22 The poems numbered 1–18 in De Robertis’ index of poems (“Indice delle rime del volume III”) are therefore all canzoni (the fifteen canzoni distese copied by Boccaccio and three others). But the total of eighteen is misleading, given that De Robertis’ number seventeen, Trag[g]emi de la mente, does not exist, and that the five canzoni of the Vita Nuova are not included.
23 On the hermeneutic issues implicit in De Robertis’ decision to exclude from his edition many of the poems in the Vita Nuova, see my essay “Editing Dante’s Rime.”
24 A further analysis of De Robertis’ subclassifications of the readmitted dubbie may be found in the introductory essay to Amore e monna Lagia e Guido ed io.
25 See Dante Alighieri, Rime, ed. Claudio Giunta, in Opere, vol. 1 (Milan: Mondadori, 2011).
26 I am not, of course, suggesting that the Commedia contains prose. On the contaminatio of the lyrical impulse with the narrative impulse in Dante’s works, including Il Fiore (if Dante actually wrote it), see Barolini, “Cominciandomi dal principio infino a la fine: Forging Anti-Narrative in the Vita Nuova” (1994), rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 175–92, esp. pp. 190–2.
27 Petrarch exploits the idea of chronology, both adopting and violating chronological order. For the hermeneutic implications of Petrarch’s choices, see Barolini, “The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta” (1989), rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 193–223; Barolini, “Petrarch at the Crossroads of Hermeneutics and Philology: Editorial Lapses, Narrative Impositions, and Wilkins’ Doctrine of the Nine Forms of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” in Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 21–44; Barolini, “The Self in the Labyrinth of Time: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 33–62.
28 This and the following quotations are drawn from Dante Alighieri, Convivio, ed. Cesare Vasoli, in Opere minori, tome 1, part 2 (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1988). Translations of the Convivio throughout this volume are by Richard Lansing, Convivio (New York: Garland, 1990).
29 Beatrice Arduini describes Manetti’s marginal note containing the canzoni distese thus: “In precedence, in a note to carta 13r, placed next to the transcription by Marabottino of the first strophe of the canzone Voi che ’ntendendo, Antonio copies the fourteen canzoni that Dante supposedly intended to gloss in the treatise. In his note Antonio Manetti writes: ‘Each of the verses here below is the beginning, that is the first verse, of each canzone that he [Dante] intended to gloss, which were xiiii.’ There follows a column of the incipits of canzoni 2–15 …” See Arduini, “Il ruolo di Boccaccio e di Marsilio Ficino nella tradizione del Convivio di Dante,” in Boccaccio in America: Proceedings of the 2010 International Boccaccio Conference at The University of Massachusetts Amherst, ed. Michael Papio and Elsa Filosa (Ravenna: Longo, 2012), pp. 95–103; citation p. 101.
30 The fact that the Convivio, insofar as it is unfinished, was not published by Dante during his lifetime takes nothing away from the complex history of these canzoni. Dante himself knew, when he chose to highlight Amor che nella mente and Voi che’ntendendo in the Commedia, that he had previously highlighted the same two canzoni in the Convivio.
31 For the reconstruction of such an ideal autobiography on the basis of the three autocitations see Barolini, “Autocitation and Autobiography,” chap. 1 of Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the “Comedy” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
32 The citation is from an essay of Michelangelo Picone, explaining why it is better not to reprint the Vita Nuova poems in editions of Dante’s rime: “On the other hand Contini is also right in respecting the independence and the specificity of works like the Vita nuova and Convivio, and in not considering the poems gathered within them to be removable. He thus applies a hermeneutics of fragmentation [un’ermeneutica del frammento] only to the outsider rime [Rime extravaganti]”; see Picone, “Dante rimatore,” in Letture Classensi: Le ‘Rime’ di Dante, vol. 24, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 1995), p. 174; this passage is cited in my essay “Editing Dante’s Rime,” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, p. 266, where too there are other examples of the inferiority imputed by critics to the uncollected “outsider” lyrics.
33 Vita Nuova, ed. Domenico De Robertis (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1980) (hereafter cited as VN). I use “Vita Nuova” instead of “Vita Nova” because I am using De Robertis’ edition and because I do not find Gorni’s case for the variant compelling. In a further twist, De Robertis became a convert to Gorni’s usage, “Vita Nova.”
34 Vita Nova, ed. Guglielmo Gorni (Turin: Einaudi, 1996) (hereafter cited as Gorni). Gorni unfortunately focuses on numerological reasons for his chapter divisions.
35 On the occasions when the discussion requires a verse or phrase to be translated literally, the English translation is in parentheses without quotation marks.
1 The other respondents are Chiaro Davanzati, Guido Orlandi, Salvino Doni, Ricco da Varlungo and ser Cione Baglione. The responses, along with Dante da Maiano’s sonnet, are preserved in book 11 of the Giuntina (on the Giuntina, see the Introduction to this volume). For printed texts of the the other responses to Dante da Maiano’s Provedi, saggio, see Dante da Maiano, Rime, ed. Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969).
2 The two other respondents to A ciascun’alma are Guido Cavalcanti and (with less certainty) Terino da Castelfiorentino.
3 Dante represents visionary experience in his rime but he thematizes vision in his prose: whereas he never uses the word “visione” in his lyrics, he uses it seven times in the prose of the Vita Nuova, beginning with the “maravigliosa visione” of III.3 (1.4). After showing his interest in visione in the larger mystical sense in the Vita Nuova, Dante retrenches (the Convivio’s only use of “visione” is technical, appearing in a discussion of optics in 3.9.9), before the expansive treatment of the Commedia. On the concept of vision in the Commedia, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 7, “Nonfalse Errors and True Dreams of the Evangelist.”
4 These are the first two verses of Amico, proveduto ha mia intenzione, Chiaro’s sonnet of response to Dante da Maiano. We will come back to the significance of Chiaro’s use of amico in his incipit.
5 As Foster-Boyde note, the point is not that the lady has taken off the shirt she was wearing to give to the poet, but that the shirt she gave him was one of hers.
6 The prose of the Vita Nuova contains two uses of the verb significare and two of the noun (significato and significazione), while the Convivio contains twenty-six uses of the verb and two of the noun significanza. Most strikingly, the Commedia contains no uses of the noun and only three of the verb significare, which after Purgatorio 24 recurs in “Trasumanar significar per verba/non si poria” (Par. 1.70–1) and “e ’l suo voler piacermi/significava nel chiarir di fori” (Par. 9.14–15). The young Dante may have noticed Cavalcanti’s striking one-time use, in a correspondence sonnet to Gianni Alfani: “Significàstimi, in un sonetto / rimatetto,/il voler de la giovane donna [You expressed to me, in a rhyming sonnet,/the young lady’s wishes]” (Gianni, quel Guido salute, 3–5).
7 The textual journey imitates the journey of life; see my The Undivine Comedy, esp. chap. 2, “Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New.”
8 Epistole, text and Italian translation, ed. Arsenio Frugoni and Giorgio Brugnoli, in Opere minori, 2 vols., tome 2 (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1979–88).
9 Dante da Maiano, Rime, ed. Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969), p. xvi.
10 “The poem [Ora parrà] is a testing ground; its purpose is to prove that the poet, now that he flees Love, is still worth what he used to be worth: ‘s’eo varrò quanto valer già soglio’ (2). The repeated forms of valere (varrò [2], valer [2]
, valer [6], valere [12], valor [14]) keep the tension alive; the issue on the table is a man’s worth, his moral/poetic measure” (Barolini, “Guittone’s Ora parrà, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire,” 1997; rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006], 47–69, p. 48).
11 See Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, p. 136.
12 Note too the pronounced use of rima equivoca and of rima composta, e.g., “par l’à” and “par là” in Non canoscendo, verses 4 and 6. This is an artifice of which traces remain in the Commedia: see “pur lì” rhymed with “urli” in Inf. 7.28, “Oh me” rhymed with “chiome” in Inf. 28.123, and “ci ha” rhymed with “sconcia” in Inf. 30.87.
13 For “amico” in the Commedia, see the discussion of Purgatorio 22 in the introductory essay to Deh ragioniamo insieme un poco, Amore. A similar but accelerated trajectory could be posited for saggio: Dante’s reference to Guido Guinizzelli in the sonnet Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa as “saggio” – “sì come il saggio in suo dittare pone” (2) – is not a ritualized honorific, as in his Guittonian address to Dante da Maiano, “o om che pregio di saver portate” in Savete giudicar (2). It is rather a genuine tribute to Guinizzelli, akin to the use of “saggio” for Vergil in the Commedia.
14 On the interconnections between these early friendships and Dante’s early attachment to the Aristotelian concept of nobility, see Teodolinda Barolini, “Aristotle’s Mezzo, Courtly Misura, and Dante’s Canzone Le dolci rime: Humanism, Ethics, and Social Anxiety,” in Dante and the Greeks, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 2014), 163–79.
15 On Dante’s erotic poetry and its relationship to Inferno 5, see my essay “Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context,” 1998, rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 70–101. On Doglia mi reca, see also my “Guittone’s Ora parrà, Dante’s Doglia mi reca, and the Commedia’s Anatomy of Desire,” 1997, rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 47–69.
16 In the lyrics we find the verb mangiare only in the sonnet Messer Brunetto, questa pulzelletta, where it occurs two times. In the canzone Così nel mio parlar the verb manducare is used (“co li denti d’Amor già mi manduca [with Love’s teeth he already devours me]” [32]), which presages its only use in the Commedia, in the Ugolino episode (“e come ’l pan per fame si manduca [and as he who’s hungry eats his bread]” [Inf. 32.127]).
17 The commentary on the Vita Nuova that in my opinion best does the work of comparing poetry and prose with an openness towards ideological discrepancies is the 1980 edition of Domenico De Robertis. Dedicated to comparing the poems to the prose with an eye to highlighting and interpreting such divergences is the doctoral dissertation by Carin McLain, “Prose and Poetry and the Making of Beatrice” (Columbia University, 2007).
18 On these cultural imperatives, see my “Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural History,” 2004, rpt. in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 245–78.
19 The odd / even dialectic, fundamental to the “metaphysics of the sonnet” (as in the Timaeus’ circle of sameness and circle of difference), is thus maintained in the sonetto rinterzato.
20 A fourth sonetto rinterzato – Quando ’l consiglio degli ucce’ si tenne – is added to the canon of Dante’s lyrics by De Robertis, whose argument for attribution to Dante is entirely stylistic (not philological) and therefore not compelling. Quando ’l consiglio is a sonetto rinterzato of twenty-four verses, as compared to the twenty-verse format of Dante’s three sonetti rinterzati of definite attribution, Se Lippo amico, O voi che per la via, and Morte villana. Contini notes of Quando ’l consiglio that it has “‘degenerated’ in the tercets in such a way that the sirima cannot be distinguished into two equal voltae” (p. 278). De Robertis wants to give Quando ’l consiglio degli ucce’ si tenne to Dante on the basis of Dante’s penchant for stylistic experimentation. Contini more persuasively ascribes Quando ’l consiglio to Antonio Pucci, who composed other poems that versify Aesop’s fables, and who used this twenty-four-verse type of sonetto rinterzato frequently. Following De Robertis, Claudio Giunta in his commentary to Dante’s rime adds Quando ’l consiglio to the canon of authentic Dantean compositions but offers no reasons for doing so (p. 646).
21 For the denigration of Guittone d’Arezzo in the Commedia, along with the notable intertextual presence of the Aretine in the same text, see my book Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the “Comedy” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), chap. 2.
22 For “e li altri due che ’l canto suso appella,” see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, p. 96; further examples of the same issue include “nel modo che ’l seguente canto canta” (Par. 5.139) and “e però miri a ciò ch’io dissi suso” (Par. 13.46), for which see The Undivine Comedy, pp. 190 and 204.
23 Hereafter cited as Rvf.
24 See Barolini, “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrix Loquax,” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, pp. 360–78.
25 On the properties of the spiral in terza rima, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, chap. 2, esp. pp. 25–6, and on the “nostalgic lapse,” see chap. 5, esp. pp. 101–3.
26 Citation p. 129.
27 The adjective leggiadro appears four times in Dante’s lyrics: once in O voi che per la via and three times in the canzone Poscia ch’amor, which is dedicated to leggiadria. The noun leggiadria appears seven times in Dante’s lyrics: once in Morte villana, once in Per una ghirlandetta, once in Sonar bracchetti, once in Due donne in cima della mente mia, and three times in Poscia ch’Amor.
28 On the canzone Poscia ch’Amor from this perspective, see my essay “Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo,” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture, esp. pp. 338–42.
29 The adjective leggiadro appears in the Commedia only twice, both times in a courtly setting:
“L’antico sangue e l’opere leggiadre [The old blood and graceful works]” (Purg. 11.61); “rime d’amore usar dolci e leggiadre [using sweet and graceful poems of love]” (Purg. 26.99).
30 “Dunque, se noi vedemo che li poete hanno parlato a le cose inanimate, sì come se avessero senso e ragione, e fattele parlare insieme; e non solamente cose vere, ma cose non vere [Therefore, if we see that poets have addressed inanimate things as if they had sense and reason, and also have made them talk – and not only real things but imaginary things as well]” (VN XXV.8 [16.8]).
31 Aristotle actually refers to the moment, which he considers indistiguishable from time: “Now since time cannot exist and is unthinkable apart from the moment, and the moment is a kind of middle-point, uniting as it does in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time, it follows that there must always be time” (Physics 8.1.251b.18–26; trans. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941]). For time in the form of a spiral and of terza rima and for the temporality of narrative in Dante, see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, chap. 2, “Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New,” esp. pp. 21–6.
32 For a similar situation, in which “la donna nostra” is shared by the god and the lover, see Petrarch, Apollo, s’anchor vive il bel desio: “sì vedrem poi per meraviglia inseme / sedere la donna nostra sopra l’erba [so we will then see, to the wonder of us both,/our lady sitting upon the grass]” (Rvf 34.12–13). The sonnet of Petrarch’s that is commonly linked to Deh ragioniamo, because of the shared motif of journeying, is the one that precedes Apollo, s’anchor vive, namely Solo e pensoso (Rvf 35). Maybe Petrarch had Deh ragioniamo in mind when he arranged sonnets 34 and 35 contiguously in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.
33 For the episode centred on the autocitation of Amor che nella mente, see my Dante’s Poets, chap. 1, “Autocitation and Autobiography.”
34 I
n the extraordinary conclusion to the Thebaid Statius warns his text not to follow too closely in the footsteps of the illustrious precursor that will always eclipse it: “Vive, precor; nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta,/sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora [Live, I pray, nor rival the divine Aeneid, but follow at a distance and always revere its footsteps]” (Thebaid 12.816–17). For discussion of this passage, see my Dante’s Poets, p. 261; for my reasons for spelling “Vergil” with an “e,” see Dante’s Poets, p. 207, n. 25.
35 Dante makes explicit the analogy between literary creation and biological generation in Convivio 3.9.4: “Per similitudine dico ‘sorella’; ché sì come sorella è detta quella femmina che da uno medesimo generante è generata, così puote l’uomo dire ‘sorella’ de l’opera che da uno medesimo operante è operata; ché la nostra operazione in alcuno modo è generazione [I use the word ‘sister’ as a metaphor: for just as we call sister a woman who is born of the same parent, so may one call sister a work that is made by the same maker, for our work is, in a sense, begotten].”
36 On the prideful “Arachnean” art that informs the bas-reliefs that seem alive in Purgatorio 10–12, an art whose mimesis is so perfect as to compete with divine art – life itself – see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, chap. 6, “Re-presenting What God Presented: The Arachnean Art of the Terrace of Pride.”
37 Bolognese notaries transcribed poems in their city records in order to fill up the empty space. These poems, by statute always transcribed without attribution, are often the work of noted poets like Guinizzelli. See the discussion in H. Wayne Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 133–5. Storey considers the Bolognese manuscript to be as authoritative as Chigiano L VIII 305, if not more authoritative; he maintains that our deference for the culture that produced the Chigiano codex – a Tuscan and Dante-phile culture – has distracted us from the importance of the older codex and has forced us to accept the Dantean paternity of the sonnet (pp. 143–56). While granting that the Tuscan manuscript has a precise social and cultural orientation that must be considered, this orientation does not in itself constitute, in my opinion, a basis for withdrawing the sonnet from Dante’s corpus.
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