The Street Kids

3 for translation.

Not speaking or reading Italian I can only comment on whether the Goldstein translation is faithful to what I regard as the ‘spirit of Pasolini'. If you cannot read the original text and are new to Pasolini some advice is that you could benefit by viewing several of Pasolini's earlier films: Une Vie Violente, La Ricotta, Mama Roma and Accatone. Pasolini's best expressions are found in film and even as a novelist Pasolini is primarily a visual artist, reverting always to directing the gaze of the reader across the expansive and weary bleached post WWII slums (Borgate) of Rome. Pasolini lived in the Borgate for a time in 1949 with his mother when they fell on hard times and his original Italian text of Ragazzi Di Vita (1955) is a minor linguistic archive of the street vernacular he found there among the young boys roughly 7-15 years in age.

Some Italian reviews of the translation were critical of the defanged language. Many of the boys names were not translated, Pisciasotto (pissy pants) for example is left alone. And often we hear the boys calling other boys ‘wimps' or other such missives. Any fan of Pasolini cannot imagine him shying away from putting shocking vulgarity into the mouths of babes. On this point I think the translation likely does fail in evoking Pasolini correctly. Where Goldstein does shine is in her rendering of the many long film like descriptions of the Borgate and its inhabitants and many of these are beautiful. A few below:

“Even the traffic on Via Tiburtina seemed to make no noise; it was as if muffled, in a bell jar, under the sun, which, colorless on the low walls and a grimy gray flock, was burning golden on the edges of Monte del Pecoraro.”

“There was a heat that wasn't sirocco and wasn't burning, but only heat. It was like a coat of paint given to the breeze, to the yellow walls of the neighborhoods, to the fields, to the carts, to the buses with clusters of people at the windows.”

“And down below, past the dripping tunnel, it's all the same, in Piazza della Rovere, where lines of tourists pass, heads high, arm in arm, in knickers and heavy shoes, singing Alpine songs in chorus, while the punks leaning against the parapet of the Tiber, near a clogged latrine, in their pegged pants and pointy shoes, look at them, saying, behind their backs, with bored and sarcastic expressions, words that, if understood, would give the tourists a stroke.”