«La superficie marmorea e perfetta del morbo». Baudelaire attraverso Pasolini

This article investigates the presence of Baudelaire in Pasolini’s critical and literary work. It tries to assess his internal tensions as a poet and intellectual, and to analyse their critical-formal outcomes. The first part of the essay sur- veys the quotations from and references to Baudelaire in Pasolini’s epistolary and critical-militant works. The second part analyses Pasolini as “translator manqué” of Baudelaire, focusing on the stylistic-formal outcomes of his draft translations of the Fleurs du Mal and their contiguities with Le ceneri di Gram- sci, which was incubating in the same years. The outcomes of the analysis are finally made to react with the litmus test of two Baudelairean occurrences traceable in Pasolini’s cinema of the 1960s (in Che cosa sono le nuvole? and in the film treatment Il viaggio a Citera).