Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Questo saggio è costituito dagli scritti, elaborati da Calvino, per intrattenere gli studenti dell'Università di Harvard in 6 lezioni sulla letteratura.

I testi risalgono agli anni 80, ma per la maestria, la lungimiranza e la ricercatezza con cui sono stati curati, possono considerarsi di grande attualità (non a caso lo scrittore li compone per proporre le sue linee guida per chi si approccia alla scrittura nel nuovo millennio, ponendosi a sua volta nell'umile ottica del discente, in continua tensione verso il miglioramento dei propri scritti sulla base dei valori letterari che ci espone).
Purtroppo Calvino è morto prima di completare l'ultima lezione e poter esporre a voce questi temi, che spaziano dalla leggerezza, alla rapidità, dall'esattezza alla visibilità, dalla molteplicità alla consistenza, parole chiave che sintetizzano i valori letterari di cui si fanno portavoce le sue lezioni, caratterizzate da una raffinata ricerca e da una conoscenza approfondita della letteratura, non solo italiana ma internazionale, non solo contemporanea ma anche classica, risalente a qualsiasi periodo storico.

Sembra quasi di vedere in cattedra questo scrittore a intrattenere gli studenti, dando loro lo spunto per fare approfondimenti, rispetto a tutte le tematiche che ci presenta, accennandole e cogliendone il senso profondo senza approfondirle con la pedanteria o la spocchia di certi uomini di vasta cultura, bensì esponendole con leggerezza e sinteticità, certo di aver gettato un seme di interesse, senza la pretesa che questo germogli in egual modo in ognuno.

La ricchezza degli spunti è talmente vasta che è difficile sintetizzarla senza perderne particolari importanti. Non mi soffermerò, pertanto, su nessuna delle lezioni in particolare, mentre ne consiglio vivamente la lettura proprio per farsi un'opinione personale e avviare un proprio approfondimento delle tematiche, degli scritti, dei letterati e scrittori che Calvino cita mirabilmente in qualsiasi passaggio di quest'opera. Io stessa proseguirò nella lettura di un altro dei suoi saggi, "Perché leggere i classici?", proprio perché ritengo che sia notevole il modo col quale egli ci racconta la letteratura di tutti i tempi sapendola collocare e interpretare nei contenuti con rigore, precisione e sinteticità.

Una bella scoperta!

چاپ جدید کتاب از نشر مرکز پیدا می‌شود و خواندنش برای هر اهل ادبیاتی واجب‌تر است از هزارتا حرف بی‌حسابی که این‌طرف آن‌طرف از این کارگاه و آن آدم و این کانال تلگرامی شنیده یا خوانده است؛ چون صیقل روح نوشتار در تاریخ نوشتن را نشان می‌دهد و رگه‌های درخشانی از قرن‌های پیش تا حالا پیش چشم می‌کشد و نشان می‌دهد.
خواننده‌ای که در نوشتن کوششی کرده باشد و بهش جدی فکر کرده باشد و در نوشتن سختگیر باشد از این کتاب لذتی خواهد برد نگفتنی. این را به تجربه‌ی دوستان نزدیک شاهد بودم که ظرافت‌های کالوینو در تعبیرها چقدر راهگشاست.

"Minha confiança no futuro da literatura consiste em saber que há coisas que só a literatura com seus meios específicos nos pode dar."

Reaffirmed my reoccurring nightmare that I’m too rational to fully submit to artistic thought (because what is he going on about half the time?)

Ultimately, a series of college lectures that have been transcribed into a single book is going to read exactly like that — unbelievably dense at times, crammed with references to references, and often incomprehensible unless you take it at the sentence level. If you have time to consider this work the way it’s meant to be considered, then it’s great at times.

Clearly, Mr. Calvino and his translator did not graduate from an IB school, because the practice of NOT integrating your reference quotations into the larger body text has not been vigorously bred out of their systems. A note to the translator — it’s best to know your audience, and primarily English speaking people are the single most ignorant and self-obsessed group in the entire world. We don’t need the first three pages of a fully German text only to have it translated to English three pages later.

Finally, if the crux of this work is that Borges’ legacy is to be envied, I am convinced and this work had worked on me.

What a pleasure it was to spend time in the company of Calvino, chatting to me like an erudite and engaging friend, expounding on his ideas about literary composition as I rode the bus or train (I refrained from reading 'Six Memos' when at the wheel of my car). Along the way, he shared extensive extracts from some of his favourite writers and it was fun to catch the cadences of the original Italian, German and French.

It was a melancholy journey too. The five essays here were prepared by Sig. C in preparation for a series of talks to American students. The sixth was never written. Calvino died of a brain haemorrhage before he could begin. And that would mean there would be no further works from the author of 'Invisible Cities' and 'If on a Winter's Night', 'Diffficult Loves' and 'The Baron in the Trees'. This leaves one feeling bereft also. Imagine what more might have come from quella penna - the brilliant 'Palomar' had appeared just two years before.

And coming from the pen of Calvino, this is not a straightforward guide to writing, there are no chapters on plotting and point of view or the use of commas and semi-colons. Sig. C themes his talks into qualities that great literature might possess, providing us with an insight into his compositional process as he does so. These qualities are elusive yet pertinent: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. We shall never know what he had to say about consistency...

'Lightness' and 'Quickness' tell us much about Calvino's approach. 'Lightness' involves both the removal of unnecessary words and transporting the reader on a fantastic journey, on a magic carpet ride or the like. It explains his fondness for fairy tale and myth. Then there is quickness, the brevity to be found in the chapters in 'Invisible Cities' and 'Palomar'. He cites a concisely-told legend about Charlemagne's love for a young woman as the template for this ideal.

'Visibility' explores the link between an image and the words that describe it, and, inter alia, the matter of which came first. Calvino argues that for some writers it's the latter and for others (himself included), it's the former. He says that many of the 'Cosmicomics' began with a single image or vision around which the brief tale was built. He quotes from Dante and Loyola, suggesting that they worked in the same way, employing their "mental cinema" (what a superb phrase!) to describe the unseen, their visions of heaven and hell.

Calvino cites Carlo Emilio Gadda (hitherto unknown to me) and Musil as producers of 'Multiplicity', pursuing the encyclopaedic, elaborating and digressing, even preventing the latter from being able to complete his work. He cites Flaubert and Proust too then brings things up-to-date (c. 1985) with his admiration for Borges and Perec (it was reciprocated). And who better to represent this concept than the two great writers who explored the encyclopaedic through such very different methods?

I think my favourite quotation of all came from 'Exactitude', where Calvino showed us another Italian genius at work, da Vinci revising his description of a sea monster, inspired by the unearthing of a fossilised creature (I was also fascinated to learn about the old theory that the earth was expanding and swallowing up such specimens):

O how often were you seen amid the waves of the vast and swollen ocean, like a mountain defeating and subduing them, and your black and bristling back ploughing through the waters, and your stately, solemn bearing!

Here Calvino seeks to present the exactitude of both abstract concepts and the visibly perceived. He also quotes that exquisite passage from his own work where Polo describes the square of a chess board to Khan and the history of the tree that was felled to make it.

These essays are a delight for the reader and writer alike. Grazie mille, vecchio amico, e riposa in pace.

Bellissimo saggio di Calvino su alcuni valori da conservare nel nuovo millennio. Oltre a tante e profonde riflessioni sullo scrivere Calvino ci parla di opere letterarie specifiche portando vari esempi, veramente illuminante in alcuni punti è chiaro come Calvino fosse un fine conoscitore dell’arte del romanzo e del mondo della letteratura. Bellissimo , lo consiglio a chiunque

Lightness

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies. Sometimes from cities

At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone

With myths, one should not be in a hurry

It is better to let them settle into the memory

It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware

The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits

Quickness

Death is hidden in clocks

Tristram Shandy does not want to be born, because he does not want to die

Borges was to pretend that the book he wanted to write had already been written by someone else, some unknown hypothetical author

Exactitude

We live in an unending rainfall of images

Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leaves no trace in the memory

And what does not fade is a feeling of alienation an discomfort

The poet of vagueness can only be the poet of exactitude

What is unknown is always more attractive than what is known

Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end

There is the word that knows only itself

Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface - Hofmannsthal

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the thing that is desired or feared

Visibility

Fantasy is a place where it rains

Multiplicity

What tends to emerge from the great novels of the twentieth century is the idea of an open encyclopedia

Ho messo in lista questo libro dopo aver letto questo post del blog "Zelda was a writer"

Allora, grazie Zelda :) e vi lascio con una delle frasi che più mi è piaciuta: "La fantasia è un posto dove ci piove dentro"