Clive James (1939-2019), "Gianfranco Contini,"
Cultural Amnesia (2007; rpt. London: Picador, 2012), pp. 133-144 (at 134, translating Contini):
Unfortunately, the custom of learning by heart has disappeared in the
schools, and as a consequence the very use of memory has gone with it.
Nobody knows how to read verse. My best students, notably gifted
philologists, can’t recognize by ear whether a line is hendecasyllabic or not:
they have to count on their fingers.
GIANFRANCO CONTINI,
quoted in Diligenzia e Voluttà [Diligence and Enjoyment]:
Ludovica Ripa di Meana Interroga Gianfranco Contini, p. 100
Id. (at 135):
There is an untranslatable Italian word for the mental bank account you
acquire by memorizing poetry: it is a gazofilacio. Contini believed that an
accumulation of such treasure would eventually prove its worth even if it had to
begin with sweated labour. He confessed that not all of the teachers who had
made him memorize a regular ration of Tasso’s epic poetry had been inspired.
Some of them had held him to the allotted task because they lacked imagination,
not because they possessed it. But in the long run he was grateful. Most readers
of this book will spot the sensitive point about modern pedagogy. Readers my
age were made to memorize and recite: their yawns of boredom were
discounted. Younger readers have been spared such indignities. Who was lucky?
Isn’t a form of teaching that avoids all prescription really a form of therapy? In a
course called Classical Studies taught by teachers who possess scarcely a word
of Latin or Greek, suffering is avoided, but isn’t it true that nothing is gained
except the absence of suffering? In his best novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo
made a running joke out of a professor of German history who could not read
German. But the time has already arrived when such a joke does not register as
funny. What have we gained, except a classroom in which no one need feel
excluded?