La lettura precedente risale a più di vent'anni fa. Nel frattempo ho letto altre opere come "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore" e "Palomar" che mi risultano adesso più chiare alla luce di questa rilettura.
Di fronte alle riflessioni di Calvino ci si sente piccoli piccoli con la sensazione di essere di fronte all'erudito, mai saccente, che si ascolta a bocca aperta e che fa magicamente apparire vicino a te, come ologrammi, i mostri sacri del pensiero a cui dà voce e il cui compito, eclettico, è quello di ricomporre significati apparentemente distanti tra loro e da noi.

L’ANIMA DELLE PAROLE


Plinio Nomellini: Prime letture (1906). Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milano.

Sei lezioni preparate e mai tenute perché Calvino morì prima di partire per Harvard (settembre 1985). Pubblicate postume, prima in inglese e solo dopo in italiano, con l’ultima, Coerenza, incompleta.
Un grande riconoscimento per lo scrittore italiano: queste Poetry Lectures hanno inanellato ospiti davvero illustri (T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert frost, Igor Stravinsky, Thornton Wilder, Octavio Paz, Northrop Frye...)
Per come sono andate le cose, diventano in pratica il testamento letterario di Calvino.


Silvestro Lega: La lettura (1864 – 1867). Pinacoteca Corrado Giaquinto, Bari.

La letteratura, e il mondo, si stavano avvicinando a un traguardo importante: un nuovo millennio. Un momento che Calvino sentiva particolarmente visto che il titolo originale fa riferimento proprio a questo: sei memo/proposte per il nuovo millennio.
Ogni lezione prende spunto da un aspetto qualitativo che la scrittura ha e dovrebbe avere: quelle qualità che sono necessarie per fare letteratura.
E che è bene, e importante, conservare e continuare nel terzo millennio. Consigli per gli scrittori di domani.

Leggerezza, Rapidità, Esattezza, Visibilità, Molteplicità, e Coerenza.
L’assunto complessivo in estrema sintesi potrebbe essere che leggere è attività curativa per arginare il “male di vivere”. Forse perché “sulla carta”, leggendo viviamo altre vite.


Gerard ter Boch: Donna che scrive una lettera (1655 circa). Mauritshuis, L’Aia, Olanda.

La mia ‘lezione’ preferita è la prima, probabilmente perché il titolo fa riferimento a una qualità che trovo meravigliosa, la leggerezza. Che per Calvino non andava confusa con la superficialità - la quale al contrario finiva nella categoria della pesantezza - ma si identificava piuttosto con l’esattezza, lo spessore, la profondità.

Avrei anche potuto scrivere che si tratta di libro “in lettura” perché lo si legge e rilegge e consulta, senza abbandonarlo mai.


Jan Vermeer: Donna che scrive una lettera alla presenza della domestica (1671 circa). National Gallery of Ireland, Dublino.

I've had the uncanny experience of having read this book around when it came out and forgotten most of it, yet rereading it is sort of like being under hypnosis, as it essentially embodies a great deal of what I strive for in my own aesthetic and weltanschauung and how I prepare food and live when you get down to it. In his ode to lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, Calvino dazzles in his apparently effortless incorporation of all of these qualities, even while admitting their opposites into the fold, confessing an affection for weight, digression, and so forth. For contradiction is elemental for Calvino, an inevitable byproduct of an authentic, reflective engagement with the universe. And so he gives us his motto from "youth on," the Latin "Festina lente," hurry slowly. Hurrying slowly herein, he whets our appetites for Dante, Leopardi, Ponge, and Carlo Emilia Gadda, as well as for revisiting Calvino's own oeuvre in all of its spindly, acrobatic glory. I can only wonder--had Calvino completed the last lecture, "Consistency," and published it, whether it would have made me a slightly different person. Few books you can say that about.

به طور حتم اگر بخشی از بشریت این‌قدر به شدت مستعد درون‌گرایی نبود و اگر این‌چنین دست رد به سینه‌ی دنیا نمی‌زد تا گذشت اوقات و ایام را فراموش کند، تا بتواند فقط نگاهش را به جملات ساکت و ساکن بدوزد، ادبیات به وجود نمی‌آمد.

Lezioni a tema per il prossimo millenio, tratte da un ciclo di conferenze pubblicato postumo. Ma si tratta anche di riflessioni che, traendo spunto dalla letteratura tanto cara a Calvino (attraverso le numerose citazioni, possiamo constatare la profonda erudizione dell'autore), affrontano, in realtà, i grandi dilemmi che si confida l'avvenire possa risolvere, le paure, i dubbi, le contraddizioni di un mondo e di una società che Calvino stesso non ha mai smesso d'investigare come uomo e come scrittore.

Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity are the five memos Calvino completed for the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. He died before completing the sixth memo, Consistency. The five we have are gems, and hopeful ones at that: "My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it," he writes in a prefatory note, and proceeds to describe the qualities he values in literature.

Here are excerpts of each memo, giving a sense of the content as well as of Calvino's beautiful style and voice:

Lightness: "The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile."

Quickness: "I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic."

Exactitude: "It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty--that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."

Visibility: "The artist's imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realizing. What we experience by living is another world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that accumulate on the page, like the layers of colors on the canvas, are yet another world, also infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation. The link between the three worlds is the indefinable spoken of by Balzac: or, rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes."

Multiplicity: "Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature....Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world."

Let's start with the fact that Italo Calvino is one of my favorite writers of all time. His crystalline surrealism, easy tone (at least in translation), and whimsical subjects (by which I mean situations and characters, inclusive) are, to me, compelling. To say that I went into this book with a favorable view of the author would be a gross understatement. I absolutely adore Calvino's work.

Now, I am also discovering that I don't really like many books about writing. Moorcock's Death is No Obstacle is, so far as I've read, the best book on writing out there. Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a close second. A *very* close second.

What you won't find in this book are lessons on grammar, editorial tips, or the best way to market your book to the masses using obnoxious tactics like going on Goodreads and spamming members when you have not bothered to review more than a half dozen books or looked to see if said members share any kind of interest in books of your type whatsoever . . . sorry, was I using my outside voice when I said that? Silly me.

What you will find here is a peek behind Calvino's magic curtain. You will see that even his explanations about how he does his work are magical. You won't see the nuts and bolts of how Calvino mechanically goes about constructing his stories (though he is very methodical), but you will see a high-level treatise on Calvino's state of mind as he writes. This is a philosophical text cleverly disguised as a book about writing.

The book is divided into five sections. "Five?" you ask. "What happened to the sixth?" The sixth memo is "Consistency," lightly penciled into the handwritten table of contents provided by Calvino at the beginning of the book. In fact, it looks as if it had been written in, then erased, an irony that is as Calvino-esque as anything else I can think of.

The first memo, "Lightness," is the one thing that I struggle with the most as a writer. Here, Calvino is not talking about lightness as it relates to hue, but as it relates to mass. He gives the example from Boccaccio's Decameron, a story in which the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti is beset by some men who want to pick a (philosophical) fight with him in a graveyard.

Guido, seeing himself surrounded by them, answered quickly: "Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home." Then, resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them.

Now, call me strange (it's true), but this is something I can sink my writerly teeth into. I can apply this principle of lightness, not because Calvino has given me specific instructions on how to do it, but because he has opened a window for me to stick my head out, look around, take stock of the landscape, and enjoy it. He's put me in the headspace I need to be in to integrate this principle of lightness into my writing.

And so it is with the remaining principles. Of "Quickness," Calvino states:

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

And, reading the context of this memo, I know exactly what he means and see that struggle in myself. In fact, this is my favorite quote about writing ever written. But can I take this down to the grammatical level and explain it to someone else? Hardly. I know in my bones what Calvino is saying, but explain it in figures and diagrams, I cannot.

In the section on "Exactitude," Calvino goes to some extent to explain how vagueness can only be properly described, with exactitude. In speaking of the evocative power of words and the importance of using them in the most exact way, he states:

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

Again, a bit of intuition and reflection is required to really grasp what he is saying. Not because his statement is poorly written, but because this notion is an abstract concept. This "writing book," if one can assign such a banal descriptor to it, requires the reader to think!

Memo four, "Visibility," dwells on the imagination as the impetus for all creativity, particularly the visual imagination. While he acknowledges that literary work might arise from the hearing of a good turn of phrase or from an academic exercise, the majority of such creations arise from a visual cue in the writer's mind. Thus, the need to use exactitude to describe the visual seed of a story or book, which allows the reader to see into the mind of the writer, if but for a moment, and anchors the story in the reader's mind.

"Multiplicity" is the fifth and most inappropriately titled memo. I might have used the word "Nestedness" or even "Complexity" to give the reader a head start, but, hey, it wasn't my book to write. I do feel that this is the weakest section of the book (and Calvino acknowledges as much), as the decision to try to form an all-inclusive novel (meaning: including ALL), is really a question of writerly preference, rather than a universal principle which one ought to apply to writing a novel. Still, Calvino calls on the example of Borges and the Oulipo to demonstrate what is possible in a novel, eve if the pursuit of such a work might not always be advisable.

As a part of this fifth memo, Calvino states his vision of the aim of literature:

. . . the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

Unfortunately, Calvino did not live to see the new millennium. He would have been fascinated by the possibilities of hypertext, no doubt, and his memo on multiplicity dwells, in fact, on the need for more open-ended work with several possible endings, a multi-dimensional plot that reaches through various realities (a'la Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"), and gathers them into one text. He even goes so far as to call his experimental If on a winter's night a traveler a "hypernovel".

Perhaps, in another reality, Calvino is exploring the infinite possibilities of literature and will one day find his way back to teach us more, like some kind of literary Messiah. In the meantime, he has left Six Memos for the Next Millennium as a travel journal showing the direction he might have gone; inviting us to follow.

Six Memos represents the English translations of essays on literature prepared by Italo Calvino for the Eliot Norton Lectures. Tragically, Calvino died a few months before delivering his discussions, but the existing manuscript was discovered by his widow, Esther, “all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.”

Completed herein are five of the six “memos”: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity with Consistency being the intended sixth. (Interestingly, Calvino discusses Bouvard and Pecuchet (Flaubert’s uncompleted novel) as a form of Multiplicity.) The essays have a conversational tone that belie the weight and enormity of his themes. What he presents is a state of the union address on the future of literature, reconciling the ancient masters to contemporary difficulties and carefully considering where next we must go.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in writing, particularly (non)fiction and poetry. It makes for an excellent companion read with any of his novels. I read it alongside If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler… and was excited to find examples of the various principles presented in Six Memos.

Letto per il corso di Scrittura e Lingua Italiana all'Università.

Probabilmente non me lo sono goduto appieno per via dell'esame in vista, ma ho comunque apprezzato le idee, i suggerimenti e le osservazioni di Calvino.
E' stato come viaggiare attraverso un mondo letterario fantastico con una guida alla pari di un Virgilio dantesco. Non solo un racconto, ma una narrazione della letteratura e degli ingranaggi che ne muovono il corso.
Ho particolarmente apprezzato la lezione sulla Leggerezza, semplicemente stupenda.

Alla fine del libro ho avuto un desiderio immenso di poter partecipare a una di queste lezione tenute da Calvino stesso all'Università americana. Davvero, sarebbe stato un onore e un piacere assistervi.

That's one of the best books I ever read about writing.

Calvino nails it:

"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty--that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."

Gör mig intresserad att både läsa mer av vad Calvin själv har skrivit och mer av vad andra skrivit. Och plötsligt myllrar det i mitt huvud av tankar om varför författare skriver - och för vem.