Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
It is rooted in Inferno xv and the meeting between Dante and Brunetto Latini, with phrases carried over (“baked aspect” and others), and a voice in both poems crying out, “What, are you here?” It should be remarked, though, that T. S. Eliot, in his congenital reaction against the “cheerful-ness, optimism and hopefulness” of the Victorians and the Romantics—the words are from the earlier Dante essay—found a wholly admirable consciousness of evil as the prime quality of the Florentine poet, in particular sexuality as evil: a theme Eliot disconcertingly located at the heart of the Vita Nuova.
And in America, we have Robert Penn Warren, the most complete man of letters in our time, using a phrase from the Purgatorio as the epigraph for All the King’s Men; organizing an earlier novel, At Heaven’s Gate, on the moral structure of the same canticle; and, in his last novel, A Place to Come To (1977), introducing a young southerner who writes his doctoral dissertation on Dante and goes on to become a renowned Dante scholar. Warren and his daughter Rosanna used to read the Commedia aloud to each other, night after night in the family’s summer home in Vermont; and when Warren was ailing, Rosanna taped the entire Inferno for her father to listen to.
Warren, more than any contemporary, represents the persistence of Dante in the literary mind. In “True Love,” one of his last poems (1985), Warren’s poetic voice recalls how, at a tender age, he first saw a neighborhood girl whose beauty stopped his heart. Two years later, when they met, she smiled at him and “named my name”; the effect was paralyzing. The girl has long since disappeared from view:But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives
In a beautiful house, far away.
She called my name once. I didn’t even know she knew it.
Warren’s love-smitten youth is a Kentucky country boy, speaking in a sort of elevated Kentucky idiom; after the girl first calls his name, he says, “I thought I would wake up dead.” But the poem is unmistakably and delightfully a thirty-six-line version of the Vita Nuova, phrase by amorous phrase, from the early childhood encounter to the envisioned beatitude. Dante’s presence, here and in many a later American poet, sparkles and sings and smiles like one of the spirits in Paradise.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Primary Sources
Texts and Translations in the Order of Composition
Dante’s Lyric Poetry, edited by Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde (1967). Vol. I: Texts and Translation. Vol. II: Commentary (very complete).
Vita Nuova, Italian text with facing English translation; by Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta (1995). A model edition, offering a superb translation of both poetry and prose, a topical index, a glossary of archaic terms, and appended discussions of the work’s structure. Professor Cervigni (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has also been generously helpful in other ways (see below).
De Vulgari Eloquentia, Latin text and Italian translation; with introduction and notes, by Vittorio Coletti (1991).
Il Convivio. Text with commentary, edited by Giovanni Busnelli and Giuseppe Vandelli, with introduction by Michele Barbi, two volumes (1934). Dante’s Convivio, English translation by William Walrond Jackson (1909).
De Monarchia. Edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci (1965).
La Divina Commedia. After discussing the problem with Dino Cervigni (see above), and after reviewing other English translations I had worked with over the years (Laurence Binyon, Dorothy Sayers, John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum), I decided to follow Professor Cervigni’s advice and draw primarily on the Temple Classics edition. This edition, with the Italian text and the English translation facing each other, consists of: the Inferno, published in 1900 and drawing largely on a previous translation by John Carlyle (the brother of Thomas Carlyle), dating from 1867; the Purgatorio, translated by Thomas Okey, published in 1901; and the Paradiso, translated by Philip H. Wicksteed, published in 1899. Again following Professor Cervigni’s advice, I occasionally modernized verb forms and choices.
I have had frequent recourse as well to the prose translation by John D. Sinclair (three volumes, 1980 edition). Sinclair’s commentaries, canto by canto, are richly informed and acutely perceptive, and I have borrowed from them even more than the occasional acknowledgment may indicate.
For pleasure and stimulus, I have also reread portions of Robert Pinsky’s verse translation of the Inferno (1994) from time to time.
The Portable Dante. Edited with an introduction by Paolo Milano (1947). For my purposes, this volume is particularly useful in its inclusion of selected letters from Dante to “the infamous Florentines” and to Emperor Henry VII, among others.
Other Resources and Commentaries
William Anderson, Dante the Maker (1980). The best and most thorough biography in English.
Piero Bargellini, Vita di Dante (1964). A lively overview of Dante’s life by Florence’s leading citizen in the 1960s and one of its chief modern historians. Lionardo Bruni: see C. A. Dinsmore entry.
Eve Borsook, The Companion Guide to Florence (6th Edition, 1997). The indispensable guidebook, newly updated.
Dino Compagni, Cronica (1968 edition, with introduction and notes by Gino Luzzatto). A detailed account of Florentine history from about 1215 to 1315, by an observer who lived through much of it.
Charles Allen Dinsmore, Aids to the Study of Dante (1903). This fine volume (dedicated to Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard professor of fine arts and translator of Dante) contains studies of all of Dante’s writings. It is especially valuable, for present purposes, for its inclusion of Boccaccio’s life of Dante, a portrait of Dante by his contemporary and friend Giovanni Villani (from the Cronica), and the engaging short life of Dante by Lionardo Bruni (1389-1444).
Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T. S. Eliot (1983). A well-informed and sensitive study of this rich, complex subject.
Francis Fergusson, Dante’s Drama of the Mind:A Modern Reading of the Purgatorio (1953). Dante (1966). Studies in Dante by the most cultivated literary critic and historian of his generation. Fergusson’s concept of the “histrionic sensibility” (see his masterwork, The Idea of a Theater) works to special effect with Dante.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, editor, Dante in America: The First Two Centuries (1983). Perceptive, often eloquent essays by commentators from Longfellow and Lowell to Allen Tate, Francis Fergusson, and Robert Fitzgerald, skillfully compiled by the former president of Yale.
Amerigo Parrini, With Dante in Florence (translated by C. Danyell Tassinari, undated [1930]). A captivating tour of the thirty-one plaques attached to buildings all across the “historic center” of Florence, each bearing an epigraph from The Divine Comedy. The text includes a translation and explanation of each epigraph and a sketch of the background.
Giorgio Petrocchi, Vita di Dante (1983). The currently standard biography, by the leading Dante scholar of the day. Among other admirable things, Petrocchi provides crucial detail on Dante’s political life in the late 1290s and regularly reviews the opinions and conjectures of his main predecessors. No less valuable for this biographer is Petrocchi’s wealth of information about Dante’s family. Enciclopedia Dantesca (six volumes, 2nd edition: 1984 rev.). A massive compilation, with entries on every conceivable Dantean subject, under the general editorship of Giorgio Petrocchi.
Ricardo J. Quinones, Dante Alighieri (Twayne’s World Authors Series, 1979). Handsomely composed, short (212 pp.) literary biography, with emphasis upon the artistic development.
ADDITIONAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am much indebted to the National Humanities Center, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and to its directors Robert Connors and Kent Mulliken, for inviting us down there for a two-month stay in the fall of 1998. The purpose of the visit was to begin work on the biography of Dante, and to this end I met regularly with a group of Fellows all of whom were engaged in biographical research. As on previous visits, I was helped enormously by Alan Tuttle and his library staf
f. I have never experienced a place more conducive to humanistic work.
William Coleman and Edvige Agostinelli, good neighbors in Florence and academic friends at home, directed me (among other things) to the Dantean studies of Giorgio Petrocchi. John Hollander, drawing on his immense knowledge of literary history, had suggestions about Dante and T. S. Eliot. Nigel Alderman found for me the volume by Steve Ellis (see above) about Dante and English poetry. Lisa Haarlander performed feats of invaluable assistance, from library research to word processing. In the late stages, Daniel Avery pitched in with his usual good-natured efficiency.
In Gargnano di Valpolicella, across the Adige River from Verona, Count Pieralivise Serégo Alighieri received us graciously, told of the history of this Alighieri estate from the time of its purchase in 1353 by Dante’s son Pietro, showed us the carriages for the wedding in the 1550s of Dante’s last direct descendant, and took us on a tour of the property. (Timothy Ryback and Susanna Fox of the Salzburg Seminar kindly apprised us of Count Serégo.) He also very kindly gave us a letter of introduction to the director of the Centro Dantesco in Ravenna, our next destination. The equally generous director, Padre Enzo Fantini, narrated for us the bizarre story of the vicissitudes of Dante’s remains over five centuries, showing us the final tomb, leading us past displays of Dante reading-conferences in diverse languages, and procuring for us a complete taped reading of the Divina Commedia.
In Florence, we had a long and fascinating session with Padre Roberto Tassi, pastor of the Church of Santa Margherita (“Dante’s church,” as it has come to be called), and we are grateful to George and Nancy Madison for introducing us to him. Padre Tassi is extraordinarily well informed not only about Santa Margherita but also about the entire sestiere where Dante and Beatrice once lived, and he took us on an illuminating tour of it. In Casa Dante, nearby, we were able to study maps of medieval Florence and Tuscany and a layout of the battle of Campaldino in 1289. To the Gabinetto Vieusseux, and its brilliant codirector Maurizio Bossi, I am grateful for bibliographic advice and for putting in my hands the life of Dante by Piero Bargellini.
I was fortunate in having, as my editorial associates, James Atlas, general editor of Lipper/Viking Penguin, who commissioned the work and provided several lively and fruitful meetings; Carolyn Carlson, as intelligent and thoughtful a manuscript editor as you could hope for; and Adam Kirsch, who went through the text with an eagle eye and detected many places that needed correction.
Throughout the undertaking, Nancy Lewis was my cherished collaborator and companion.
To the Meiners, finally, to whom this book is dedicated, my gratitude is unending: to Fausto in particular, for locating and driving us out to Alighieri holdings in Pagnolle; to Francesca, for digging up crucial information about the old fortress of Caprona; and most of all to Rita, for companionship and guidance to our entire family for many a year.
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