by Dante
If one wants to crown a particular exercise for its fervid imagination, one might well favor Daniello’s opinion (comm. to vv. 97–102) of male horses sniffing on the wind the maddening odor of female horses in heat and shuddering thereat. In short, a number of animals have been called (including, in addition to those already mentioned, piglets, dogs, even birds [in particular, the hooded falcon]), but none has been chosen. [return to English / Italian]
103–108. See the note to vv. 95–96. [return to English / Italian]
104. See Moore (Moor.1889.1), pp. 483–86, supporting the traditional reading (“da te”) against that strange but, for some people, overpoweringly attractive variant, “Dante”: “There are few passages where we can pronounce with greater confidence as to the true reading than we can here.…” (p. 483). A goodly number of Dantists are firmly committed to the notion that the appearance of the poet’s name in the poem, his signature, as it were, occurs only once, as the first word spoken by Beatrice, in Purgatorio XXX.55. Such as they are most grateful to Moore’s exertions, since there had been, before his intervention, more than a few who were most eager to find “Dante” uttered by Adam, the first namer (see Genesis 2:19–20). [return to English / Italian]
107–108. Tozer (comm. to vv. 106–108) paraphrases Adam’s remark as follows: “I see those wishes depicted in the mind of God, in which, as in a faithful mirror, the thoughts of His creatures are reflected; whereas their minds (and therefore your [i.e., Dante’s] mind) cannot know what is passing in the mind of God, so that you cannot reach the same certainty.” He continues as follows: “According to this interpretation, pareglio is a substantive, meaning a ‘parhelion’ or mock-sun; from which sense—as a parhelion is a reflected or refracted image of the sun—it is taken to signify simply a ‘reflexion.’ The literal translation, then, of vv. 107–108 will be—‘who makes [H]imself the reflexion of (i.e., in [H]im are reflected) the other things (and, in particular, men’s minds), while none of them makes itself a reflexion of [H]im ([H]is thoughts are not reflected in their minds).’ ” For an exhaustive (it contains more than fifteen hundred words) review of the word pareglio, which, if its general sense is understood, has caused considerable difficulty, see Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 106–108). [return to English / Italian]
109–114. Adam “repeats” Dante’s four questions: (1) How much time has passed since God put Adam in Eden? (2) How long did he reside there? (3) What caused God’s anger against him? (4) What were the languages that he was given and that he developed? (This fourth question has been variously understood.) [return to English / Italian]
110–111. Dante’s “thought question,” intuited by Adam from the mind of God, included his reverent feelings toward Beatrice (unsurprisingly enough), who came to him in Eden, the very place that Adam lost, prepared to lead him on this great spiritual and intellectual journey. [return to English / Italian]
114. The early commentators did not realize how problematic (and how important) this verse is. It presents Adam as having two separate linguistic “pools,” each deriving from a different source, from which he first gathered and then formed the first human speech. It was Lombardi (comm. to this verse), at the early dawn of the “modern age” in Dante studies, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, who first made the (fairly obvious) point that the first speaking task performed by Adam was to name the animals God had just created as sharers of his world (Genesis 2:19–20). What was the source of that language? That is, did Adam learn it or was it innate in him, put there by God when He formed him from earth? Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 112–114) is (and correctly so) of the second opinion. Andreoli (comm. to this verse) appropriates Tommaseo’s words to this effect, but then adds an important piece of evidence from Dante himself (De vulgari eloquentia [I.vi.4]): “I say that a certain form of language was created by God along with the first soul; I say ‘form’ with reference both to the words used for things, and to the construction of words, and to the arrangement of the construction; and this form of language would have continued to be used by all speakers, had it not been shattered through the fault of human presumption, as will be shown below” (tr. S. Botterill [italics added]). Thus did Dante at that time account for the origins of human vocabulary, of grammar, and of syntax; these all came directly from God and were inherent in Adam (and Eve, we imagine, though Dante never pays any positive attention to Eve as speaker; that is not something for which he considers her interesting). It is Adam who will name Eve virago (“woman”—Genesis 2:23). What Dante believed to have been Adam’s creative process in developing his God-given language by adding words to it may be apparent here: From the pre-Hebrew equivalent of Latin vir, implanted in him by God, he derived “virago” (for “woman”).
While it is clear that Dante had changed his thinking, by the time he was writing the Commedia, about the second part of this history of the language (the length of time that the original Adamic speech survived—see the note to verse 134), there is no reason to believe he had altered that first opinion very much, if at all: The first Adamic speech was given by God, but (and we will be surprised by this, as some today still are, even to the point of simply getting it wrong) it was given as perishable. It was, as we shall shortly see, the core, or seedbed, of the first vernacular and, like all vernacular speech, doomed to die out to be replaced by other always changeful “idioms.” God gave his Ursprache to Adam as a form, containing models for his development of vocabulary, of grammar, and of syntax. Simultaneously, He granted him the privilege of naming the animals himself. As a result, “dog,” “owl,” “lion” were terms invented by Adam, not by God. The language that he got from God was thus immediately, even if it first served as a model, in flux, a part of the mortal world of becoming, as was, we shall shortly learn, the one word that we can safely assume he got directly from his Creator, His name. This was “I,” but became “El” (again, see the note to verse 134). (For God’s changing His own name, see Exodus 6:2–3: “I [Dominus] appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty [in Deo omnipotente], but by my name the Lord [Adonai] I did not make myself known to them”).
For the word idïoma, which we have here translated “language,” but which seems to be identified by Dante with vernacular speech, see the note to Paradiso XV.121–123, the passage in which it has its only other occurrence in the poem. On the language of Adam, see Mengaldo, “La lingua di Adamo,” ED (IV [1970]), pp. 47b–48b; Imbach (Imba.1996.1), pp. 197–214. For the treatment of Adam in De vulgari eloquentia, see Corti (Cort.1978.1), pp. 243–56. [return to English / Italian]
115–142. Tozer summarizes the rest of the canto (comm. to these verses): “Of Dante’s four questions, which have just been stated, Adam answers first No. 3—‘What was the real cause of the Fall of Man?’ (vv. 115–117); next No. 1—‘How long a time had elapsed from the Creation to the present moment?’ (vv. 118–123); then No. 4—‘What language did Adam speak?’ (vv. 124–138); and finally No. 2—‘How long a time did he spend in the Earthly Paradise?’ (vv. 139–142).” [return to English / Italian]
115–117. Adam answers first the third question that Dante has put to him, a question that, as many commentators point out, reflects the gravest issue that Adam knows: his own disobedience, which cost him and all our race Eden. This is “paradisal” behavior that we witness here; what sinner in Inferno would voluntarily recite his worst sin first (or at all)? There are a few exceptions, beginning with Ciacco (see Inf. VI.53), but most, as we saw, try to avoid this subject.
Hardly anyone dealing with this tercet recently (and this is particularly true with respect to American Dantists, who are perhaps more drawn to Ulysses than may seem reasonable) fails to discuss the obvious “quotation” in the phrase “il trapassar del segno” (the trespass of the boundary line) of Inferno XXVI.107–109: “… we reached the narrow strait / where Hercules marked off [segnò] the limits, / warning all men to go no farther.” Surprisingly, the only apparent mention in the commentaries collected in the DDP (but see,
e.g., Chiavacci Leonardi [Chia.1997.1], p. 728) is in Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 109–117), referring to this passage’s relationship with the theme of transgression, as embodied in the canto of Ulysses. However, cf. (among others) Iannucci (Iann.1976.1), p. 426; Hawkins (Hawk.1979.1); Brownlee (Brow.1990.1), p. 394; and Barolini (Baro.1992.1), pp. 49, 52, 58, 106, 108, 112, and 238, whose treatment begins with reference to Nardi’s consideration (Nard.1942.1) of both Ulysses and Adam as having trespassed boundaries. See also Rati (Rati.1988.1), pp. 513–14. [return to English / Italian]
116. The last occurrence of the noun cagione (reason, cause), of its forty-six instances in the poem, is found here (and for the penultimate, see verse 113). As the poem concludes, discursive reasoning yields to more intuitive forms of understanding and expression.
The use of the noun essilio (exile) binds two other figures to Adam in having shared this bitter experience, Dante and Virgil (who sees his afterlife as exilic—see Purg. XXI.18). It is not surprising to find “Virgilio” as its rhyme in verse 118. [return to English / Italian]
118–120. For the first notice of Adam’s long life of exile from God’s kingdom, first on earth and then in Limbo, see Purgatorio XXXIII.58–63 and the note thereto. See also the note to Paradiso IX.40 and to vv. 121–123, below.
Eusebius (whose dates were the basis for Jerome’s authoritative Chronicon [which served most medieval encyclopedists, such as Isidore of Seville and Uguccione da Pisa]) is credited by the more recent commentators (beginning with Lombardi [comm. to vv. 119–120]) as being Dante’s source for the 4,302 years between Adam’s death and the Harrowing. [return to English / Italian]
118. This represents the thirty-second and final appearance of Virgil’s name in the poem. It thus occurs slightly more than half as often as that of Beatrice, which appears sixty-three times. (See the notes to Purg. XV.77 and Par. XVII.19.) [return to English / Italian]
121–123. Adam says that he had lived on earth for 930 solar years (see Genesis 5:5). This means that he was harrowed (in a.d. 34) after 5,232 years (930 + 4,302) of sinful life, first on earth, then in Limbo, where his punishment was, apparently, to live without hope yet in desire. At least that is Virgil’s description of the suffering of him and his cosufferers in Limbo (Inf. IV.42: “without hope we live in longing”), and it certainly fits him and all other damned pagans. But what of the Hebrew saints, like Adam? During their time in Hell were they equally without hope? Or, because they believed in Christ to come, were they in fact hopeful? Adam, however, does refer to his time in Hell as being typified by “anguish” (verse 133). In short, this is not an issue that Dante has chosen to confront, and we cannot say whether Dante thought that Adam and his eventually to-be-harrowed companions knew that Christ was coming for them or not, or whether they even hoped that He would.
Adam has now enjoyed 1,266 years of grace in Heaven. Adam’s years coincide, of course, with the course of human life in general, 6,498 years along its road in 1300. See the note to Paradiso IX.40 for one traditional estimate of the future duration of human time. And see, for a fuller discussion of three views of that future, involving the Platonic Great Year (36,000 years), a medieval variant of that tradition (13,000 years), and St. Augustine’s (possible) view that the world will last seven millennia, the last paragraph of the note to Inferno I.1 and the note to Paradiso IX.40 in the PDP. [return to English / Italian]
124–126. Pietro di Dante explicitly identifies (comm. to vv. 124–132) Adam’s first lingua as being vernacular speech. It was extinct, this tercet insists, before construction of the Tower of Babel began. Many have realized that this is a direct contradiction of what Dante had said in De vulgari (I.vi.4–7), where he specifically says that the first language was Hebrew and that it was spoken until after the construction of the Tower. (For a study of the literary history of this topos, see Borst [Bors.1957.1].)
From Genesis, Dante might have learned several things about the history of the language that squared with his spectacularly idiosyncratic theory of that history. The tenth chapter teaches that Noah’s three sons (Japheth, Ham, and Shem) each had children, and all these groups of progeny spoke different languages (linguae); that is, the “confusion” was apparently in progress before the launch of Nimrod’s “unachievable” architectural project. Nonetheless, Genesis 11 begins with the earth still being of a single tongue (terra labii unius), and this passage is what Dante “revises,” whatever justification he might have thought he had found, in the previous chapter, for doing so. God puts humankind into confusion for trying to build the tower (and that is the version found both in Genesis and in De vulgari); in the Commedia, however, the result of Babel is pre-Babelic. This is not the only time that we find Dante revising the text of the Bible to suit his own purpose. To seize on only one other blatant example, found in a neighboring passage in De vulgari (I.iv.2–3), Dante denies the authority of Genesis in making Eve the first speaker (God, he says, would not have wanted a woman to utter the first spoken word). And see his similarly high-handed treatment of classical text, e.g., of the Aeneid in Purgatorio XXII.40–41. Fortunately, there is a good deal of playfulness that lies behind these otherwise numbingly troglodytic gestures; nonetheless, there they are, and they are certainly challenging. [return to English / Italian]
130. See P. V. Mengaldo, “lingua,” ED (III [1971]), p. 661b, discussing the source of this verse in Egidio Romano, De regimine principum (III.ii.24): “It is a natural thing that man should speak, and nature teaches him to do so; but whether the speech should be German or French or Tuscan nature does not instruct him. On the contrary, a man must himself learn it, either by himself or with the aid of others.” [return to English / Italian]
132. Daniello (comm. to vv. 130–132) makes the astute observation that Dante is here citing the first line of the poem in Provençal he composes and attributes to Arnaut Daniel (it actually derives from a poem by Folchetto—see the note to Purg. XXVI.140–147—“Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen”). See Purgatorio XXVI.140. [return to English / Italian]
133. Adam dates the change in the pre-Hebrew vernacular as having occurred before his death at the age of 930. His words do not allow any greater precision than that.
It is striking that we do not hear his name in this scene (we have heard it five times in Inferno and Purgatorio). See Andrea Ciotti, “Adamo,” ED (I [1970]), pointing out that medieval Scriptural exegesis related Greek ’âdhâm to âdâhmah (“man” to “earth”), thus homo to humus. This would surely have been of interest to Dante, since it would tend to locate Adamic vernacular within the low style, Dante’s own (or so at least he chose to present it as being). [return to English / Italian]
134. This verse has been the cause of a great deal of confusion, as some of its interpreters are honest enough to admit. Scartazzini, after an exhaustive survey of the history of its interpretation, concludes with the notice that, while it is most embarrassing for a commentator to admit such a thing, he has not resolved its problems. (For another noteworthy attempt to clarify [if not to solve] the problem, see Porena [comm. to this verse].) The most enduring, among the several desperate stabs it has caused, has been the following: Vellutello (comm. to vv. 130–138) was apparently the first to claim that “I” was to be read numerically, as “one.” Another notion has periodically reappeared (after having been introduced by Scartazzini [comm. to this verse]): “I” (or “J”) is the first letter of “Jah” or “Jehovah.” A much rarer but still interesting proposed solution is only found as late as Trucchi’s commentary (comm. to vv. 133–138): Dante wanted “I” and not “El” because “I” (or “J,” the same character in his Italian) was the first letter of “Jesus.” Nonetheless, the formulation that “I” equals “un” (“one”) found favor, over the years, with many interpreters (including several editors, who replace what is “I” in our text with “un”), beginning with Francesco da Buti (comm. to vv. 133–142). Lombardi (comm. to this verse) was apparently the first commentator to refer to Dante’s earlier treatment of
the nature of Adam’s first word in De vulgari; he also pointed out that Dante was (whether deliberately or not he does not say) in disagreement with Isidore, who had been plain that “El” was the name that God was first called. That “I” is the number/name of God is a valid reading of this verse is reinforced by the presence of the same alpha-numerical pun on the Roman “i” as “one” at Paradiso XIX.128.
See Casagrande (Casa.1976.1) for a careful consideration of the problems of this verse. He ends up linking it, through the commentary of the Ottimo ad loc., to Isidore’s eighth (of ten appellations) name of God (Etym. VII.i), ia, itself connected to the Hebrew word alleluia, as praise of God’s name. Hollander (Holl.1969.1), p. 144n., had previously argued for Isidore’s ninth name of God, the tetragrammaton, transliterated as ia ia, as being the text that Dante had in mind, as evidenced by the parodic reference to it and the sixth name of God (“Ego sum, qui sum” [I am that I am]) found first in the Siren’s self-naming (Purg. XIX.19), “Io son, io son dolce serena” and then corrected in Beatrice’s self-naming (Purg. XXX.73), “Ben son, ben son Beatrice.” (All of these phrases have repetition as a common feature.)