3 posts tagged “dante”

It can be easy to forget, when reading the Inferno, just how tall an order it was to create a hell that exceeded the extremes of contemporary military and political violence on earth.  The lovely Middle Ages of modern nostalgists aside (no names, but you people know who you are), it was hideous.  I am reading a brief history of the Catalans— alongside desultory reading about Spanish history in general and 14th-century Florence and so forth— and, seriously, yuck.  I'd never have the stomach to work on this period; I don't care how magnificent the troubadours were.  Under the banner of a peculiar seafaring German, a nasty band of Catalan mercenaries, the Almogàvers, sailed to Constantinople in 1303 and briefly overpowered it; on the way back they captured Athens and much of the rest of Greece.  Did you know about this, Catalan hegemony in Greece and Asia Minor?  No?  My source is Jan Read's The Catalans (Faber & Faber, 1978).  It was a bloody, gory, gruesome messy mess, and no one misses the Catalans in Greece today.  From there we move on to a chapter on the great era of Catalan preeminence in the Mediterranean, presided over by a king who made his enemies drink molten metal.  This is all too obvious to be worth mentioning, but it isn't as though Dante was wandering around Bella Tuscany eating goat cheese and dreaming up nightmare scenarios with which to smite his enemies; he needed only to take notes and extrapolate.

It is far from clear what lessons one can derive from this.  The idea of Necessity lurking in the past really does seem dangerous.  Also, Jesús Moncada = good, although I don't know what's been translated etc.  Also, expect me to be an utter sniveling wreck by the end of two weeks or so, when my papers come due.  At least I am learning to conceive of worlds distant in time and space...  even if "when the papers are due" is a misty one...

This cheered me up— from the Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd Edition, in "Dante and the lyric past" by Teodolinda Barolini (p. 27):

The Rime contains the traces of Dante's stylistic and ideological experimentation.  The tenzone of scurrilous sonnets exchanged between Dante and his friend Forese Donati, for instance, was long denied a place among Dante's works because of its base content, considered inappropriate for the refined poet of the Vita nuova; and yet, without it, we would be hard put to trace the passage from the tightly circumscribed world of the Vita nuova to the all-inclusive cosmos of the Commedia.  Nor does the tenzone's lowly content obscure the archetypal signs of Dante's poetic mastery, evidenced by the compact vigor and concise force of his diction, and the effortless energy with which one insult springs from another.  Whereas Forese requires a full sonnet to accuse Dante of being a bounder who lives off the charity of others, Dante characteristically packs an insult into each verse of the opening quatrain of "Bicci novel," which tells Forese that (1) he is a bastard, (2) his mother is dishonored, (3) he is a glutton, and (4) to support his gluttony he is a thief:

Bicci novel, figliuol di non so cui
(s'i' non ne domandasse monna Tessa),
giù per la gola tanta roba hai messa
ch'a forza ti convien tòrre l'altrui.

(Young Bicci, son of I don't know who [short of asking my lady Tessa], you've stuffed so much down your gorge that you're driven to take from others.) (Foster and Boyde, Dante's Lyric Poetry, 1, p. 153)

Also good was David Wallace's "Dante in English," from which I kept reading aloud to P, z.B.:

In [1782], however, William Hayley translated three cantos of the Inferno as a footnote to his Essay on Epic Poetry, and William Rogers published a blank verse translation of the entire Inferno.  Rogers' work is neither accurate nor poetically accomplished; the quality and tenor of Hayley's work may be gauged from an earlier rendition of the famous Hell-gate inscription in his The Triumphs of Temper (1781): "Thro' me ye pass to Spleen's terrific dome" (DEL 1, p. 361). [...]  It was not until 1814... that H.F. Cary, an Anglican clergyman, brought the English-speaking world face to face with a powerful, accurate, and poetically moving translation of Dante.  (289-90)

That was the one Keats hauled around the Lake District and Blake illustrated.  On Wallace's account, with only a few exceptions (Chaucer, Milton, Shelley) the height of Dante's reception in English was the 20th century, although he doesn't speculate on the implications.  I leave this exercise to you readers!  Why would Dante have gone over so well in the age of modernism-and-after, at least in English?  Is it just too upsetting in a less secular world, perhaps?

In the meantime found a beautiful book on Petrarch, from 1898, at Moe's; also free and very charming translations of some of his earlier sonnets, like this one:

[234]

I inhabit a small room.  It is shaking
With storms I thought to hide from.
I carry them with me, then.

My bed moves like a sea,
Harboring its own grief.

I escape my privacy, leave behind me
There myself, my stunted thinking.

I am so terrified of being alone
I catch myself arranging encounters with milkmen,
Civil servants, the people who sell vegetables.

tr. Nicholas Kilmer.  The original, quite distinct:

O cameretta, che già fosti un porto
A le gravi tempeste mie diurne,
Fonte se' or di lagrime notturne
Che 'l dí celate per vergogna porto!

O letticciuol, che requie eri e conforto
In tanti affanni, di che dogliose urne
Ti bagna Amor con quelle mani eburne
Solo vèr' me crudeli a sí gran torto!

Né pur il mio secreto e 'l mio riposo
Fuggo, ma piú me stesso e 'l mio pensero,
Che, seguendo 'l, tal or levommi a volo;

E 'l vulgo, a me nemico et odioso,
(Chi 'l pensò mai?) per mio refugio chero:
Tal paura ho di ritrovarmi solo.

There's the Petrarchan form you all know and love!  Honestly, if I'm going to buy a bilingual edition of poems for my own enjoyment, I'd rather get something like this -- especially with a form (that sonnet, with its ready-made tropes) that has been replicated twelve billion times and whose viral characteristics have been remarked time and again.  Do we need the rhyme scheme in English?  Nah.  Make it strange.

The rendition of the last stanza might be a bit optimistic, however, in its lack of judgment and pejoratives.  In a chapter from Dante in Renaissance Florence (on the virtual bookshelf at right), on Boccaccio's and Petrarch's reactions to Dante, we get a sense of Petrarch's feelings about "il vulgo:"

Petrarch's best-known statement on the subject, that he cannot envy a poet who is the darling of manual workers from lower social groups, now follows in a passage that rests upon classical topoi and is found in one of the most rhetorically wrought sections of the entire letter:

"how can someone who does not envy Virgil, envy anyone else, unless perhaps I envied him [sc. Dante] the applause and raucous acclaim of the fullers, or tavernkeepers, or woolworkers who offend the ones whom they wish to praise, whom I, like Virgil and Homer, delight in doing without?  [aut cui tandem invideat qui Virgilio non invidet, nisi forte sibi follonum et cauponum et lanistarum ceterorum ve, qui quos volunt laudare vituperant, plausum et raucum murmur invideam, quibus cum ipso Virgilio cumque Homero carere me gratulator?]" (36-7)

I have written more embarrassing things in letters than this, believe me, but history demands that we assign this passage the full force of conviction.  Not until the introduction of religious doubt in the 18th century was that sort of embarrassment possible.  And how clear is the man's envy of Dante?  Crystal.