Dante Alighieri - Reading Dante

Reading Dante

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GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA

Yale
UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Haven and London

Copyright 2014 by Yale University.

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Excerpts from Dantes Divine Comedy are taken from the following editions, translated and with commentary by Charles S. Singleton:

Divine Comedy: Inferno 1970 Princeton University Press, 1998 renewed. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Divine Comedy: Purgatorio 1991 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Divine Comedy: Paradiso 1975 Princeton University Press, 2003 renewed, 1991 paperback edition. Reprinted by Princeton University Press.

Set in Minion type by Westchester Book Group. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 1942

Reading Dante / Giuseppe Mazzotta.

pages cm.(The Open Yale Courses Series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-19135-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Dante Alighieri, 12651321Criticism and interpretation. 2. Dante Alighieri, 12651321Appreciation. I. Title.

PQ4390.M544 2014

851'.1dc23

2013024101

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I dedicate this book with love to my grandchildren:
Peter, Dasha, Giuseppe Khaleel, and Azura Marie

In the fall of 2008 I complied with a request to have my Dante in Translation course videotaped in the Open Yale Courses series. It is a course that I began teaching in 1969, when I was on the faculty of Cornell University, and I have been teaching it ever since, with very few occasional intermissions in between.

Over all these years (as is my wont with all other courses), I have taught without notes. This habit has one definite advantage but also at least one big disadvantage. The disadvantage is clear: my oral style does not directly translate into the legible prose it has become in this book thanks to the extraordinary talent for creative writing of Taylor Papallo. Taylor has masterfully transformed the nebulous approximations of the transcripts of my courses twenty-four lectures into faultless English, and I gratefully acknowledge my debt to him. Above all, he and I have decided to keep in this book the skeleton structure, indeed the rhythm (the movement of a sentence, repetition, cadence, the improvisation, and so on), of a spoken talk.

On the other hand, one obvious stylistic advantage in the adoption of the conversational, informal tone of the classroom is that it allowed me to cut to a bare minimum the use of technical, philosophical language and to engage in spur-of-the-moment, extemporaneous, offhand remarks and interpretations. Plainly, in a book the act of improvisation, which we usually link with impromptu musical or poetic performances or the comic theater, typically finishes in mere contrivance or fiction, however desirable it may be for the sense of immediacy it conveys. The qualities associated with oral communication were replaced in this book by what could be called a deliberate artlessness. I have deployed this rhetorical mode not because I meant to write a popular book on the Divine Comedy, but because I think that Dante did write a poem that would be sung in public and would be suitable to all, to the scholars, the philosophers, the friars and the popes, political figures as well as everyman in the streets of medieval cities. As is known, the poem represents a wide assortment of characters, styles (the high, the low, the plain, and their mixtures), schools of thought, theological perspectives, and diverse social and political backgrounds.

To represent this variety of experiences, disciplines, and political-theological questions Dante self-consciously invents a new poetic language, which amounts to saying that he shaped a new way of thinking, one that transcends the traditional oppositions between philosophy, poetry, and theology. The premise of the Divine Comedy, which was written in the vulgar tongue, in Italian and not in Latin, so that a simple woman or a man at the lower end of the social ladder would understand, is that, however divergent and contradictory the exchanges and discourses among characters are, however mixed its style (lyrical songs, invectives, moral teachings, dialogues, prayers, and so on), they are all bound in a conversation with one another. It is a conversation that is born of familiarity and yet cannot be understood within the horizon of what is familiar. Dante has a way of turning all fixed conceptions about the values of the familiar and the known upside down, as readers discover that they arethat we areat sea, disoriented or lost, and that the poem challenges and puts into question all that has been taken for granted as final (politics, justice, the illusoriness of limits and of the boundaries of the various worlds that are represented, the senses of history, knowledge as transgression, the failure of political and religious authority, freedom and its values, and so on).

This call to the iconoclastic, critical self-reflection that the poem unfolds suggests that, hermeneutically speaking, the Divine Comedy resists popularization. There is always something else, something more, in every line of the poem, and the palimpsests behind the overtness of the literal sense force us readers to launch headlong into the more that the poem offers. Beginning with the central canticle of the poem, Dante tries to chart the course for the pilgrim himself; he will do so again for the fewer brave sea-voyagers in Paradise, and, again, eventually for those the poet refers to as the people of the future: in reality, he wants his poem to become the everymans vademecum, as a way of making possible what we see from the edges, the limits and the limitlessness of the human. The poem guides the reader in acknowledging ones actual place in the world and in wanting to find that place by breaking out of the prison of the self and its mirrors. Individually first, but also as members of the pilgrim Church, he hopes his readers will discover that they all have in common something profound: they all take different routes in a common pursuit, at the end of which it is possible to look into the knot where the human and the divine are bound together.