Rinaldo De Benedetti left us thirty years ago. More than ninety years old, with the pseudonym Didymus he regularly signed articles for scientific dissemination in “La Stampa” and, with another of his many pseudonyms, Sagredo, books of poetry. In a cross-game between the “two cultures”, which for him were one, as it should be for all, the scholar “Sagredo” evoked Galileo’s Venetian friend who we find in the “Dialogue of maximum systems”, while the scientist ” Didymus ”alluded to the alter ego of the poet Ugo Foscolo. Time has passed, yet from Rinaldo’s drawers, thanks to his daughter Anna, writings of surprising quality and relevance continue to emerge: stories, philosophical and customs reflections, translations. In any case, unpublished or otherwise unobtainable pages.
Engineer and humanist
Amazing is “The novel of Catullus” just published by LED, University Editions of Literature Economics Law (138 pages, 22 euros), a work dated February 1935 in which Rinaldo De Benedetti – the engineer Rinaldo De Benedetti – becomes a historian, philologist and translator of the greatest Latin lyric poet, born in Verona in 84 BC and died in Rome in the prime of his age consumed by a disordered life.
It is difficult to add anything to Luca Serianni’s perfect “Presentation” that introduces this special book that has remained secret for so many decades. Serianni highlights, in the narrative part, the prose veiled by “a slight archaic patina”, and in the poetic part, the “modern but not necessarily actualizing translation”, rigorous in the metric aimed at restoring the hendecasyllabic faleci of Catullus.
Modernity, here it is about the fatuous Suffeno mocked by Catullus in poem XXII: “he is never so happy / as when he throws himself into verse / he enjoys himself so much, he admires himself so much”. The discursive tone, however, includes rarities such as “humbilic” (the sticks on which the papyri were rolled up) and leaves almost intact “dicax”, literally translated into “dicace” because in this Latinism-neologism Rinaldo De Benedetti perceives a better representation of that mixture of wit, vanity and impertinence that the Latin poet wanted to suggest.
The “dolce vita” of two thousand years ago
Read today, the “novel of Catullus” brings to mind and to the eye “La dolce vita” by Fellini: joyful friends, tempting women, youth, the pursuit of pleasure, sleepless nights, ambitions, rivalry, follies, excesses, loves, betrayals , melancholic joys and joyful melancholies, unrealistic escapes from an everyday life that nevertheless looms and becomes boredom as soon as the last cup of wine is drained or – worse – immediately after returning to native provincial life. And then Catullus attempts to escape to Bithynia, Thrace and Rhodes, before returning restlessly to quiet Sirmione. Because one cannot escape from oneself and the “novel of Catullus” is the story of a fragile man who gets hurt by loving Clodia / Lesbia, a strong woman. A man of clay against a woman of iron. A romantic and immature libertine as opposed to a calculating, cynical, inveterate libertine.
To read at school
It would be nice if this book, which so faithfully revives Roman culture of the last century before the Common Era, were to arrive in schools. It would be more useful than many history textbooks that struggle to get out of abstraction and push the past away instead of bringing it closer. It would also better understand how the elegant and smooth Greek culture conquered the Roman one, which nevertheless maintained its rustic concreteness, probably due to the lack of that philosophical sensitivity that marks the real profound difference between the shores of the Aegean Sea and the Tyrrhenian coast.
When he was writing for Dino Buzzati
Speaking of “lived philosophy”, other surprises reserve “In search of oneself” (preface by Vittorino Andreoli, L’Orto della Cultura editions, 227 pages, 16 euros), a book published a few months before the “Romanzo di Catullo”, where we find collected the reflections that Rinaldo De Benedetti / Didimo / Sagredo entrusted to a column in the “Domenica del Corriere” between 1950 and 1953, when that weekly, at the time the most widespread in Italy (600 thousand copies), responded to the shadow-direction by Dino Buzzati. There are 95 “cursives” that draw a pedagogical, moral and civil landscape, a personal experience which, on the printed page, becomes collective. In short, a world view.
The past seventy years have not made those clippings yellow. Just one example. Regarding the “education of yesterday and today”, explaining the tendency to permissiveness, Rinaldo De Benedetti wrote: “Today we live a fluid age. Parents (…) do not know what their children are waiting for tomorrow. Why should they discipline them so much? To save what? What stability, what security? They do not even dare to exercise strong authority because they feel a little guilty of the world in which one lives ”. Words that could be from this morning, the “fluid age” is exactly ours, in which precariat is ubiquitous, from the workplace to the economy, from existential projects to scales of values.
Foreword by Vittorino Andreoli
The broad and detailed preface by an internationally renowned neurobiologist and psychiatrist like Vittorino Andreoli is important both for the contents and because it allows us to remember that Didymus also played a role in introducing the thought of Freud and Jung to Italy: it was he who to found for the publisher Aldo Garzanti – where he had already invented the “garzantina”, progenitor of pocket encyclopedias – the first series of psychoanalysis, which he entrusted to Antonio Miotto, a psychologist particularly attentive to the implications of society and language.
As a scholar of the mind, Vittorino Andreoli is intrigued by the multiple pseudonyms of Rinaldo De Benedetti, which were not only Didymus and Sagredo, but also Alazor (from Lazzaro, his first name), Debe, Marco Valderi, Emi De Ponti, Ettore Fabietti and perhaps still others. In the specific case, common to many Jews, there is originally the need to hide in order not to fall under the blows of the racial laws: Didymus lost his job at the General Electricity Company for refusing to join the fascist party and worked illegally paid to Garzanti in order not to appear on the payroll. But later the game of aliases became an expression of his reserve, of his discretion. Perhaps he even enjoyed being elusive, being a journalist, poet, storyteller in disguise.
In the act of looking for himself, Andreoli observes, Rinaldo De Benedetti escapes the readers, carries out a stubborn misdirection. Like Pessoa with its fifty heteronomes or Anna Banti / Lucia Lo presti, Alberto Moravia / Alberto Pincherle, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who almost always published under fictional names such as Climacus and Anticlimacus, or the quotations from Borges attributed to non-existent authors. But it is above all Rinaldo’s wisdom that strikes Andreoli: “I have even read pages on madness and so I found it in simplicity and not in that organization of the discipline to which I have dedicated myself”. A madness as a “forced search for solitude: denying belonging to a world, to a society; a conversation no longer with others, but only with oneself and with miserable ghosts of one’s mind “.
The whys of children and scientists
For my part, I would like to point out the pages entitled “The whys of children and the whys of scientists”, where Rinaldo exalts “the disinterested curiosity, mother of all science and of many daring, a genuine sign of youth and spiritual nobility” and affirms “the substantial identity between the child and the scientist “. “Carrying this curiosity with you – he adds – without letting it completely sadden and die, even in the midst of the struggle for life, means that in this struggle we have not burned all the best of us; that it has not made us entirely slaves of necessity; which has allowed the possibility of a noble mental game to survive, common to children, to genuine thinkers, to true scientists: that is, precisely to those among scientists for whom science is not just a pretext for gain or career “.
“The twentieth century in your pocket”
In a notebook of autographs that Adriana Enriques inaugurated in October 1921, Albert Einstein signed this phrase destined to become famous: “Study and in general the search for truth and beauty are an area in which we are allowed to remain children for the whole life “(photo above). Wonderful assonance with Didymus, who obviously could not know the notebook, which reached the general public long after. However, the 30 thousand Turinese (and not) who visited the exhibition “The infinite curiosity” dedicated to Tullio Regge in 2017 and hosted at the Turin Academy of Sciences saw it. Enzo Barone and I, who designed that exhibition, considered it the “gem” of the entire exhibition itinerary. After Einstein’s signature, those of Arthur Eddington, Enrico Fermi, David Hilbert, Theotore Kàrmàn, Edmund Landau, Tullio Levi-Civita, Guglielmo Marconi, Robert Millikan, Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, Emilio Segré, Peter Zeeman, and also Rabindranath Tagore parade , Gianni Agnelli, Adriano Olivetti, Giacomo Puccini, Matilde Serao, Pietro Mascagni, Ugo Ojetti. There is also Ettore Petrolini. And there is the writer Marina Jarre, whom I then had the good fortune to meet, first by reviewing her and then convincing her to publish a novel about the Resistance, “The war of others”, which she kept unpublished on her desk in her house in via Villa of the Queen.
Anyone wishing to know everything about this exceptional notebook can read “The Twentieth Century in your Pocket” by Enzo Barone and Marco Ciardi (Hapax Editions, 126 pages, 28 euros). Never was the title more guessed. There you will find little-known details of Einstein’s visit to Italy in 1921, the intellectual and family relationships between Federigo Enriques and his daughter Adriana, the science that, thanks to physics, in the first half of the last century becomes truly international, the cultural intertwining between letters, arts and research, the synthetic history of racial laws and their fatal failures.