Famous in Italy, Rodari Reaches U.S. Shores With ‘Telephone Tales’
The children’s book writer never caught on in America, partly because of
his Communist Party ties, but the English-language release of his
masterpiece could change that.
Gianni Rodari’s book “Telephone Tales” was published in Italy in 1962,
using unlikely situations and imaginary worlds to prompt young readers
to question the status quo.
Gianni Rodari’s book “Telephone Tales” was published in Italy in 1962,
using unlikely situations and imaginary worlds to prompt young readers
to question the status quo.Credit...via Enchanted Lion Books
ByAnna Momigliano
* NY Times, Sept. 5, 2020
*
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EUPILIO, Italy — One of Gianni Rodari’s short stories is set in a
faraway land where the authorities are so meek that, when a visitor
picks a forbidden flower, a police officer demands to be slapped across
the face. The visitor refuses to comply with such a strange order — if
anything, he says, it’s the police who should slap him — but the reader
is left wondering if reality is any less absurd.
Rodari, a beloved children’s author in Italy who died in 1980, took
state violence seriously. When he was a reporter for the Communist
newspaper L’Unità, in 1950, he covered the police shooting of six
unarmed men protesting for workers’ rights, and one of his early poems
was about a child whose father was killed by the police.
But by the time he published his masterpiece, “Telephone Tales,” Rodari
had developed a subtler approach. “He put politics in his tales in a way
that you couldn’t say, ‘Well, this is socialist ideology,’ but made you
question what’s happening in the world and how nonsensical people are
sometimes,” said Jack Zipes, a professor emeritus of comparative
literature at the University of Minnesota who has studied and translated
Rodari.
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First published in Italy in 1962, “Telephone Tales” is a collection of
children’s stories intended to be short enough that one could be read
during a 20th-century pay phone call, as the Italian title, “Favole al
telefono,” suggests more explicitly. It is also unapologetically
political, using unlikely situations and imaginary worlds to prompt
readers to question the status quo.
Image“Telephone Tales” comes out in English on Sept. 8.
“Telephone Tales” comes out in English on Sept. 8.Credit...Enchanted
Lion Books
It has never before been published in the United States, but Enchanted
Lion is releasing it on Tuesday, with translation by Antony Shugaar and
illustrations by Valerio Vidali (a partial English translation came out
in the U.K. in the 1960s). The publisher also plans to release Rodari’s
essay on education and storytelling, “The Grammar of Fantasy,”
translated by Zipes, next year.
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Other children’s books, including “The Story of Ferdinand
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/ferdinand-review.html>,” have
become classics over the years despite debate over their political
interpretations, but it remains to be seen how “Telephone Tales” will be
received in America. “Every single tale is a small revolutionary act,”
said Giulia Massini, an Italian book critic.
Claudia Bedrick, the publisher and editor at Enchanted Lion, said she
and Shugaar have been working on the book for five years and that its
release isn’t a political statement or a response to one. But she added
that “Rodari’s political message is profoundly important, and you don’t
publish Rodari without caring about it, because it lives and breathes in
all he says.”
During his lifetime, Rodari was popular at home and abroad, especially
in Russia and Eastern Europe, and was the only Italian writer awarded
the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for children’s literature.
He never caught on with English-speaking readers, in part because of his
ties to the Communist Party.
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In Italy, nevertheless, Rodari is seen as a mainstream author. His books
are read in schools, most Italians know at least one of his nursery
rhymes by heart, and some of his lines (“nails have heads but they don’t
think / the same could be said of some people”) are part of Italy’s
shared heritage as much as Pinocchio.
Image
As a reporter at the Italian newspaper L’Unità, Rodari was asked to
write the children’s section because he was the only staff member who
had ever worked with children.
As a reporter at the Italian newspaper L’Unità, Rodari was asked to
write the children’s section because he was the only staff member who
had ever worked with children.Credit...Enchanted Lion Books
His books are constantly reprinted, and he has been the subject of
several books in Italy, most recently a biography by the historian
Vanessa Roghi. “He’s a timely author,” she said.
Born in a working-class family, Rodari briefly taught in a primary
school. During World War II, he joined the Resistance and Italy’s
Communist Party, and in 1947 he began working for L’Unità, the party’s
newspaper, as a political reporter. There editors asked him to write the
children’s section, because he was the only staff member who had ever
worked with children.
His breakthrough came in 1960, with a collection of nursery rhymes that
reached far beyond his typical politicized, leftist readership.
“Telephone Tales,” published two years later, was an instant success. In
1971, the publisher Einaudi released a new edition of the “Telephone
Tales” in its most prestigious book series, the Struzzi, dedicated to
classics, placing Rodari side by side with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Italo
Calvino.
Rodari worked at a pivotal moment for Italy’s education system and took
a serious interest in pedagogy. In the 1960s, Italy’s schools were
reformed to be more inclusive of poor and working-class children, but
the changes sparked a conservative backlash. Rodari’s books, with their
accessible style and jokes built around grammatical mistakes, were
intended to empower disadvantaged children who weren’t exposed to books
and formal speech at home.
“He wanted kids not to feel intimidated, to see mistakes as a tool to
grow and as a creative moment,” Roghi, his biographer, said. She added
that Rodari also contributed to the development of the Reggio approach,
the educational philosophy born in Reggio Emilia after World War II,
that saw the classroom as a self-educating community.
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His ideas on education have attracted criticism in some quarters. One of
Italy’s most prominent education writers, Paola Mastrocola, dedicated a
chapter of one of her books to what she viewed as Rodari’s negative
influence on schooling. “The implicit idea of Rodari’s method, his
not-so-hidden message, was that school needed to stop doing boring
things,”she wrote
<https://www.guanda.it/libri/paola-mastrocola-togliamo-il-disturbo-9788860881649/>.
“The direct consequence was that suddenly we deemed boring grammar,
history and literature, and stopped studying them.”
Image
“Rodari’s political message is profoundly important, and you don’t
publish Rodari without caring about it, because it lives and breathes in
all he says,” Claudia Bedrick, the publisher and editor at Enchanted
Lion, said.
“Rodari’s political message is profoundly important, and you don’t
publish Rodari without caring about it, because it lives and breathes in
all he says,” Claudia Bedrick, the publisher and editor at Enchanted
Lion, said.Credit...Enchanted Lion Books
Rodari was at times enthusiastic of Communist ideology. “Go Marx! Go
Lenin! Go Mao Tse-Tung! Go Juventus!” he wrote in a 1971 letter to his
publisher, grouping Communist leaders with his favorite football team.
But he also criticized the U.S.S.R. “For us socialism means more
freedom, or it doesn’t mean anything at all,” he wrote in a 1968 op-ed
criticizing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The political message
in his children’s books had more to do with developing a critical
attitude toward the world as it is, capitalism included, rather than
inculcating socialist ideals.
“His political project was freedom, the idea that the humankind could
set itself free through the development of a critical sense,” Massini,
the critic, said.
To Rodari, imagination was always revolutionary, because he thought
that, when readers picture different worlds, they stop taking existing
conditions for granted and learn to think about alternatives. His world
bears similarities to Dr. Seuss as much as it does the Marxist
philosopher Antonio Gramsci, bringing utopia and nonsense together.
In one of the stories in “Telephone Tales,” two children make up numbers
and measurements on a whim. “How much does a teardrop weigh?” one asks.
The other answers: “Depends. A willful child’s teardrop weighs less than
the wind, but that of a starving child weighs more than the world.”
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