The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition

Excellent bilingual edition of selected poetry

best translation

Pasolini was indeed gay, just as he was very much a communist (albeit of the most original and strangely dedicated sort), but readers searching for something narrowly construed in these pages will quickly discover, rather, a most remarkable poet whose abilities can hardly be captured by simplistic stripes of any nature. Much as Whitman's universality went well beyond nineteenth-century America, bisexuality, and democracy, while simultaneously enfolding the lot within his productive activity, Pasolini is one of the most remarkable voices of the postwar era. These remarkable walks he takes—initiated in poverty and misery before blossoming into sublime light, colors, smells, and pure radiance—are some of the most extraordinary to make their way to words in all of twentieth-century literature. He is a poet, above all, to be experienced as a poet; an ancient voice making sense of the strangeness of modernity and its lingering fragments of the archaic past. I cannot recommend these translations enough, though the others from MacAfee and Ferlinghetti certainly have their immense virtues as well.

A poet not well known in the US, but brilliant, and I greatly prefer the dual-language edition, as I have with other poets - it's the only way to capture some of the intended "sound" that is so integral to poetry.

I thought I was getting a "used' edition but this book was brand spanking new! I couldn't afford the hard back edition and I was pleasantly surprised to get such a nice copy! Anyone interested in poetry or Pasolini would do well to purchase this book.