Please Hold the Line: Gianni Rodari
by Antony Shugaar
A king who would rather die than dress in rags, a barber who purchases a major city and is baffled as to why the populace seems unimpressed, a war fought entirely with pealing church bells, a building constructed entirely for children to take out their destructive impulses, a class in the future where the pupils are baffled as to the meaning of the verb “to cry,” a worker who falls into a cement foundation and then becomes the soul of the building that rises above him, a man who spends a lifetime stealing the Colosseum, piece by piece, and hiding it in his house.
The stories in Telephone Tales, for all their idiosyncrasy and the fact that they were written more than half a century ago, occasionally seem surprisingly timely. A violet at the North Pole, for instance, dies in martyrdom, part of a longer-term effort to melt the polar ice—certainly an unlikely hero in our current era of global warming.
In any case, the idea of a bookful of stories short enough that they can be told by a traveling salesman father to his daughter back home in the space of time offered by a single phone token is very modern, coming close to the length of the double-capacity tweet on Twitter. In the Sixties, when Rodari wrote this book, the Italian phone company required a phone token—a gettone—for public phone booths; the price of a local phone call could simply be adjusted, like a Forever stamp.
At the end of that decade, the 1970 Hans Christian Andersen Award, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize for children’s literature,” was awarded to Maurice Sendak for illustration. That same year, the other recipient of the award (given every two years to one illustrator and one writer) was Gianni Rodari, the only Italian writer ever to be so honored.
Rodari’s work has been compared to that of Roald Dahl, Italo Calvino, and Lewis Carroll. Like them, Rodari’s stories ground the reader in the everyday but then sends the plot hurtling in unexpected directions.
Rodari was born in 1920 in a small lake town in northern Italy, at the foothills of the Alps. This meant that his life, from age two to age twenty-five, was lived under the Fascist regime. And while we may think of Italian Fascism as a reign of terror, many of those who lived through it recall it especially as a time of dull apathy, enforced conformity, and the repression of ideas and imagination.
When Rodari was fifteen, the Italians invaded Ethiopia. At sixteen, Italian warplanes took part in the bombing of Guernica. And when the Second World War came, he was just nineteen. This succession of events, like the sound of jackboots approaching, must have shaped his views as he approached adulthood. Poor health kept him out of the army, but work was scarce and Rodari joined the Fascist Party, in order to take a paying position at the local party headquarters. This was hardly a proud moment for young Rodari. Looking back on a decision he made at age 20, Rodari described it as an “act of cowardice,” but added, “perhaps if I’d been a factory worker, I’d have made different choices, but I was an intellectual and a member of the petty bourgeoisie from the provinces, and I had the shortcomings of my class.” As ashamed as Rodari was, what he did was hardly unusual for young men at the time. General Mark Clark, commander of the American Fifth Army in Italy, is quoted as wryly observing that the greatest vanishing act in history was the disappearance of 50 million Italian Fascists the day the war ended.
Before war’s end, however, Rodari had joined both the (then illegal) Communist Party and the Italian Resistance. By 1948 he was working as a journalist for the Communist Party’s official newspaper, L’Unità, and before long had risen to the position of special correspondent. In the postwar years that followed, alongside his prolific work as a “non-party aligned” political journalist, Rodari began writing for children.
Exactly what prompted his interest in writing for children is unclear. Aside from his professional commitments (in 1950, he was appointed the editor of a new weekly children’s magazine, Il Pioniere), he got married in 1953. We know that his daughter Paola, born in 1957, was the inspiration for the father-daughter relationship in Telephone Tales. But clearly something else drew him to it: he had been writing children’s stories since the end of the war. Perhaps, like people everywhere, his mind turned lightly to the thought of innocence and new life at the end of ten long years of war and bloodshed (Italians had been at war since 1935).
As he became a successful children’s author and special correspondent, he traveled frequently to the Soviet Union.
He never renounced his membership in the Communist Party, the way he did his brief involvement in the Fascist Party, but then the Italian party was quite a different matter from hardline, Stalin-worshiping militants elsewhere.
Perhaps because of this history, and in contrast with the work of Dahl, Calvino, and Carroll, Rodari’s work is rife with social commentary and ironic darts at blinkered conventions.
One of his best-known works at the time was Cipollino (1951), the story of an adventurous onion with a social conscience. Wikipedia describes the book as set in a “garden kingdom … inhabited by anthropomorphic produce,” with the onion boy fighting “the unjust treatment of his fellow vegetable townsfolk by the fruit royalty,” with an especially savory jab at “the overly proud Lord Tomato.”
The metaphors here are so fraught that one is reminded of that deathless scene in the movie Elf, where the editorial staff is pitching story ideas for a new kid’s book: “We were thinking, uh, something like this, uh...: We open on a young tomato. He's had some tough times down at the farm with, you know, a rabbit, and...” The hired marketing genius replies: “No. No tomatoes... Too vulnerable... And no farms. Everybody's pushing small town rural.”
Cipollino, in fact, won great favor in the USSR, but it is other work by Gianni Rodari that has become popular around the world. Given Rodari’s leftist leanings, it may come as no surprise that he is only now beginning to be appreciated in the English-speaking world, where Communist-sympathizing children’s authors aren’t a marketing formula that leaps to mind.
There is one aspect to Rodari’s storytelling that possibly traces back to his place of birth. He was born in Omegna, on Lake Orta, the smallest lake in Italy’s northern lake district. Orta’s larger and better known counterparts are Lake Como and Lake Maggiore. The New York Times recently called Orta “the Secret Little Sister of the Italian Lakes,” and Balzac called the island of San Giulio, at the lake’s center, “a spot coyly hidden and left to nature, a wild garden.” Rodari himself, in another of his most popular books, Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto, pointed out that the river Nigoglia flows north out of Lake Orta, as if intending to scale the Alps. “The people of Omegna are very proud of this rebellious river,” he wrote, adding that there is a local saying: “‘La Nigoglia runs uphill and we make our own laws.’ It strikes me as a very nice motto. Always think with your own mind.”
Perhaps there’s something special in the water of the river Nigoglia. I have personal knowledge of local brilliance: Omegna was also the birthplace and lifelong home of my friend the late Gianni Guadalupi, who was a prolific author and an expert on history’s famous travelers and explorers, as well as a connoisseur of fantastic literature. He coauthored (with Alberto Manguel) an international bestseller, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a veritable atlas of the imaginary lands of literature and legend.
One of Rodari’s contemporaries, the Nobel Laureate and playwright, Dario Fo, was born six years after him and not ten miles to the east. His best-known production was Mistero Buffo (“Comical Mystery Play”), based on surviving texts of the giullari, itinerant medieval players who wandered from town to town, village to village.
Fo’s and Rodari’s contemporary, Italo Calvino (who grew up not two hundred miles away) had a similar wry approach, blending political and social commentary with an unbridled fantasy. The idea of disguising political commentary as unbridled fantasy, by the way, certainly thrived under Fascist censorship, when saying something and being able to deny you had meant it to apply to the real world proved a useful tactic.
And in the mountains just west of Rodari’s birthplace stands the Sacred Mountain of Varrallo. This remarkable pilgrimage site, built five hundred years ago, features a succession of spectacular open-air shrines, populated with life-sized figures, coiffed with horse-hair and sporting medieval finery. Like a succession of dioramas, this cornucopia of vivid narrative is reminiscent of Rodari’s telephone tales, tumbled forth like a merchant’s offerings on a straw mat.
The tradition and the intent remains very much the same: a profusion of dazzling and diverting exemplary tales. It forms part of a narrative tradition, including stained-glass windows, mosaics, and carved fountains, known as the “Poor Man’s Bible.” Could it have been an inspiration?
Even when Rodari was at his most modern, as in The Cake in the Sky, there was inevitably some medieval quality to be glimpsed between the lines. The book, written two years before Telephone Tales, is rife with the atmosphere of the Cold War, the arms race, and the H Bomb. A giant cake is spotted in the sky over Rome, and the grownups, all dithering bureaucrats and absentminded scientists, have no idea what to do when it crashes. Luckily, the children of Rome do not hesitate: There’s plenty of cake for everybody. Come one, come all!
While it’s true that Rodari is relatively little known in English-speaking cultures, at least in comparison with his renown in Europe, he has had at least two previous English translators, Patrick Creagh (who produced a much abridged edition of Telephone Tales in 1965) and Jack Zipes. Zipes in particular translated Rodari’s The Grammar of Fantasy, an analysis of the process of unleashing the imagination. The book opens with this description:
“A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out on the surface of the water, and their reverberation has an effect on the water lilies and reeds, the paper boat and the buoys of the fishermen at various distances. […] Other invisible vibrations spread into the depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, scaring the fish and continually causing new molecular movements. When it then touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud and bumps into things that have rested there forgotten, some of which are dislodged, others buried once again in the sand.”
This description of the creative process seems apt for an author from a lakeside town, who subtitled another of his best-known works (Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto) “The Mysteries of the Island of San Giulio.” Other suggestions he offers in The Grammar of Fantasy to the budding creative mind are tactile (imagine that you are made of wood. What do you eat? What is your life like?), and the importance of slips of the tongue (having mistyped “Lampland” for Lapland, he set out to imagine a country inhabited by lamps. But in that same book, he cites illustrious names, ranging from Dante and St. Augustine to Novalis and Charles Perrault to Umberto Eco and John Dewey and Bertrand Russell.
Many of his stories may seem like the product of a simple tactic, but behind each lies a deep-rooted and wide-ranging conception of the universe, based on freedom and decency and friendship.