Pasolini and Minor Comparativism: Transnationalizing Dialect Poetry

Comparative Literature as a discipline seems caught between the macroscopic perspectives of World Literature and a fascination with the untranslatable and the incommensurable. This has made it difficult to elaborate methodologies for reading the local and the minor transnationally, which insist on linguistic and historical rigour but remain open to hermeneutical border-crossing. I reconstruct some aspects of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s engagement with Friulian, a language spoken in northeast Italy, focusing specifically on his poetry in Friulian and connected translation practices from sound to written work, between dialect to national language, and laterally across minoritized cultures. Foregrounding the extraordinary fertility of Pasolini’s explorations of language, history and politics as well as his biases and failed attempts, this essay proposes not a model to imitate but a repertoire of possible approaches to ‘minor comparativism’.