l'arto rotto

So I work at a bookstore now, and in the break room we have a shelf of publisher's copies that we are free to read and to take home. By the time they get to me, there are few very desirable ones left, and although I've heard rumors that we get almost all of the books in advance, I've seen little evidence of any author I know. Anyway, I have found a couple of interesting ones on that little shelf, but for the most part, my reading list is so stocked with books that have already been published, I haven't dared to delve into the realm of the unproofed. But this book was calling out to me from the shelf. I like to think it was the size of the book, just chubby enough and not too tall, that drew me in, but I'm partial to believe that it was fate, as I usually do with Dante.

This book is the epitome of junk food for your eyes. It's like Mean Girls sans parody. I mean, this is the kind of book that I don't even want my coworkers to see me read. I actually hide it from them when they come into the break room and pretend that I'm playing with my BlackBerry. That's how ridiculous it looks.

Then, I did something to this book I swear I have never done before. I ripped out a page. That's right. I feel guilty even now, sitting here with pages 305 and 306 on my lap, like someone's severed limb. I keep telling myself I'll tape it back in tomorrow, but this was too urgent, and I didn't want to take the whole book home and not have any reading material for my break tomorrow.

But I couldn't help it - pages 305 and 306 are magical. They contain the Dante references.

"I remember when we were studying Dante in English, and Ben Gowan kept asking if the tormented souls ever got cast down into hell (Ben Gowan once got suspended for three days for drawing a picture of a bomb blowing up our cafeteria and all of these decapitated heads fling everywhere, so for him the question was normal), and Mrs. Harbor went off on one of her tangents and said that no, that wasn't possible, but that some modern Christian thinkers believed you could go up from purgatory into heaven once you'd done enough penance for your sins. I've never really believed in heaven. It always sounded like a crazy idea: everybody happy and reunited, Fred Astaire and Einstein doing a tango in the clouds, that kind of stuff."

Actually, it isn't just the modern Christian thinkers - even Dante believed that people could travel up from purgatory. Remember Sapia? Her heartbreaking plea for prayers reminds the reader that the living have power over the soul of the dead in Dante's purgatory:

"Oh, this is such a strange new thing to hear,"

she replied, "that it is a great sign that God loves

you; therefore with your prayers help me from

time to time.

And I beg you by what you most desire, if ever

you tread the soil of Tuscany, restore my good

fame among my relatives.

You will see them among that vain people who

place their hopes in Talamone and will lose more

hope in it than in seeking the Diana,

but the admirals will lose even more."

(Purg. XIII, 145-154, trans. Durling)

The Durling translation is new to me, but it seems to be accessible in this case. Sapia believes that if Dante is close enough with God to be able to travel through Purgatory while alive, then he must have a little sway in her own situation. Even her relatives, not necessarily chosen by God for any particular journey, have influence through prayer. This passage is beautifully hopeful for anyone who has lost a loved one, to believe that your prayers aren't made in vain.

As far as I know, however, no soul has been cast down into Hell from above. If you're in Purgatory, you're saved. If you're not, I'm sorry. The only exception has been those few virtuous pagans whom Jesus lifted up with him the day of his resurrection. All of this, of course, according to our poet, who insists that his word is the truth. But no one gets worse. Dante's is a surprisingly forgiving afterlife in this aspect. Unless, of course, you enter the gates of Purgatory and decide to look backwards. Then, we all know what will happen to you:

"He who would look back must return, again, outside."

(Purg. IX, 131-132)

It seems like every novel I've read in the past few months mentions Dante at some point. I'm not keeping an eye out for any other classical references, so it's difficult to be sure, but I can't remember seeing so many direct addresses regarding one work. Either Dante really is making a comeback, or I'm starting to really lose it. Maybe I should lay off the junk food for a while.

il rinascimento

In Danteworlds, published this summer, Guy Raffa writes that we are in the "midst of a mini renaissance in the cultural appreciation of Dante's poetic masterpiece." Based on what I've witnessed over the last few months, I'd have to agree. Roberto Benigni made a national tour of his "Tutto Dante" performance, which was awesome, by the way. I also read two novels which included Dante and his themes. Along with the renaissance, Dante enthusiasts will have to bear the fact that the general public is going to be exposed to his work and form their own opinions of it. It could be en vogue to write and talk about our favorite medieval poet!

One of the novels I mentioned is The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult. It was recommended to me a couple of times before I actually picked it up and read it, and I can't really say what it added to my library. I want to be clear, though: this is not a book review of her work - I pretty much knew what I was going into with it. But the title struck something in me when I discovered its meaning. The mother, a Dante professor, ends her semester on Inferno with a discussion of modern sins and how they fit into Dante's hell. She and her students discuss how "Technology helps us be more creative in the way we sin, but it doesn't mean that the basic sin is any different." She goes on to think of a worse sin, one that isn't addressed by Dante. The tenth circle would be the level for people who betray themselves; deeper than treachery to kin or to country. But aside from how a tenth circle would screw with Dante's number symbology, I wondered if Dante would honestly think that betraying oneself is truly the deepest sin. I don't think Dante is so self-centered as we are today, with our American notions about individualism.

The worst sin, for Dante, is the sin against God, of course. Just like the best that you can do for yourself is stop being selfish and start to glorify the Lord. Every sin is self-centered because the sinner took the focus off of God and put it on himself.

While reading about her final lecture, I couldn't help but reminisce about how our final "lecture" in Dante class. We didn't actually have lectures, technically, but Dr. L always left us with a few words of wisdom. "What if," he asked, "Dante actually did go on this journey? What if he was telling the truth?" The words stay with me. Somehow, I know he was telling the truth. If Dante didn't really go through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, how could he have written the poem in all its perfection? Maybe the journey wasn't literal, but it must have happened, metaphorically, for Dante.

When I teach Dante, I want to put my students up to the same challenge. Dante's relevancy isn't in question here; I think we can all agree that Dante will never stop being relevant. He's classic. But his popularity is another question. In this Dante renaissance, it's important not to get caught up in the use of Inferno for film, video games, and bestselling novels. Of course, I support Dante as inspiration, but let's not let it go too far. I hope that "re-finding" Dante's work will allow other people to develop appreciation, awareness, and interest for Dante without perverting this incredible poem.

Trascendentalismo

This weekend, I attended the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, where Pulitzer Prize-winner John Matteson read an essay entitled "Margaret on the Stairs, Waldo on the Common: the Origins of the Transcendental Self."  I have been thinking a lot lately about the influence of Dante on the American Renaissance - the Transcendentalists in particular - but this essay struck a particular chord with my understanding of Dante.

We talk so often of the first lines of Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che la diritta via era smarrita.

(Inf. I, 1-3)

Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood,

for the straight way was lost.

(Trans. Hollander, obv)

Again and again we return to these lines, focusing on the meanings of particular words, such as mezzo or nostra.  But what about ritrovai?  If anything like "trouver" in French, I would liken the word to "found" - essentially, re-found.  Hollander here says "came to myself," which is a little more poetic, but I think I have to refer to Sanders and Birk on this one:

About halfway through the course of my pathetic life,

I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place.

I'm not sure how I ended up there; I guess I had taken a few wrong turns.

(Trans. Sanders and Birk)

There is a sense here that Dante was wandering through life before this without any conscious effort put forth into where he was headed - not that he necessarily expected to be somewhere else, because I think that the poetry is imbued with the hints of surprise.

In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard describes a similar phenomenon:

"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad?  They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning; in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills.  They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way."  (Three by Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, 281)

What does this have to do with Transcendentalism, you ask?  The essay I heard on Sunday at the School of Philosophy in Concord highlighted a journal entry by Margaret Fuller when she recalled being a child, and finding herself suddenly on the stairs of her home, thinking, "How came I here?  How is it that I came to be this Margaret Fuller?  What does it mean?  What shall I do about it?"  She found herself standing in the middle of her own life, suddenly awake and full of questions.

Dante also awoke to find himself full of questions, yet he was not a child.  This was part of the point - he was middle aged, quickly approaching "too late" to repent, so Beatrice sent Saint Lucia down to warn him, to take him on this journey.  Transcendentalists saw moments of clear consciousness such as this to be divine, and in Dante's case, it truly was.  Perhaps there is a reason for this association; we can only realize and appreciate the value and weight of life - of living - when we are aided by divinity.  Matteson argued that this awakening is necessary for the realization and discovery of the self.  What did Dante find on his journey if not himself and God?

Hopefully all people experience this at some point, waking and realizing that life is meant to be lived consciously and well.  The child's experience in Annie Dillard and Margaret Fuller, or the mid-life awakening of Dante or "Waldo on the Common" I think share a similar message: be conscious of the importance of your self.

I had a magnificent weekend attending lectures about Thoreau and commemorating the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.  But the highlight was Sunday, sitting in the School of Philosophy behind Orchard House and thinking about Dante.  I think that those were the moments that I truly felt alive.

la verità

On the flight home from Tuscany, Gracie leaned across the aisle and read to me this quote from Hollander's introduction to Inferno:

The Comedy is presented, from end to end (no reader can possibly miss this fact), as a record of an actual experience.  Let us be honest with one another.  You do not believe, and I do not believe, that Dante took a seven-day trip to the otherworld.  But we can agree that his claims for total veracity are in the poem.  Why?  

(Hollander, xxxiii)

Of course, we all got a kick out of Hollander's frankness on the subject, and I began to recount the instances in which Dante insists that his poem is the truth and wonder about their purpose.

Part of Dante-the-Pilgrim's reliability as a narrator is his relationship with the reader.  There are more than twenty direct addresses to the reader throughout the poem, and this idea is reflected in the very first line: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita..." (Inf. I, 1).  Critic William Franke argues that this device has "ontological significance;" that all poetry inherently addresses a reader, and that Dante brought this device further into usage (Franke 119).

Because the reader trusts Dante, feeling that the pilgrim is confiding in him, the reader also notices when Dante is insistent on the veracious nature of his poem.  In fact, the entire poem hinges on this truthfulness; Dante is commissioned to write a poem exactly about what he has seen on the journey in order to gain the grace of God.

For example, Purgatorio XXIX is the primary example of this cited by Hollander:

Go read Ezechiel who depicts them as he saw them,

descending from the frigid zone

in wind and cloud and fire.

And just as you shall find them on his pages

such were they there - but for the wings,

where John accords with me and not with him.

(Hollander, Purg. XXIX 100-105)

Here, Dante reminds the reader that he has actually seen these beasts.  Hollander notes that "even biblical testimony is secondary to his own" (660).  Dante's unwavering conviction is admirable.

It is said that when Dante was older, he grew a long, gray beard, and people would spread rumors in hushed whispers that it was singed from his trip to inferno.  Children would tug at his ragged cloak, simply to touch "the man who went to hell."  The poem requires a suspension of disbelief significantly greater than most other works of fiction, yet the intensity of imagination has never hindered readers; in fact, it has often only encouraged them.

Imagine if Dante had ever, even for a moment, seceded his claim that the poem was anything other than the truth; the reader would not know how to approach this work, even from the beginning.  As a poem with infinite layers, the primary and most interesting to new readers of Dante is the ability to read the poem as a simple recounting of one man's journey to the afterlife.  Without this facade, the reader is forced to consider the poem solely by its allegorical meaning - immediately losing him or her in its complexity.

Its adherence to this "truth" is why Dante's poem can be as enjoyable to read as to study.  Besides, everyone likes to be entertained.  Give over to the hypothetical adventure, and the Comedy truly comes to life.

un omaggio

Last night, I went to watch the senior thesis presentations for the Theater Department, and  I was truly impressed with every scene.  But when Jeff, a fellow Dantista, began his performance with a spotlight and the words "Midway through the journey of this our life..." I was more than impressed; I was enraptured.  As I sat watching Jeff interpret the different parts of the Commedia, I began to wonder why the seven of us took so immediately and intensely to Dante's poem.  Our response was beyond any normal interest, and we often referred to ourselves as "the Dante obsessed."

Dante readers tend to feel that the love for this poem is something internal rather than external, that the poem incites something within themselves that hasn't existed before.  Does this imply that all of the Dantisti are inherently predisposed to fall in love with Dante?  There seems to be something common and separate about Dante for all of us.

As I watch the other Dantisti and realize their capabilities, I can't help but notice that the students of Dante stand out in any crowd.  Does Dante only attract exceptional students, or are we only exceptional because we are drawn to him?  Either way, every one in the class made a unique contribution: Susan, with her passion for teaching that results in a well of patience; Jeff, whose creativity and genius stunned the audience last night; and Kali, of course, who is like Dante's image of the mirrors in her infinite wisdom and love.  Our lives have been shaped by major events, yet all of these events are drastically different.  Still, we all find solace and comfort in the words of the Commedia.

I have not written for a long time.  As Kali wrote, "Traveling to Italy turned me somewhat silent."  Though the trip was undoubtedly inspiring, the experience required reflection and introspection.  Why were we so moved by this poem that we had to travel 4,000 miles to try to see it come to life?  We were making our own pilgrimage, I suppose, to the place where Dante

wandered for many of his days.  The Comedy has always required more from the reader than complacency.

Now that the final class of Dantisti are graduating, we must take our knowledge of Dante out into the world.  Though it might not sound entirely practical, we know that the poem influences all aspects of our lives.  Graduation is certainly nothing like crossing the threshold onto the earthly paradise, but it is another layer, another level, in the climb towards ultimate understanding.

La nuit des musées

Paris hosts a special event in May, when the nights are finally warm enough, called La nuit des museés. This is not "Night at the Museum" in the style of Ben Stiller, although the hundreds of French people dressed in their coal-miner's-daughter-style headlamps is possibly more frightening than dinosaurs coming to life. Rather, the museums throughout Paris remain open until about midnight, so you can enjoy a long, French dinner before the art exhibits. There was something magical about entering the museum so late after closing time. Literally hundreds of people were roaming through the streets of Paris that night; I had hardly ever seen it so lively and festive.

My friends and I decided to go to the Musée Rodin on La nuit des musées; we figured that the crowd would be less intimidating than somewhere like the Musée d'Orsay or the Louvre, and the thought of the old Hôtel Biron at night was enchanting. We were in for a surprise, however, while I was explaining to Kelsey and Laura the story of the sculpture Ugolino in the center of the fountain at the end of the gardens; suddenly, a massive screen lit up with the glow of a chubby naked man dancing and playing some sort of wind instrument. We decided it was time to enter the hôtel.

The mansion has a long history dating back to 1728, when it was built for Abraham Peyrenc de Moras, a nouveau-rich wig-maker from Paris. The building has served as a royal home, a religious boarding house, an artists' colony, and now as the Musée Rodin. From the Boulevard des Invalides, Rodin's best-known work, The Thinker, peeks up over the high walls of the gardens. But these beautiful gardens are littered with other works: the Gates of Hell, the Three Shades, Victor Hugo, Adam and Eve.

Some of these titles should have already sparked a Dante epiphany. Count Ugolino, of course, is found in the lowest position in hell, frozen in Lake Cocytus. The Gates of Hell are another astounding work and are a product of Dantean influence. The Thinker himself is interpreted as Dante, based on this picture of the monument to Dante inside Santa Croce in Florence.

Outside of Santa Croce, a fierce Dante regards his former city with a look of scorn, but this pensive Dante (found inside Santa Croce at the monument to Dante), by Stefano Ricci, is an interesting parallel to Rodin's sculpture. We know that certainly as a young man, Dante was introverted and thoughtful. He is a poet, after all. He also bore the burden of exile, which is a motif of Rodin's work; the Thinker has tired, hunched shoulders.
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What was Rodin's connection to Dante that would have made him create so many works with this inspiration? Biographies of Rodin indicate that the Divine Comedy was a popular reference for the French in the mid-nineteenth century, and that Rodin's Dantean elements are simply a product of his fascination with Inferno. This is not hard to believe coming from someone who is equally fascinated. Yet Rodin brings something new and refreshing to Dante's work: reality.

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The Commedia has come to represent the height of Italian literature and culture, which explains the presence of Dante in many of the mansions here in Newport; his likeness can be found in both Ochre Court and in Rosecliff. For centuries, artists made polished interpretations of Dante's work, attempting to do justice to his polished style. Think of Doré's illustrations, for example, or of the painting "The Death of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta" by Alexandre Cabanel. "Highly-stylized" does not describe Rodin's work, however; at least, it does not describe the Thinker. His muscular body presents us with an earthiness that seems incomparable to the other interpretations of Dante.

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The first time I entered the Hôtel Biron, I had a sense of Dante all around me. It was not until I saw The Kiss, however, that I became convinced of the connection.

Here is the idealized version of love presented by Francesca in Canto V of Inferno. But there is another sculpture, in the next room, which is actually titled "Paolo and Francesca," where we can see the agony of their eternity, despite the tenderness in that one moment of The Kiss.

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Rodin eventually created many more literary-inspired scuptures. The imposing figure on the corners of Boulevard Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail is a Rodin - a sculpture of Balzac. He also made many drafts of a monument for Victor Hugo. Copies of his sculptures, including The Kiss, can be found outside of the Musée de l'Orangérie in the Tuilleries. Because we honor those who honored Dante, Rodin is at the top of my list. I will, however, have to save an interpretation of The Gates of Hell for another day; there is just too much of it!

Dante en français

I have been studying French for almost 10 years, a fact that even I still find hard to believe. Ever since Mrs. Dechene's 7th grade French class, I've been slaving over workbook exercises, confused and frustrated. I even spent 6 months at la Sorbonne last year plowing through my schoolwork just to prove to myself that I could learn French. Then, last night, it suddenly paid off.

I was mid-way through the journey of my reading of La Grande Aventure de la langue français, a book written by two Canadian authors - one native English speaker, and one native French. It's the story of the development of the French language from a sociological point of view rather than an etymological one, and no history of language would be complete without a reference to the father of the vernacular, Dante Alighieri.

"Le poète Dante Alighieri, dans son De vulgari eloquentia de 1304, fut l'un des premiers à introduire le terme langue d'oc, l'opposant à langue d'oïl et à langue de si (le roman de la péninsule italienne)." (47)

The poet Dante Alighieri, in his De vulgari eloquentia of 1304, was one of the first to introduce the terme "langue d'oc," the opponent to "langue d'oïl" and to "langue de si" (the Romance of the Italian peninsula).

The difference between the "langue d'oc" and the "langue d'oïl" is actually a very important distinction in French. The Occitan language once dominated the southern region of France, and sounded much closer to Italian than the modern, standardized French that we know today. Dante was the first to recognize this distinction.

Perhaps Dante's understanding of words allowed him to draw conclusions about language that others had thus far failed to recognize. Barbara Reynolds discussed Dante's classification of words in De vulgari eloquentia, where he used the vocabulary of the cloth-trade to describe their differences:

"[Words] can be combed out and glossy, or shaggy and rumpled, descriptions which indicate on Dante's part a sensuous, tactile response to words. It is as if, when he writes, he fingers the nap of what he weaves." (61)

His grasp of language led him to become one of the greatest poets of all time; the Commedia compares easily to a woven tapestry, and not only for its incredibly intricate weave of themes and literary devices, but for the sound itself.

You can listen the Commedia in Italian here.

Who doesn't want to fall asleep to the flowing sounds of Dante's terza rima? Although we can't exactly call Inferno a bedtime story, the sounds of Dante's poetry prove that he must have had a talent for the texture of words that most writers and poets lack. Imagining the texture of a word sounds obscure or unimportant, but when piecing together a poem, Dante has proved this to be a work of genius.

The following lines are a French translation of Dante's poetry:

J'ai vu déjà, au lever du jour,

le ciel paraître à l'orient tout rose,
et par ailleurs teinté d'un bel azur,

et la face du soleil alors naître voilée,
de sorte que les yeux pouvaient supporter
son éclat tempéré par les vapeurs;

de même, dans un nuage de fleurs,
qui, des mains des anges, montait
et retombait sur le char et tout autour,

couronnée d'olivier sur un voile blanc,
une dame m'apparut en manteau vert,
vêtue d'une robe couleur de flamme ardente.

Et mon esprit qui, depuis si longtemps,
n'avait été par sa présence
accablé de stupeur et de crainte,

sans avoir besoin d'autre secours des yeux,
par une vertu secrète qui émanait d'elle,
sentit la force irrésistible de son ancien amour.

(Purgatoire, Canto XXX, 22-33 -- to the right is the painting "La Barque de Dante" by Frenchman and Dante enthusiast, Eugène Delacroix)

The poetry is perhaps even more beautiful in French. I suppose the last 10 years of studying haven't been wasted after all.