In presenting his collection of studies, Sebastiano Timpanaro (Parma 1923 – Florence 2000) said that those were the minor writings of a philologist who did not have major writings to his credit. A similar understatement reflects the profound humility of one of the greatest classical philologists of the twentieth century, who can be listed among the eminent figures of contemporary culture, “one of the brightest and most original minds,” wrote Perry Anderson. Son of a physicist (Sebastiano senior, the one who branded Croce as “illiterate in science”) and of Maria Cardini, an esteemed Greek scholar, Timpanaro was a figure of great intellectual complexity in which interests and only philological-literary but also, and constantly, theoretical-political.
A PHYSIOLOGY he was a shy man, suffering both from an inability to speak in public and from severe agoraphobia, to which he added a further peculiarity – in his case synonymous with equal dignity – the fact that he had never climbed onto a university chair and had taught between the post-war period and 1959 in professional start-up schools before being employed, he who had been one of Giorgio Pasquali’s favorite pupils, in the La Nuova Italia publishing house in Florence as editor in charge of proofreading the Greek and Latin texts.
Now, in view of the centenary of his birth, the monograph that Luca Bufarale dedicates to him comes out of a small and worthy collection from Pistoia, Sebastian Timpanaro. The restlessness of research (Preface by Mario Bencivenni, Afterword by Romano Luperini, Documentation Center Pistoia Editrice, «I Quaderni dell’Italia antimoderata, pp. 112, euro 10), a clear profile, balanced in the judgments and divided into four chapters of concentric structure.
Obviously starting from the training of Timpanaro who never wanted to follow the advice of the masters at the University of Florence (because Pasquali wanted him to edit the archaic Ennius, the subject of his thesis, while Eduard Fraenkel even advised him the complete Virgil) vice versa applying himself to a number of minute philological and linguistic problems that other scholars punctually received as Cartesian solutions, as evidenced by the titles of an immense bibliography (Contributions to philology and history of the Latin language1978; For the history of ancient Virgilian philology1986; Ancient Virgilianists and indirect traditionposthumously 2001) and starting from a monograph which soon became internationally famous, The genesis of the Lachmann method (1963), in which the scholar returns to the disciplinary foundations of philology as a science of the edition of ancient texts, analyzes their history and conditioning fearing an excessive mechanization of the procedures and instead opting for an interpretative examination more in keeping with the material and historical entity of the texts themselves.
AND THAT FOR TIMPANARO philology was not a separate practice but a real habitus, on the other hand, another outstanding book of his says, The Freudian slip (1974), where the scholar demolishes a famous passage from Psychopathology of everyday life starting from Freud’s controversial interpretation of a Virgilian verse referred to him by a patient. In Timpanaro’s eyes, Freud is an epic narrator, an accomplice of the bourgeoisie rather than a scientist because «he sees confirmation of the validity of his method in the great multiplicity of explanations all competing for a single goal, without asking himself whether this superabundance, indeed inexhaustibility , is not rather an indication of the weakness of its construction».
It is a critique that the scholar extends to the dominants of contemporary culture in the name of materialism (his major collection is precisely entitled On materialism1970) which he claims by recovering the first traces in antiquity (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius) to connect them to the Enlightenment and above all d’Holbach, of which he translates for Garzanti in 1985 The goodsenseand then of course Karl Marx who, however, does not separate from the always underestimated Engels and from what for him is not “vulgar” materialism at all but materialism tout court: that is, the only means to face existence nakedly, with dignity and a spirit of truth.
But another and even more essential reference of his, which once dismayed some readers of Piacenza notebooks, it is Giacomo Leopardi whose thought Timpanaro finally corroborates (his «bitter and sad, desperate but true» philosophy) against the white, recluse and detached image that had been of the crociani. In his eyes, if Marxism is not an anthropology but an ongoing critique of political economy, then it is necessary to interrogate the other material invariants of the human condition (physical frailty, disease, pain, death) up to the “consequences pessimistic ideas that Leopardi drew from it with greater coherence and lucidity than anyone else», as he states in an essay by Classicism and Enlightenment in the Italian Nineteenth Century (1965) which follows, with an eloquent title, Anti-Leopardians and neo-moderates in the Italian left (1982) to close the circle opened in ’55 with The philology of Giacomo Leopardi.
AND MARX’S NAMESLeopardi and Freud himself dot the scholar’s papers now ordered at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, especially the epistolary writings of which Timpanaro was prodigal and master in the significance of a crystalline style even in polemical vivacity: and the correspondences with some of his peers, the one with Francesco Orlando (Correspondence on Freud2001) and, amazingly, with the German scholar Cesare Cases (A slip of Marx’s. Correspondence 1956-1990edited by Luca Baranelli, Edizioni della Normale 2015).
Authentic Red string of his bibliography and of his very existence, writes Bufarale, “is the passionate defense of the link between the human aspiration to happiness and the struggle for socialism” without which not even his most minute activity as a classical philologist is conceivable. Always an anti-fascist, a member of the PSI after the war and close to the positions of Lelio Basso, he joined the PSIUP due to disagreement with the newborn centre-left and finally, between 1974 and 1976, the Pdup. He remains a grassroots, assiduous, participatory militant and some comrades still remember him present at the meetings together with his mother, an elderly socialist. An anti-Stalinist, Bufarale underlines his “enhancement of the ‘libertarian’ Lenin of the State and Revolution and of the battles waged in recent years against bureaucratism and against the excessive power assumed by Stalin” while bringing him closer to Trotsky’s thought which for him “should become common patrimony of the entire workers’ movement”.
POLISHEDin a Leopardian fashion without being sceptical, his political testament is in a terminal collection, The Green and the Red. Militant Writings 1966-2000 (edited by Luigi Cortesi, Odradek, 2001), which contains texts on the political present, on the return of war, on the forms of neocolonialism and the now disruptive ecological question. In 1999, almost on his deathbed, addressing those protesting at the Seattle summit, Sebastiano Timpanaro dictated this diagnosis of the present state of things: «More and more we understand and say clearly what capitalist globalization means: an increase in the gap between rich countries and poor countries and, within the rich countries themselves, an ever greater sinking into the misery of the proletariat and of a large segment of the middle class».
The Notebooks of anti-moderate Italy
A small but essential necklace. Dedicated to great figures of the intellectual and political left, the «Quaderni dell’Italia antimoderata» are published by the Documentation Center Pistoia Editrice (www.antimoderati.it). Entrusted to specialists, these are popular monographs, concise but bibliographically impeccable and rich in documentary contributions. The series has so far released: «Luciano Bianciardi» by Giuseppe Muraca, «Giovanni Pirelli» by Cesare Bermani, «Raniero Panzieri» by Cesare Pianciola, «Stefano Merli» by Franco Toscani and Attilio Mangano, «Guido Quazza» by Diego Giachetti, « Massimo Gorla» by Fabrizio Billi and William Gambetta, «Bruno Borghi» by Antonio Schina and «Franco Fortini» by Luca Lenzini.