The writer, translator and literary critic Gianni Celati, one of the most representative voices of the cultural ferments that have crossed Italian society from the seventies onwards, a restless author in his insatiable hunger to travel and tell stories, died in the night between 2 and 3 January at the age of 84 in a nursing home in Hove, near Brighton, an English city where he settled in 1989 with his wife Gillian Haley. The news of the disappearance was confirmed to the time.news by the writer friend Daniele Benati, in whose house in Reggio Emilia Celati was a guest every time he returned to Italy. Long ill, the writer had accidentally fallen last September, fracturing his femur and therefore requiring hospitalization.
Born as Giovanni Celati in Sondrio in 1937, from parents of Ferrara origin, he spent his childhood and adolescence in various Italian cities (Trapani, Belluno, Ferrara) following his family. He trained in Bologna where he completed his high school studies and then graduated in English literature with a thesis on James Joyce. In the mid-sixties he began his literary activity writing articles for magazines and publishing the first translations, including William Gerhardie’s “Futility” and Jonathan Swift’s “Fable of the barrel”.
In 1971 he made his debut as a narrator at Einaudi with the novel “Comiche”, with a note by Italo Calvino. Also at Einaudi he published “The adventures of Guizzardi” (1972), “The band of sighs” (1976) and “Lunario del paradiso” (1978), a work destined to profoundly influence the authors of the next generation, later collected in the trilogy ” Funny parliaments “(Feltrinelli, 1989, Mondello prize 1990).
After a period of teaching in the United States, Celati settles down again in Italy to take up the chair of Anglo-American literature at the Dams in Bologna, where a new generation of storytellers and artists grows around his teaching (Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Claudio Piersanti, Enrico Palandri, Giacomo Campiotti, Gian Ruggero Manzoni, Andrea Pazienza, Roberto ‘Freak’ Antoni and others). He also resumed an intense activity of literary criticism and translation, especially in the Anglo-Saxon area, translating among other things “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, “Bartleby the scribe” by Herman Melville, “The shadow line “by Joseph Conrad,” La Certosa di Parma “by Stendhal,” Gulliver’s travels “by Jonathan Swift.
In 1981, at the invitation of Luigi Ghirri, Celati’s path is intertwined with the artistic experience of a group of photographers engaged in research on the new post-industrial Italian landscape. Celati establishes a fruitful partnership with Ghirri, participating in the “Journey to Italy” project, which finds its expression in a large exhibition and in the catalog published in 1984.
After years of traveling and studying, in 1985 Celati returned to fiction with the short stories “Narratori delle pianure”, which mark the passage to the Feltrinelli publisher but also a strong stylistic change. After the ‘comic phase’ of the seventies, Celati inaugurates a new narrative season, linked to the world of orality, to the daily and marginal life of the lower Po valley. At the end of the Eighties “Four short stories on appearances” (Feltrinelli, 1987) came out and then, after a long work of rewriting and reassembly, the volume “Verso la foce” (Feltrinelli, 1989), an observation story “of wanderings made years earlier in the countryside of the Po Valley.
Leaving the University to devote himself entirely to writing, Celati in 1989 Celati settled in Brighton, England, from where he left for long trips to Italy and Africa. The writer’s production continues with intensity, measuring himself against literary and artistic experiences that are difficult to place within the traditional canons of genre.
In fact, Celati’s work ranges from travel notebooks with “Adventures in Africa” (Feltrinelli, 1998, Comisso award), to short stories with “Natural Cinema” (Feltrinelli, 2001 Chiara Award), passing through ethnological tales “Fata Morgana” (Feltrinelli, 2005, Campiello Selection Award, Naples Award, Flaiano Award), up to “Vite di pascolanti” (Nottetempo, 2006, Viareggio award), a collection of three short stories intended as the start of a personal epic. Among the most recent books “Sonnets of Badalucco in Italy today” (Feltrinelli, 2010) and “Commuter children who got lost” (Feltrinelli, 2011).
Concealed he also dedicated himself to the re-reading of ‘classics’ with the transcription of poems into prose (“The Orlando Innamorato told in prose”, Einaudi, 1994; “The misfortunes of Ulysses. Two songs of the Odyssey told in prose”, 2000). His critical essays dedicated to the most beloved authors appeared in the volume “Studies of affection for friends and others”, a collection of writings developed over the course of twenty years and published in 2016 by Quodlibet.
The Celati’s creativity is also expressed in the role of author and documentary film director: “Strada Provinciale delle Anime” (1991), “Luigi Ghirri’s world” (1999), “Scattered houses. Visions of collapsing houses” (2003) and “Diol Kadd. Life, diaries and filming in a Senegalese village “(2010, the latter inspired the book” Passar la vita a Diol Kadd. Diari 2003-2006 “(Feltrinelli, 2011).
In 2016, Celati’s decades of narrative commitment finds its consecration with the publication, in the “I Meridiani” series by Mondadori, of a large collection of narrative works edited by Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri, entitled “Novels, chronicles and stories” .
(from Paolo Martini)