THE DIVINE MIMESIS

Written between 1963 and 1967 The Divine Mimesis Pasolinis 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 selfcritique by the author of The Ashes of Gramsci 1957 who saw the civic world evoked by that book fading absolutely from view By the mid1960s 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 Dantes 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 Pasolinis 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 sullIndia 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 Pasolinis 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 Pasolinis 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 P