Enzo Siciliano, “APPENDICE – Pasolini: la vita, la poesia”, in Vita di Pasolini. Mondadori, Milan 2005. 

When I met [Pasolini] and it was 1956, I had just written an article on Le ceneri di Gramsci, the single poemetto published in the series “Nuovi Argomenti“ by Alberto Carocci and Moravia. I met him at his Roman resedence on Via Donna Olimpia. He asked me what I was reading, and I spoke to him about Ezra Pound. I had read the Pisan Cantos again and again. I was struggling to translate some excerpts from Rock-Drill 85-95 de los cantares. Pasolini’s reacted furiously: Pound was a racist, a fascist, and so on. That first meeting went badly. I was a leftist militant: but why would I have had to deny that Pound was a great poet? In him, I read the tragedy of history and of humanism, lived against the barbaric war of the Nazis and the Fascists. Pound was the repentant barbarian, tangibly stripped naked in the cage of Pisa, a Whitman reborn who had lost and allowed the Panic beauty of living to slip away into blackness. 

Years went by. Pasolini met Pound: the result was a testament, never equaled, of excellent television, an interview. In the wrinkles, in the dry sclerae of the aged Pound, there was the turmoil of a Western world that had been overwhelmed by its own reasons of life, its own cognitive advance. And Pasolini was there in front of him: his questions reflected the same despair, the same apocalypse – both of them far from any ideological and political connotation, both alive as exorbitant and extraordinary poets, disobedient to any etiquette of literary sanity, faithful that History, in any case, would follow its own strange pathways forward. What emerged was a dual truth, two solitudes that reflected each other and sought each other, more modern than any modern man, in search of brothers no longer alive.