Italo Calvino Praises Galileo's Prose
As I am reading Galileo’s Dialogue, I find the writing to be very much alive. I am by no means alone. In this post, I will focus on comments made by the late Italian writer Italo Calvino, who called Galileo “the greatest Italian writer.”
On YouTube, there is a short video from January 1968 of Calvino speaking about Galileo:
Here is an English translation, done with the help of Deepl, of the transcript of the part of the video that refers explicitly to Galileo:
Leopardi, in the Zibaldone, admires Galileo's prose for its combined precision and elegance. It is enough to see the choice of passages from Galileo that Leopardi makes in his Crestomazia della prosa italiana to understand how much the language of Leopardi, even the language of the poet Leopardi, owes to Galileo.
Galileo uses language not as a neutral tool but with a literary consciousness, with a continuous expressive, imaginative, even lyrical participation. When reading Galileo, I like to look for passages in which he speaks of the moon. The moon in Galileo's pages becomes for the first time a real object for mankind, something that is described minutely as a tangible thing. Yet as soon as the moon appears, Galileo's language undergoes a kind of rarefaction, levitation, rising into an enchanted suspension.
When I said that Galileo is the greatest Italian writer, Carlo Cassola jumped up and said, “What? I thought he was Dante.” Thank you! Nice discovery! I first of all meant prose writers, and then there the question arises between Galileo and Machiavelli, and I too would be embarrassed. I am telling the truth, because I also love Machiavelli very much.
But right now I have to say that the direction of work, from which again I find the greatest nourishment, I find in Galileo as precision of language, as imagination, let us say typical poetics, as the construction of conjectures.
But Galileo, says Cassola, was a scientist, not a writer! But this argument is easily dismantled. Similarly, Dante too, in a different cultural horizon, did encyclopaedic and cosmological work. Dante too sought through the literary word to construct an image of the universe. This is a profound vocation of Italian literature. This vein in recent centuries has become more sporadic and, since then, Italian literature has certainly declined in importance. Today, perhaps the time has come to resurrect it.
The transcript of the Italian original, I did myself:
Leopardi, nello Zibaldone, ammira la prosa di Galileo per la precisione ed eleganza congiunte. È basta vedere la scelta dei passi di Galileo che Leopardi fa nella sua Crestomazia della prosa italiana per comprendere quanto la lingua leopardiana, anche la lingua del Leopardi poeta, deve al Galileo.
Galileo usa il linguaggio non come uno strumento neutro ma con una coscienza letteraria, con una continua partecipazione espressiva, immaginativa, addirittura lirica. Leggendo Galileo mi piace cercare i passi in cui parla della luna. La luna nelle pagine di Galileo diventa per la prima volta per gli uomini un oggetto reale, qualcosa che viene descritta minutamente come una cosa tangibile. Eppure appena la luna compare il linguaggio di Galileo subisce una specie di rarefazione, di levitazione, che si innalza in una sospensione incantata.
Quando ho detto che Galileo è il più grande scrittore italiano, Carlo Cassola ha saltato su e ha detto, "Come? Credevo che fosse Dante." Grazie! Bella scoperta! Io prima di tutto intendevo scrittori in prosa e allora lì la questione si pone tra Galileo e Machiavelli, e anch'io sarei in imbarazzo. Dico la verità, perché amo molto anche Machiavelli.
Ma in questo momento devo dire che la direzione di lavoro, cui di nuovo il maggiore nutrimento lo trovo in Galileo come precisione di linguaggio, come immaginazione, diciamo quindi tipico poetica, come costruzione di congetture.
Ma Galileo, dice Cassola, era scienziato, non scrittore. Pero questo argomento si smonta facilmente. Allo stesso modo anche Dante in un diverso orizzonte culturale, faceva opera enciclopedica e cosmologica. Anche Dante cercava attraverso la parola letteraria di costruire un immagine dell'universo. Questa è una vocazione profonda della letteratura italiana. Questa vena negli ultimi secoli è diventata più sporadica e da allora certo la letteratura italiana ha diminuito di importanza. Oggi forse è venuto il momento di riprendere.
In 1985, Calvino prepared a series of texts on literature for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures to be delivered at Harvard University that fall. Unfortunately, he passed away that September prior to flying to the US. The lectures were published posthumously. In the second lecture, on Quickness, he wrote about the interaction of Sagredo and Salviati, focussing on the end of Day One in the Dialogue:1
In the Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), speed of thought is personified by Sagredo, a character who intervenes in the discussion between the Ptolomaic Simplicio and the Copernican Salviati. Salviati and Sagredo represent two different facets of Galileo's temperament. Salviati is the rigorously methodical reasoner, who proceeds slowly and with prudence; Sagredo, with his “swift manner of speech” and more imaginative way of seeing things, draws conclusions that have not been demonstrated and pushes every idea to its extreme consequences. It is Sagredo who makes hypotheses on how life might be on the moon or what would happen if the earth stopped turning. But it is Salviati who defines the scale of values in which Galileo places quickness of mind. Instantaneous reasoning without passagi (transitions) is the reasoning of God's mind, infinitely superior to the mind of man, which however should not be despised or considered nothing, insofar as it was created by God, and in the course of time has investigated and understood and achieved wonderful things. At this point Sagredo breaks in with an encomium on the greatest human invention, the alphabet:
But above all stupendous inventions, what eminence of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, no matter how far distant in place and time? Of speaking with those who are in India, of speaking with those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years? And with what facility? All by using the various arrangements of twenty little characters on a page!
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Italo Calvino. Six Memos for the New Millennium, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp.43-44.