La controverità delle madri: la ballata «à la manière de Villon» tra Sanguineti e Pasolini

Abstract

The aim of this study is to show that, in the early Sixties, the Italian poetry, with Sanguineti and Pasolini, tried to use comic forms. In fact, among the many reuses of the metrical forms during the Twentieth century, the ballad by Villon created a curious event: in 1961, Sanguineti published Ballata delle controverita (Ballad of countertruth), a Villonian parody, and Pasolini wrote the Ballata delle madri (Ballad of mothers), a satirical text dedicated to the mothers of journalists that vexed him, taken from a metrical pattern of the French poet. Through a historicistic investigation, this work tries to show that the use of comic figures is determined, in large part, by the influence of Brecht, who had used texts by Villon in his Threepenny Opera. The survey made it possible to detect that these attempts to write comic verses, made in the case of Sanguineti in a parodic tone and in the case of Pasolini in a satirical tone, have determined, as a way to balance the comical figures, the adoption of stanzaic forms and rhyming schemes.