2023-05-31 16:00:36
“When she suggests replacing the classics with the contemporary, Susanna Tamaro should name, rather than herself, the writers of the great twentieth-century style, to whom it is right to draw greater attention. But not to the detriment of the greats of our past, who are the protagonists of the planetary gallery of literati e it would be good if the writers themselves read more today, to get their own style tooThis is how the Accademia della Crusca beats the writer Susanna Tamaro, author of the best seller “Va’ dove ti porta il cuore”, according to which, as she recently declared, contemporary writers should be read at school and leave the boring classics alone starting with Giovanni Verga.
The reprimand against Tamaro, whose words have aroused “bewilderment among teachers and scholars”, reports time.news, is signed by Vittorio Coletti, professor emeritus of the history of the Italian language at the University of Genoa and academician of the Crusca, who with Francesco Sabatini he directed the “Sabatini Coletti. Dictionary of the Italian Language”.
According to the linguist Coletti, in the article entitled ‘Literature at school, today’, published on the website of the Accademia della Crusca, Susanna Tamaro’s specific reference to Verga was “particularly unfair and wrong – she must have been bored reading the ‘Malavoglia’, but I think it’s his problem, because it is, by universal recognition, a novel that is among the great masterpieces of nineteenth-century European narrative: an extraordinary linguistic invention, between the poetic and the realistic, epic and tragic portrait of a humble and honest Italy, which tried to establish itself through hard work and found in the State a distant and deaf power.The relevance of Verga’s masterpiece remains very strong, even if the poor no longer trade in lupins and emigrated abroad”.
According to Professor Coletti, “there is a powerful pedagogical reason for making Susanna Tamaro’s statements questionable: the idea of school and literature as a double or mirror of the present. The role of the school, however, is not to reflect or to erase the differences between young people and their world, but to help them understand them, to measure them with different languages, richer or more precise than their own, such as those of literature”.
“Literature, for its part, helps the reader to understand his own time not only when it is chronologically contemporary with it, but also and above all when it provides him with powerful and long-lasting means, tested by decades or centuries of attention and consensus, to understand it alone – writes Coletti – Literature and school are not places in which one must reflect on the surrounding reality, already too poor of its own to hope for duplicates, but those in which one reflects on it and tries to understand it, to consciously relate to and, whenever possible, to improve it”.
To Tamaro who argued that young people need contemporaneity, of current events, to find their sensitivities and problems and of the present also in literature, the academic della Crusca replies that “there is a just need in this request, but also a gross error, refuted for centuries, which consists in believing that the artistic topicality is represented only by contemporary art and not understanding that the rate of modernity is proportional to the value of the work, to its resistance to time, so much so It is true that today Greek tragedies (albeit in another language and of much greater antiquity) are commonly used and studied by historians and jurists to address strictly current political and juridical problems, and the recent anniversaries of Dante and Manzoni have shown the vitality of their teaching for the knowledge and criticism of the Italian character and for a rethinking of the concrete human dimension at the time of its feared evaporation into the virtual universe”.
(by Paolo Martini)
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