns

with 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 coats
of beggars and deserters. . . . How serene are

the mountains they return to, so lightly
the submachine guns tap their hips, to the tread
of the sun setting on the intact

forms of life, which has become
what it was before
to its very depths.  Help, they are going away!—back to their
silent worlds in Marzabotto or Via Tasso. . . .

With the broken head, our head, humble
treasure of the family, big head of the second-born,
my brother resumes his bloody sleep, alone

among the dried leaves, in the serene
retreats of a wood in the pre-Alps, lost in
the golden peace of an interminable Sunday. . . .
. . . . . . . . .
And yet, this is a day of victory

Vertaald door Norman MacAfee en Luciano Martinengo

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (5 maart 1922 – 2 november 1975)

 

De Nederlandse schrijver Arthur van Schendel werd geboren op 5 maart 1874 in Batavia. Van Schendel verloor al jong zijn vader. Na zijn hbs-opleiding te Amsterdam werd hij eerst opgeleid voor het toneel, daarna voor het onderwijs. Hij was enige tijd leraar in Engeland en leraar Engels in Nederland. Zijn eerste vrouw verloor hij na drie jaar huwelijk; hertrouwd in 1908, vestigde hij zich als literator in Ede en later in Sestri Levante, Italië (tot 1945). Al in zijn eerste publikatie, het middeleeuwse verhaal Drogon, met illustraties van Marius Bauer in 1896 uitgegeven, toonde Van Schendel zich een onafhankelijk auteur: een vroege symbolist in een tijdvak van heersend naturalisme. Zijn roman Het fregatschip Johanna bezorgde de 55-jarige schrijver de aanmoedigingsprijs van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde te Leiden, en een veel groter lezerskring dan hij tevoren had gekend. In De wereld van een dansfeest (1938) deed Van Schendel afstand van een alwetend schrijverschap en gaf hij zijn figuren een dimensie van onkenbaarheid, bijv. door ze enkel te laten bestaan in de wisselende verhalen van hun omgeving, of in de algemene wetmatigheden van de generaties (zoals in Het oude huis, 1946).

 

Uit: De wereld een dansfeest

“En omdat in het begin de maat verkeerd was bleef ik overtuigd dat ik er niet bij hoorde, bij het lachen en het treuren niet, bij deze wereld niet…… De wereld een dansfeest! Als men ziet dat zelfs maar twee mensen niet langer dan een uurtje met elkaar kunnen dansen, in de maat zoals het hoort. Een dansfeest, dat dachten wij toen wij twaalf waren.”

 

Arthur van Schendel (5 maart 1874 – 11 september 1946)

 

De Nederlandse schrijver Koos van Zomeren werd geboren in Velp op 5 maart 1946. Hij debuteerde op negentienjarige leeftijd met de dichtbundel De Wielerkoers van Hank (1965). In de jaren 60 schreef hij nog drie romans. Daarna stopte hij – tijdelijk – met het schrijven van literatuur. Van 1967 tot 1971 werkte hij bij het dagblad Het Vrije Volk. Daarna werd hij actief in de linkse politiek: in 1972 behoorde hij tot de oprichters van de Kommunistiese Partij Nederland/Marxisties Leninisties, de voorloper van de huidige SP. In 1975 brak hij echter met deze partij. Zijn ervaringen in de vroege SP staan beschreven in De witte prins. Eind jaren 70 verschenen een aantal thrillers van Van Zomerens hand. In de politieke thriller Haagse lente en het vervolg Minister achter tralies (beide 1981) verwerkt hij zijn eigen politieke verleden. In 1983 keerde hij weer terug naar de “grote” literatuur met Otto’s Oorlog. Vanaf 1992 schrijft Van Zomeren columns in NRC Handelsblad.

 

Uit: De levende have (IJsberen, zorgenkindjes)

“Met deze bewegingen of handelingen, de voortdurende herhaling ervan, probeert een dier zich te schikken. De hartslag gaat omlaag, de hersenen maken endorfines vrij, endorfines dempen de onrust. Het dier doet gek om zich de gekte van het lijf te houden. Stereotypieën kun je als een laatste redmiddel beschouwen.

,,Moeten we ze dan niet bevorderen in plaats van tegengaan?”, vroeg ik.
,,We moeten de oorzaken tegengaan”, zei Paul. ,,Deze dieren zijn diep ongelukkig, meestal omdat we ze een veel te eenvoudige omgeving aanbieden.”
In de natuur komen stereotypieën zelden voor. In de natuur wordt een dier op het hele scala van zijn gedragsmogelijkheden aangesproken, in al zijn capaciteiten uitgedaagd. Misschien moet je dan eerder van een gevoel van compleetheid dan van geluk spreken. Maar wie weet, een gevoel van compleetheid, misschien is dat wel geluk.
Zo zaten we te praten voor de ingang van Ouwehands Zoo in Rhenen. Het begon zachtjes te regenen en het werd weer droog, en toen we eindelijk naar binnen gingen, voegde zich een vrouw bij ons, José Kok, de bioloog van de zoo zelf.
We liepen naar de flamingo’s, een nieuwe volière. ,,Toen ze vorig jaar begonnen te broeden”, zei José, ,,hebben we ze afgeschermd voor het publiek. Toen ze dit jaar weer gingen broeden, gingen ze juist zo dicht mogelijk bíj het publiek zitten.” Ze bedoelt maar: we weten niet alles van de wensen die hier leven.
Van de flamingo’s naar de tijgers, van de tijgers naar de giraffes, van de giraffes naar de leeuwen, van de leeuwen naar de ijsberen, van de ijsberen naar de bruine beren, van de bruine beren naar de panters (,,Deze verblijven zijn me te transparant”, zei José, ,,ze doen geen recht aan de behoefte aan privacy van deze dieren”) en van de panters weer naar de flamingo’s (er scharrelde een onvoorstelbaar dapper kuiken door dat woud van roze poten. ,,Pas één jong”, zei Paul. ,,Al één jong”, zei José).”

 

Koos van Zomeren (Velp,  5 maart 1946)

 

De Amerikaanse schrijver Frank Norris werd geboren op 5 maart 1870 in Chicago. Van 1887 tot 1889 studeerde Norris, die tekentalent bezat, aan het Atelier Julien in Parijs. Geïnspireerddoor het naturalisme van Zola studeerde hij daarna literatuur in Berkeley en literaire compositie in Harvard. Na de succesvolle publicatie van zijn eerste roman “Moran of the Lady Letty“ in 1898 trok hij als medewerker van “McClure’s Magazine” naar New York. In 1899 ging Norris als oorlogsverslaggever naar Cuba. Nadat hij nog wat aanstellingen bij uitgeverijen gehad had publiceerde hij „Blix“, „A Man’s Woman“ en begon hij aan zijn hoofdwerk, een trilogie over de strijd van de Californische tarweboeren tegen de Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, die met zijn buitensporige vrachtprijzen hun bestaan bedreigde (“The Octopus”, “The Pit”). Voor de voltooiing van het derde deel „Wolf“ stierf hij. De roman “McTeague: A Story of San Francisco” ontstond tijdens zijn Harvard tijd en verscheen in 1899. Erich von Stroheim gebruikte de stof van de roman voor zijn legendarische stomme film Greed (1923).

Uit: McTeague

“It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors’ coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna’s saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.

 

Once in his office, or, as he called it on his signboard, “Dental Parlors,” he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having crammed his little stove full of coke, lay back in his operating chair at the bay window, reading the paper, drinking his beer, and smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food digested; crop-full, stupid, and warm. By and by, gorged with steam beer, and overcome by the heat of the room, the cheap tobacco, and the effects of his heavy meal, he dropped off to sleep. Late in the afternoon his canary bird, in its gilt cage just over his head, began to sing. He woke slowly, finished the rest of his beer—very flat and stale by this time—and taking down his concertina from the bookcase, where in week days it kept the company of seven volumes of “Allen’s Practical Dentist,” played upon it some half-dozen very mournful airs.”

 

Frank Norris (5 maart 1870 – 25 oktober 1902)

 

De Indiaans-Amerikaanse schrijfster Leslie Marmon Silko werd geboren op 5 maart 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Zij groeide op in de Laguna-Reservation en studeerde later aan de universiteit van New Mexico. In 1969 publiceerde zij haar eerste verhaal Tony’s Story. Haar eerste bundel Laguna Women Poems verscheen in 1974.

Uit: Gardens in the dunes

“Sister Salt called her to come outside. The rain smelled heavenly. All over the sand dunes, datura blossoms round and white as moons breathed their fragrance of magic. Indigo came up from the pit house into the heat; the ground under her bare feet was still warm, but the rain in the breeze felt cool — so cool — and refreshing on her face. She took a deep breath and ran up the dune, where Sister Salt was naked in the rain. She pulled the ragged sack over her head and felt the rain and wind so cool, so fragrant all over her body. Off in the distance there was a faint rumble of thunder, and the wind stirred; the raindrops were larger now. She tilted back her head and opened her mouth wide the way Sister Salt did. The rain she swallowed tasted like the wind. She ran, leaped in the air, and rolled on the warm sand over and over, it was so wonderful. She took handfuls of sand and poured them over her legs and over her stomach and shoulders — the raindrops were cold now and the warmth of the sand felt delicious. Sister Salt laughed wildly as she came rolling down from the highest point of the dune, so Indigo ran after her and leaped and rolled too, her eyes closed tight against the sand. Over and over down-down-down effortlessly, the ease of the motion and the sensation of the warm sand and the cool rain were intoxicating. Indigo squealed with laughter as she rolled into Sister Salt, who was helpless with laughter, and they laughed and laughed and rolled around, one girl on top of the other.”

Leslie Marmon Silko (Albuquerque 5 maart 1948)