Cesare Garboli’s “Molière”

In an age teeming with know-it-alls who write and talk about absolutely everything, it seems almost touching – and thoroughly twentieth-century – to return to reading and discovering critics who, instead, chose a select few authors to accompany them throughout their lives, and whose deepest secrets they managed to fathom. One such great critic was Cesare Garboli, whose body of work can be summed up in the title of a book that sheds light on his perspective regarding a handful of authors (Elsa Morante, Molière, Dante, Sandro Penna, Giovanni Pascoli) whom he scrutinised with philological rigour and the keen eye of one who knows how to read beyond the ink of the words: Scritti servili is the title of that book in which Garboli defines the ‘servile’ nature of his writing, an act of ‘service’ that takes concrete form in the craft of the ‘writer-reader’: ‘There are writer-writers and writer-readers. The writer-writer hurls his words into space, and these words fall into an unknown place. The writer-reader goes to fetch those words and brings them home, just as Vespero herds his goats, making them belong once more to the world we know”. In the marvellous "Il Molière di Cesare Garboli" (which finds its perfect home in the elegance of the ‘Millenni’ series), one can grasp the deeper meaning of the work of the ‘writer-reader’, as it brings together – with the care of the great actor and theatre director Carlo Cecchi, a friend of Garboli’s with whom, right up until the critic’s death, he worked side by side specifically on Molière – all the work Garboli carried out on the great French playwright throughout his life. Here one can read Garboli’s twelve acrobatic translations (including the unfinished work on "Le Seigneur de Pourceaugnac" and the three unpublished works "Les Quatre Fâcheurs", "George Dandin" and "Le Médecin malgré lui"), accompanied by a series of sorcerous (the adjective is Carlo Ginzburg’s) essays that highlight the significance of reviving a work which seemed (before Garboli dissected it) so far removed from contemporary taste, yet which instead lays bare all its idiosyncrasies and vices with the tragic smile of one who can see beyond the end of one’s own nose. “A novelist is a person brimming with imagery and imagination, who projects the vapours of their own imagination onto the screen of the world and ‘brings the world into being’, imprinting it, branding it, stamping it with their own imagination. Thus, he transforms the world with his words.” This is how Garboli described Molière’s visionary power, but these reflections also serve as a guide to recognising the paradigm of his work—a hermeneutic impulse that has made literature a living entity, a mirror through which to attempt to understand the world. A lesson for those who believe it is necessary to speak of everything.

edited by Carlo Cecchi
"Molière" by Cesare Garboli
, Einaudi, 1,042 pp., 100 euros