1 post tagged “literary history”
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?
