Famous Italian Children’s Author GIANNI RODARI Celebrated
As part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gianni Rodari, Italy’s most beloved author of children’s books, the Embassy of Italy’s Italian Cultural Institute hosted a virtual talk on November 24, 2020, featuring experts here and in Italy. Rodari remains the only Italian writer to have won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Prize, awarded to him in 1970, one of the most important international awards relating to children’s literature. The webinar featured Grazia Gotti, president of the official Italian committee for Gianni Rodari’s centenary, translator Antony Shugaar and illustrator Valerio Vidali. In Italy, everyone knows who Rodari is. But in the U.S., practically nobody knows his name. During his lifetime, not one of his 30 books was published here. Now a small publisher in New York, Enchanted Lion Books, has brought out the first full English translation of “Telephone Tales,” considered by many to be his masterpiece.
Gianni Rodari (1920-1980) is known for his love of word play, nonsensical turns of phrase, and for looking at social justice and equality issues with a fresh, playful perspective. The panel described his works for children as wildly inventive, sometimes funny, sometimes surreal, but always profound and timely. As Rodari famously said, “When they are little, children must stock up on optimism, for the challenge of life.” The panel discussed the relationship between words and pictures and explained the challenge, joy and provocation in translating and illustrating the work of such an influential and iconic figure.
Vidali talked about the task of illustrating a book by an author whose books he remembered reading as a child, and he described how he came to do the whimsical, surreal drawings he envisioned as adding to the stories. First published in Italy in 1962, “Telephone Tales” is a collection of 67 children’s stories intended to be short enough that one could be read during a 20th-century pay phone call, as the Italian title, “Favole al telefono,” suggests. In those days, a token (gettone) allowed the caller to make a short telephone call. The premise of the book is a father who was a traveling salesman calling home each evening to tell a story to his young daughter. The stories have enchanting titles such as “The Road to Nowhere,” “The Planet of Truth” and “The Man Who Stole the Coliseum.
“Gianni Rodari is known for his love of word play, nonsensical turns of phrase, and for looking at social justice issues with a fresh, playful perspective.”
” In one of the stories in the book, “Inventing Numbers,” two children make up numbers and measurements on a whim. “How much does a teardrop weigh,” one asks. The other answers, “Depends. A willful child’s teardrop weighs less than the wind, but that of a starving child weighs more than the world.” Born in 1920 in Omegna, a small town on Lake Orta in the Piemonte region, Rodari came from a poor family. His father died when Gianni was 9 years old after contracting pneumonia rescuing a cat in a rainstorm. Rodari had a background in education and journalism before embarking on the career that would secure his place in the hearts of children in Italy and all over the world. Interested early on in children’s education, he first taught at an elementary school before he transitioned to work as a newspaper reporter. In World War II, Rodari was a member of the Resistance and joined the Communist Party.
His brother was interned in a German prison camp. In 1948, he began publishing in the Communist newspaper Unità poems about the children of contemporary working-class Italy that in form closely resembled children’s folklore. Rodari’s poems in his collections, for example, “Little Book of Nonsense Rhymes,” showed his ability to reveal the world’s complexity and meaningfulness in the ordinary, small phenomena of life. By 1960 he had written enough material to publish his first book, “Nursery Rhymes in the Sky and on Earth.” On the centenary of his birth, October 23, 2020, Roadri was the subject of the “Google Doodle” logo on the search engine’s homepage.
The Google Doodle featured an onion, alongside Rodari’s face, in a reference to his much-loved children’s book “Il romanzo di Cipollino” (The Tale of the Little Onion). For his contributions to children’s literature, Rodari won many major awards throughout his life, and today his works have been translated into over 20 languages. During his lifetime, Rodari was popular at home and abroad, but he never caught on with English-speaking readers, in part probably because of his ties to the Communist Party. Perhaps the translation of “Telephone Tales” will change that. ❚