It goes largely unacknowledged but is nonetheless true that a complete accounting of any country’s literary geniuses will include several writers for children. Near the top of the list for Italy would be Gianni Rodari. Rodari was a schoolteacher, a journalist and, most important, the author of stories and poems for kids. At the time of his death, in 1980, he was pretty much unknown in the United States, and he remained unknown until a few years ago, when the Brooklyn publisher Enchanted Lion put out a splashy edition of Rodari’s masterpiece, “Telephone Tales.” Now it’s releasing revised translations of two other Rodari titles.
I was going to call THE GRAMMAR OF FANTASY (316 pp., $29.95), with new illustrations by Matthew Forsythe, an essay, but right off the bat Rodari writes, “This book is not an ‘essay.’” OK, so what is it? Rodari: “To tell the truth, I really don’t know what it is.”
It’s an essay.
And what an essay! Rodari’s subject is “some ways of inventing stories for children and of helping children to invent their own.” As such, the book holds great value for the adults who teach kids and the adults who write for them — as well as anyone else who believes children’s stories are important, which should be everyone, but some days I’m not so sure.
There is a dearth of general interest literary criticism about children’s books, and both books and children are worse off for it. So we’re fortunate to have this contribution to a neglected genre by a major writer, in a revised translation by Jack Zipes that conveys Rodari’s love of wordplay.
In 1972, Rodari led a weeklong seminar for teachers in Reggio Emilia, an Italian town that was (and is) a bastion of experimental education. His week there inspired “The Grammar of Fantasy,” which is imbued with the child-centered, play-based spirit of the Reggio approach to schooling. The book is funny, freewheeling and angry, animated by Rodari’s fury at an educational system in which “imagination is still treated like a poor relation of attention and memory.”
Rodari insists on literature and creative writing’s centrality to a child’s schooling, and urges us to approach the subjects with a sense of delight and an appreciation of beauty. In “The Goat of Mr. Séguin,” one of the book’s most exciting chapters, Rodari lays out the stakes:
The decisive encounter between children and books takes place in the classroom. If it happens in a creative situation, where it is life that counts and not exercises, a taste for reading can arise, a pleasure with which one is not born, because it is not an instinct. If, on the other hand, the encounter happens in a bureaucratic situation, if the book is “humiliated” by being reduced to a tool for exercises (copying lines, summarizing the contents, analyzing the grammar, and so on), if it is suffocated by the traditional academic routines (“interrogation, evaluation”), the technique of reading can be developed, but not the taste for it. The children will know how to read, but they will read only out of a sense of obligation.
“The Grammar of Fantasy” is a tonic for anyone disheartened by our current zeal for STEM — curriculums emphasizing science, technology, engineering and mathematics — which often leaves little room for the unquantifiable benefits and innumerable joys of the humanities. A few years back, somebody had the idea to cram “art” into the mix, creating the new, much less substantial acronym STEAM. The whole thing was embarrassing, like when the office chips in to buy Jessica a cake for her birthday, a pretty one with “Happy Birthday, Jessica!” written on it, and then someone remembers that it’s also Carl’s birthday, so they scrawl “and Carl” in a different color. As anyone with a good arts education could have predicted, STEAM didn’t stick.
Rodari proposes a truly integrated model of education with “no hierarchy of subjects whatsoever. And ultimately, there is only one single subject: real life, encountered from all points of view.” This isn’t just some grandiose theory. Rodari gets practical. Throughout “The Grammar of Fantasy,” he offers classroom games that puncture the barriers between academic disciplines. A section on teaching limericks to kids concludes with this endorsement of nonsense and the irrational: “With children, to serve their best interests, it is important not to limit the possibilities for absurdity. For I believe that such possibilities can only add to their scientific education. Besides, even in mathematics, there are proofs that ‘reduce to the absurd.’”
Many of Rodari’s story prompts for students are ones the author used to generate his own famous stories. Most arise from his theory of the “fantastic binomial,” in which narrative energy is generated from the juxtaposition of two unlikely words, images or concepts. Whether other children’s writers find these prompts useful will depend on their taste for puns (a word game gives us “octomobile,” a car with eight wheels), topsy-turvyism (a silly gesture inspires a story about a man with a spoon for a nose who couldn’t eat his soup) and zany names. (“A character called ‘Pimpom,’” Rodari declares, “is certainly funnier than one called Carl.” On this point especially, Rodari and I could not more strenuously disagree.)
“The Grammar of Fantasy” is less a manual on how to write for kids than a treatise on why we must respect them as readers, written by an author whose life’s work was underpinned by an appreciation of the child’s “underlying seriousness, and the moral engagement that she brings to everything she does.”
Rodari’s final book, LAMBERTO, LAMBERTO, LAMBERTO (136 pp., $29.95, ages 9 to 12), first published in Italy two years before his death, is also being reissued, in a revised translation by Antony Shugaar with new illustrations by Roman Muradov. This is a modern fairy tale, the story of an elderly banking tycoon, Baron Lamberto, who learns that the secret to eternal youth is to have his name spoken constantly and so employs six people to sit in his attic and repeat “Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto,” in shifts. It all goes well until 24 bandits, also named Lamberto, take the baron hostage, setting off a protracted negotiation with the 24 directors of Baron Lamberto’s banks.
Kids’ favorite parts will probably be the stuff most likely to horrify prudish adults: the baron’s murderous nephew Ottavio, who tries to hasten his inheritance by attacking the old man with various heavy weapons, or the bandits’ removal of Baron Lamberto’s ear. (It grows back.) The story is buoyed by what Rodari’s friend Italo Calvino called “lightness,” a weightless story structure and language that floats above violence and dea
Muradov’s elegant, witty illustrations reinforce the playful tone (he draws the ear, and it’s not at all gross). And his illustrator’s note, which urges kids dissatisfied with his work to “feel free to alter the illustrations with whatever tools you have at your disposal,” is echoed by Rodari’s empowering farewell in his last book’s last pages: “Readers who are dissatisfied with the ending are free to change it to suit themselves, adding a chapter or two to this book. Or perhaps even 13. Never allow yourself to be frightened by the words: The End.”
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