Natalia Ginzburg e il mestiere di scrittore, “il più bello che ci sia al mondo”

"My job is to write stories: invented things or things I remember from my life, but stories nonetheless—where culture has nothing to do with it, but only memory and imagination." With these words, Natalia Ginzburg (Palermo, July 14, 1916 - Rome, October 8, 1991), born into a cultured, anti-fascist, Jewish family, sums up her poetics: a writing born from the encounter between reality and imagination, between memory and invention, and in which life is transformed into literature. A protagonist of contemporary Italian culture, she lived through the periods that dramatically shaped the historical, political, social, and cultural course of the twentieth century. "It's useless to believe we can heal from twenty years like the ones we've spent," we read in one of the most powerful pages of The Son of Man, and a little further on: "Those of us who have been persecuted will never find peace again (...). We cannot lie in books and we cannot lie in any of the things we do (...). We are close to things in their essence." Natalia Ginzburg's name is closely linked not only to the literary world (in 1963 she was awarded the Strega Prize for Lessico famigliare). Her editorial work—as an editor, reader, and translator (particularly of the works of M. Proust) for the Einaudi publishing house—and her ongoing civic and political commitment, sitting in Parliament as an independent left-wing politician, tell the story of a woman who has left a profound mark on her intellectual personality. Short stories ("It Was So", 1947; "Valentino", 1957; "Family", 1977), novels ("The Road to the City", 1942; "All Our Yesterdays", 1952; "The Voices of the Evening", 1961; "Dear Michele", 1973; "The City and the House", 1984), essays ("You Must Never Ask Me", 1970; "Imaginary Life", 1974; "We Cannot Know It. Essays 1973-1990", 2001), memoirs ("The Little Virtues", 1962), biographies ("The Manzoni Family", 1983) and plays (the first of which "I Married You for Joy", 1966) represent the many expressions of a total dedication to writing in which, far from pathetic forms of autobiographical pietism or opaque halos of self-satisfied sentimentalism, the An authentic and true humanity. Natalia Ginzburg established a new way of being a writer in our literature: "True novels have the power to suddenly take us to the heart of truth," she wrote in 1969. A truth that, amidst the subtle yet deafening noise of everyday life, manages to tell us stories of drama, love, and illusions that unfold within, or just outside, the family shell, and in which "comic and slightly miserable" characters come to life. The writer does not wish to express judgments or moralistic considerations about these stories. The freedom of Ginzburg's typically literary art, strongly characterized by the use of the first person, does not seek to teach, but simply to tell. Thus, through the many stories invented or reactivated from memory—the latter stripped of any typically Proustian nostalgic edge—Natalia Ginzburg transcends self-referentiality, transforming that "I" into a "we," who are thus called indirectly, but inevitably, to reckon with our existence. Each in their own way, with their own familiar vocabulary, small wounds, and everyday virtues. And if for a shy woman "it was always difficult to talk about herself," it is through writing that Natalia Ginzburg imposes her voice—delicate, clear, simple—yet strong and powerful, like a thunderclap that has reached us all. Chiara Ruffinengo, born in Bra (Cuneo) and living in Paris, has taught Italian language, translation, and civilization at the University of Lille since 2012. Previously, from 2000 to 2008, she was part of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she earned a PhD in Italian Studies in 2008 with a thesis dedicated to Natalia Ginzburg. Her research focuses primarily on the relationships between anthropology, literature, and writing practices. She has published academic articles on Natalia Ginzburg, Daniele Del Giudice, Anna Maria Ortese, and Giovanni Arpino, as well as on translation-related topics, a field in which she has been active for many years. Her translations include Jean-Paul Kauffmann's The Kerguelen Arc: The Desolate Isles (Feltrinelli), Gaston Bachelard's The Poetry of Matter, and Line Amselem's novel Little Stories of the Rue Saint-Nicolas. She has also collaborated on the production and revision of the translations of two French-Italian dictionaries for Larousse. She has published the novel Altrove – Letters of a Woman from the World (Feltrinelli). Since 2016, she has led an Italian writing workshop in Paris.