Why Read the Classics? (12 page)

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Authors: Italo Calvino

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Vinceano di candor le nievi intatte
,
et eran piú ch’avorio a toccar molli:
le poppe ritondette parean latte
che fuor di giunchi allora allora tolli
.
Spazio fra lor tal discendea, qual fatte
esser veggiàn fra piccolini colli
l’ombrose valli, in sua stagione amene
,
che ’l vemo abbia di nieve allora piene
.
(Her skin outdid virgin snow in its whiteness and it was smoother to the touch than ivory: her little round breasts were like fresh mozzarellas. The space between them was like the shady valleys we see between gentle hills, in early spring, which winter has filled with snow.)

These shifts towards vagueness cannot blind us to the fact that precision is one of the chief poetic values cultivated by Ariosto’s narrative vene. In order to document how much richness of detail and technical precision an octave can contain, one has only to choose from the duel scenes. I shall limit myself to this stanza from the final canto (46.126):

Quel gli urta il destrier contra, ma Ruggiero
lo cansa accortamente, e si ritira
,
e nel passare, al fren piglia il destriero
con la man manca, e intomo lo raggira;
e con la destra intanto il cavalliero
ferire al fianco o il ventre o il petto mira;
e di due punte fé sentirgli angoscia
,
l’una nel fianco, e l’altra ne la coscia
.
(Rodomonte charges his horse against him, but Ruggiero, on foot, cleverly avoids it, and stepping aside grabs the horse’s reins with his left hand, and turns it round. At the same time, with his sword in his right hand, he aims blows at his enemy’s side, stomach or breast; and in fact makes him feel the pain of two sharp jabs, one in the side and the other in the thigh.)

But there is another type of precision which one must not ignore: that of reasoning, the argumentation that unfolds within the enclosure of metrical form, which he articulates in the most detailed way, attentive to every implication. The maximum agility, of a type I would define as almost forensic, is to be found in the defence which Rinaldo, like a skilful lawyer, conducts against the crime passionnel of which Ginevra is accused, when he does not know whether she is guilty or innocent (4.65):

Non vo’ già dir ch’ella non l’abbia fatto;
che nol sappendo, il falso dir potrei:
dirò ben che non de’ per simil atto
punizïon cader alcuna in lei;
e diró che fu ingiusto o che fu matto
chi fece prima li statuti rei;
e come iniqui rivocar si denno
,
e nuova legge far con miglior senno
.
(Now I am not saying she did not commit this act, for since I do not know the facts for sure, I might then be saying something false; but I will certainly say that no punishment must fall on her for such an act, that he who first framed these evil laws was either unjust or mad, and that as unjust laws they must be revoked, and a new law passed with wiser counsel.)

The last thing I should exemplify is the violent octava, one which contains maximum slaughter. Here there is an embarrassment of choice: sometimes it is the same formulae, indeed even the same verses, which are repeated or
simply reordered. At a first, cursory glance, I would say that the record in the violence quotient for a single stanza is to be found in the
Cinque canti
(4.7):

Due ne partí fia la cintura e l’anche:
restâr le gambe in sella e cadde il busto;
da la cima del capo un divise anche
fin su l’arcion, ch’andò in pezzi giusto;
tre ferí su le spalle o destre o manche;
e tre volte uscí il colpo acre e robusto
sotto la poppa dal contrario lato:
dieci passò da l’uno a l’altro lato
.
(He sliced two of them between the belt and the hips: their legs remained in the saddle while their upper half fell down; another one he split from the top of the head down to his seat, which then fell cleanly into two pieces; he struck three others in the back, either on the right or left shoulders, and in these three cases the strong, painful lance-blow emerged on the other side under their nipple; ten others he ran through from one side to another.)

We note immediately that this homicidal fury has caused damage the author did not foresee: the repetition of the rhyme-word
lato
without it having a different meaning is clearly an oversight which the poet did not have time to correct. Actually, if one looks carefully, in the context of this catalogue of wounds which fills the stanza, the entire final line turns out to be a repetition, since being run through with a lance has already been exemplified. Unless this fine distinction is implied: while it is clear that the three preceding victims are run through back to front, the last ten victims could present a less usual case of lateral run-through, the lance going through from side to side not back to front. The use of
lato
(side) seems more appropriate in the last line if it is used in the sense of
fianco
(hip). Instead in the penultimate line
lato
could have been easily replaced by another word in ‘-ato’ such as
costato
(ribcage): ‘sotto la poppa al mezzo del costato’ (under the nipple in the middle of the ribcage), a correction which Ariosto could not have failed to make had he continued to work on what are now known as the
Cinque canti
.

With this modest contribution towards Ariosto’s work in progress, expressed in a spirit of friendliness, I close my homage to the poet.

[1975]

Gerolamo Cardano

What is Hamlet reading when he comes on stage in Act 2? To Polonius, who asks him this, he replies ‘words, words, words’, and our curiosity remains unsatisfied. However, if the To be or not to be’ soliloquy, which opens the Prince of Denmark’s next appearance on stage, offers any clue as to his recent readings, it ought to be a book which discusses death as though it were sleep, whether visited or not by dreams.

Now this theme is discussed in considerable detail in a passage of Gerolamo Cardano’s
De Consolatione
, which was translated into English in 1573 and dedicated to the Earl of Oxford, therefore familiar in circles frequented by Shakespeare. Amongst other things, it says, ‘Certainly the sweetest sleep is the deepest sleep, when we are almost like the dead, not dreaming anything; whereas the most irksome sleep is the one that is very light, restless, interrupted by constant waking, tormented by nightmares and visions, as happens to those who are ill’.

To conclude from this that the book read by Hamlet is definitely Cardano, as is held by some scholars of Shakespeare’s sources, is perhaps unjustified. And certainly that little ethical treatise is not sufficiently representative of Cardano’s genius to become evidence for Shakespeare ever having encountered his work. However, that passage does discuss dreams and this is no accident: Cardano returns insistently to dreams, especially his own, in several passages of his works, describing, interpreting and commenting on them. This is not only because in Cardano the factual observation of the scientist and the reasoning of the mathematician somehow derive from a life dominated by premonitions, signs of astrological destiny, magic influences, and diabolical interventions, but also
because his mind refuses to exclude any phenomenon from objective enquiry, least of all those that surface from the deepest wells of subjectivity.

It is possible that some of the restlessness of Cardano the man comes across in the English translation of his rather awkward Latin. In that case it is highly significant that if it is Cardano’s European reputation — Cardano was famous as a medical man, but his works embrace all branches of knowledge and enjoyed considerable posthumous popularity — which authorises the link between him and Shakespeare, it does so actually on the periphery of his scientific interests, in that vague territory which will be later thoroughly traversed by the pioneering experts in psychology, introspection and existential anguish. These were the areas into which Cardano probed in an epoch in which this branch of knowledge did not even have a name; nor did his enquiries have a clear objective, but were merely driven by an obscure but constant inner necessity.

This is what makes us feel close to Gerolamo Cardano, today on the fourth centenary of his death. But this is not to take anything away from the importance of his discoveries, inventions and intuitions which ensure that his name figures in the history of science as one of the founding fathers of various disciplines. Nor does it detract from his fame as a magus, a man endowed with mysterious powers, a reputation that followed him around but which he himself also broadly cultivated, and which was at times the object of his boasts, at times the source of his own apparent amazement.

His autobiography,
De Propria Vita
, which Cardano wrote in Rome shortly before his death, is the book which keeps his name alive for us both as a writer and as a personality. He was a writer manqué at least as far as Italian literature is concerned, because if he had tried to express himself in the vernacular (and it would certainly have been an Italian as rough and ungainly as Leonardo’s), instead of doggedly composing all his works in Latin (he felt that only Latin could guarantee immortality), sixteenth-century Italian literature would have had not another classic writer, but another weird one, though one that was all the more representative of his age for being eccentric. Instead, adrift as he is on the high seas of Renaissance Latin, he is now read only by scholars: not that his Latin is as clumsy as his critics claimed (in fact the more elliptical and idiosyncratic his style, the more pleasant it is to read him), but because it forces us to read him through a glass darkly, as it were. (The most recent Italian translation is, I believe, the one published in 1945 in Einaudi’s Universale series.)

Cardano wrote not just because he was a scientist who had to
communicate the results of his research, or a polygraph bent on contributing to a universal encyclopedia, or a compulsive scribbler obsessed with filling page after page, but also because he was a genuine writer, who tried to capture with words something that appeared to elude them. Here is a passage about childhood memories which would merit a place in any future anthology of ‘precursors of Proust’: it is a description of visions or daydream rêveries or flights of fancy or psychedelic hallucinations to which he was subject — when he was aged between four and seven — when he stayed in bed in the morning. Cardano tries to provide the precisest possible record both of this inexplicable phenomenon and of the state of mind in which he watched this ‘diverting spectacle’.

I saw aery images which seemed to be composed of tiny rings, like those in chain mail (lorica), even though I had never seen them at that age. They rose from the right-hand comer of the bed, ascending slowly from the bottom to form a semicircle and then descending to the left-hand comer where they disappeared: castles, houses, animals, knights on horseback, blades of grass, trees, musical instruments, theatres, men dressed in different guises, particularly trumpeters playing their trumpets, though no sound or voice could be heard, and then soldiers, crowds, fields, shapes I had never seen before, woods and forests, a whole range of things which flowed past without merging into each other but instead seeming to jostle each other. Diaphanous figures, but not like empty, non-existent forms: rather they were at once both transparent and opaque, shapes which lacked only colour to make them perfect, but which yet were not only made up of air. I used to enjoy gazing at these spectacles so much that once my aunt asked me: ‘What are you looking at?’ and I refused to answer, afraid that if I spoke, the source of these displays, whatever it was, might be annoyed and stop the entertainment
.

This passage comes in the autobiography in a chapter dealing with the dreams and other unusual physical features he was heir to: being born with long hair, the cold of his legs at night, his hot sweats in the morning, the recurrent dream of a cockerel which seemed permanently on the verge of uttering some dire warning, the moon he saw shining in front of him every time he looked up from the page he was writing after solving a difficult problem, his emission of sulphurous or incense-filled odours, the fact that whenever he was in a fight he was never wounded, nor wounded other people or even saw others being wounded, so that once he realised he had
this gift (which however did not work on several occasions) he would fling himself fearlessly into every quarrel and riot.

His autobiography is dominated by a constant preoccupation with himself, with the uniqueness of his own person and destiny, totally conforming to the astrological belief which held that the sum of disparate particulars which make up the individual finds its origin and raison d’être in the configuration of the sky at the moment of birth.

Thin and unhealthy, Cardano was triply concerned with his own health: as a doctor, as an astrologer, and as a hypochondriac, or as we would say now, as someone with a psychosomatic condition. As a result the clinical chart he has left us is extremely detailed, ranging from lengthy life-threatening illnesses to the tiniest spots on his face.

This is the subject matter of one of the first chapters of
De Propria Vita
, which is a biography constructed around themes: there are chapters on his parents (‘mater fuit iracunda, memoria et ingenio pollens, parvae staturae, pinguis, pia’ (my mother was an irascible woman with a powerful memory and intellect, small in stature, fat and pious)), his birth and star sign, a physical self-portrait (which is meticulous, ruthless and complacent in a kind of inverted narcissism), his diet and physical routine, his virtues and vices, his favourite things, his consuming passion for gaming (dice, cards, chess), his manner of dress, his gait, his religion and other devout practices, houses he lived in, poverty and losses to the family patrimony, risks taken and accidents, books written, the most successful diagnoses and therapies of his medical career, and so on.

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