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2. Dante in Translation: Vita Nuova
Poziom:
Temat: Edukacja
Prof: Today we'll be
discussing,
and a little bit in haste of
course,
because I haven't got much time
to do this,
but we'll devote the whole
class to the Vita nova or
nuova,
as it is called which is
Dante's first work.
I was going to say "first
finished work,"
but in a way,
it's not a finished work.
It is a deliberately unfinished
work.
Dante doesn't really finish
many of his works.
He interrupts them;
he breaks off and decides to
move on to do other things.
This is the case with the
philosophical Banquet,
this text of ethics that he
goes on writing once he's in
exile.
It's true for the text on
language, the so-called De
vulgari eloquentia,
about the vulgar language,
a second book he just won't go
on.
But it's also true,
in a way, for the Vita
nuova to know that ends with
a vision, but we do not know
what's going to happen after
that.
This is--there is a kind of
suspension about it,
but this is the first work,
let's call it,
full work, that Dante writes.
The title means a "new
life";
though new or new life,
so it means probably youth;
that describes the story,
an autobiographical account,
the lover, the poet who falls
in love with Beatrice.
You may remember I called it
the first decisive event
happening in his early life
immediately after his mother's
death and describes the story of
this love for Beatrice who then
in the narrative dies.
And he goes--he,
the pilgrim,
lover, poet,
goes on recording the
confusion, the sense of loss
that ensues this event of the
death of Beatrice.
His betrayals become an ethical
drama,
as most lyrical poetry of the
Middle Ages does,
they're always dealing with
treacherous presences,
with betrayals,
with infidelity,
etc.,
and then he ends up having a
final vision.
So it's youth,
it's the new life meets,
above all youth,
but youth means many other
things which I think the
narrative will go on--
the meanings of which I think
the narrative will sustain.
"New," in Italian,
means surprising,
unexpected, even strange,
novel, marvelous,
it's--and it therefore gives a
kind of direction to the way we
should be reading the story.
Its primarily,
well all of these meanings are
true and it's an autobiography,
or what do we call,
or we'll come to the
description of what an
autobiography is,
it's also what we call a novel
of the self.
Another way of speaking about
autobiography which literally
means I write about myself.
So let me say a few things
about this structure,
this autobiographical
structure, this form of problems
before we get into the narrative
as such.
From one point of view we might
all agree easily that if you
knew that this is--
it belongs--the Vita
nuova belongs to the mode of
Provençal poets,
who would all write what they
would call,
"vida"
-- life.
It's just a word that lingers,
continues in Spanish,
"life."
So they would write their poems
and they would append a brief
account of their lives.
This is true for Jaufré
Rudel, they all would do that
when they would publish their
poems.
So let's say that Dante is
writing about himself,
and inserting the poems as part
of the texture of his own life.
As an autobiography,
though, the text echoes,
and is modeled on,
the most important
autobiography written in the
Middle Ages.
In fact, it's written by one
who can be called the founder of
the autobiographical genre and
it is St.
Augustine, who writes as you
know, the Confessions.
A confession,
which is a witnessing,
which is--it's really the story
of his life,
from his childhood in Africa,
his growing up as a gifted
young rhetorician,
philosopher turned rhetorician,
who then moves to Rome where he
becomes a teacher despised and
paid by his students,
moves on to Milan and the whole
narrative climaxes with a
conversion.
In fact, the whole idea of an
autobiography for Augustine is
that it is--it coincides with,
it is coextensive,
with a conversion.
He writes--he achieves this
conversion in a garden in Milan,
it's a narrative that we may
have at some point a chance to
go to and look at it in some
detail and then goes on writing
a hermeneutics of the biblical
Genesis as if the new life that
he found,
through the conversion,
could only literally issue into
a commentary about all
beginnings;
Genesis is the beginning of all
beginnings as it were.
After we say this and we
say--and I can say that
Augustine writes in the full
awareness that in effect
autobiography has to be the same
thing as a conversion because
autobiography demands two voices
all the time.
It's necessarily ambivalent;
it demands the voice of the
narrator who is outside of the
narrative and who can look
back--
in fact the mode of writing
autobiographies is always
retrospection.
I look back at my life and try
to figure out what are the
stages, what are the events,
what is it that makes me now
the person that I am.
There's a sort of necessary
distance between the protagonist
and the narrator,
two voices.
A narrator who knows more than
what the protagonist knew.
I am caught in time and I have
encounters in my own life from
day to day,
and I never know what those
encounters really portend,
nor what do they mean and that
same thing for you.
You have--you probably--I don't
know if you hold that which is a
most abbreviated--
a unit of an autobiography
which is a diary,
you go home at night and you
jot down all the great events of
the day,
but you may overlook the most
important.
You may have had a meeting with
someone,
you may have caught sight of
some person,
who eventually ten years from
now will reenter your life and
give an altogether different
appearance and direction to your
life.
This is to say,
that all autobiographical
experiments,
like all diary entries,
are always uncertain and
fundamentally false because you
can never really write--
you can only write about what
you know at that point and you
can never really write about the
whole structure of your life.
To be able to write about the
structure of your life you have
to die, that's Augustine's idea
of the necessity of conversion.
It's a symbolic death by means
of which you come back into
existence,
you come back into life as a
new man,
you have a new life,
and now from that standpoint of
yours being a new life you can
have all the necessary
detachment to look at your past
and decipher that which was in a
haze,
that which was uncertain as
things went on.
The other reason why you need
this kind of structure in
autobiographies,
this double voice,
is obvious.
Because if I go on writing
about my life without any sense
of what my life is about,
can you imagine what happens?
I go on writing every single
thing that I do which means that
I would need another life to be
able to say well I got up in the
morning,
then I brushed my teeth,
etc., etc.
It becomes a random,
senseless, accumulation of
facts without any particular
meaning or direction.
Dante is aware of this type of
complication of autobiographies.
We don't have this kind of
autobiographies,
you have autobiographical
writings beforehand,
you have a kind of self
analysis, think of the one--
the figure that is most
powerful for Augustine is David,
King David and his Psalms with
a kind of reflection,
a kind of turning inward,
and trying to pinpoint the
shifts in moods,
moral judgments,
temptations,
the idea of one's own system
is,
but this really means a kind of
internalization of one's life.
Augustine will not do this,
Augustine will go into the
interiority of his self,
into the interiority of his
consciousness,
but he will also describe what
has happened to him in the
public space.
Now he goes inside and outside
all the time.
Dante's, Vita nuova,
you have all read it,
it's really a complicated text
from this point of view,
because for it being an
autobiography,
it's amazing how little he
tells us really about his own
life.
There's nothing concrete about
this text.
We know that it has taken place
in--it takes place in Florence,
but Florence is not even
mentioned as a city.
We only infer that it's
Florence because at one point
there is a description of a
river that crosses by it and
which Dante uses because he has
had an inspiration,
words come to him with the same
kind of strength and naturalness
with which the waters of the
river flow,
that's the implied meaning of
that association or description
of the landscape,
there's a river and fantastic
words came to me which I jotted
down which I wanted to remember,
it's the turning in point in
poetic terms of the Vita
nuova.
When he addresses the -- he
understands that to write poetry
--
he writes the famous line,
"Women who have intellect
of love."
It is a remarkable line,
Donne ch'avete
intelletto, it's a
remarkable line and I will
explain why it's a remarkable
line.
It was never written -- that
kind of perception was never
really part of the
understanding--of the warehouse
of the poetic imagination.
What does Dante do?
It's a little bit abstract.
It's a kind of an enigmatic
account that he gives and this
is unlike Augustine.
It begins with a reference to
the book of memory.
In that part of the book of my
memory,
within which little has been
written,
I find words which I cannot go
on repeating and all,
but I would just transcribe
some sentences,
the meanings of them,
so he understands that here we
have,
first of all,
it's a book of memory,
not necessarily an act of
retrospection and memory it has
a number of other implications
and dangers.
What are the implications?
Well, Dante is writing this,
he's about 25,24;
it's a provisional
retrospection of his growth as a
poet.
He certainly knows that
memories of the mother,
as you know of the Muses,
this is the famous myth,
right?
There's the old Greek myth that
memory,
Mnemosyne, lay with Jupiter for
nine successive nights and from
their copulations the nine muses
came into being,
so Memories,
the Mother, which means that
art is always an act of memory;
a way of remembering,
an act of remembrance,
we could say.
It has also some dangers that
Dante will go on reflecting
about.
It's that if you go on getting
caught in the activity of memory
you run a serious risk,
the risk of changing your sense
of life and your sense of
reality into the phantasms of
memory because that's what
memory is.
It's called,
as you know,
the eye of the imagination.
That's the famous description
of memory.
The Greeks, of course,
used to put memory in the
heart, and in fact as you know,
the ancient Greeks used to put
memory in the heart.
In fact, as you know,
in Italian we still do say--
or in Spanish,
recordarse,
which really has the etymology,
in English record,
that's the etymology of the
heart we remember.
But in the Middle Ages it's
already part of the imagination;
it's called the eye of the
imagination which means that it
has a visionary component to it.
This explains the emphasis of
dreams, vision,
strange apparitions with which
this text is punctuated from the
beginning to the end.
Dante, I repeat,
understands that there is a
danger to memory and the danger
of memory is the transformation
of experience into a
phantasmatic reality;
the whole living in the world.
It's like you're always looking
backwards and you're not
Janus-like,
you don't look in all
directions, you don't look ahead
and Dante will turn against
memory.
The second thing that we get
from that little exordium of--
in that part of the book of my
memory,
we know that Dante's placed
himself--
I find words which have been
the inscriptions of memory,
I'm not going to repeat them
all, but only some of them.
We know that Dante has casted
himself as the editor of his own
book, that's the double poise.
This is the double structure of
this little text of his.
First of all it's a double--
has duplicity all over,
this text has,
it's a book of poetry and it's
a book of prose.
It's not an unusual structure:
Boethius, The
Consolation of
Philosophy is written like
that.
Dante also writes other texts
like that, but what are the
implications?
Well, there's a lyrical self
who has been in the throes of a
great passion for Beatrice,
who struggles sometimes with
his inspiration,
who waits.
And that's the problem he has,
that one of the crises that he
has is that he's always waiting
for words to come to him,
he's always waiting for
Beatrice to say hello to him,
there is a way in which he
casts himself as the passive,
a passive protagonist,
weak-willed,
unable, believing that the will
can direct him wherever the will
wants and that's another problem
that we are really going to talk
about.
Then, finally he understands
that he better get out of that
mode,
and in effect,
and I will say this by making
you turn,
just talking about the formal
structure now,
the whole text is written in
the past mode,
the whole text in that part of
the book of memory;
a commemoration of a great
event in the private life of
Dante,
the love which he doesn't even
know what it is,
he doesn't even know the woman,
he doesn't even know what the
passion is and part of what the
tension of this text is,
to ponder what it is that the
passion means and what it is
that it's doing to him and to
his mind.
But by the end of the--in
Chapter XLII,
which by the way,
let it be said in passing,
its division in numbers is
completely arbitrary.
We don't know,
that's not the way books were
written,
codices were written in Dante's
time,
it was a continuous -- to say
page something,
page something,
people really believe,
but the modern editors have
made it controversially into
XLII,
so this should be XXX,
and I agree with that.
Let me read the last passage,
the last paragraph which is not
poetry now, ends with prose.
With a voice of reflection
prose functions as the work of
reflections on the lyrical
inspirations,
on the immediacy of the lyrical
voice,
so that's the double voice.
I'm an editor and I'm a poet at
the same time;
sometimes the editing,
the notes that he writes,
say nothing about the poem.
They try to--sometimes he goes
on into formal mechanical
description about love,
this sonnet is divided into two
parts,
that doesn't really add much to
the inner life,
to our understanding of the
inner life of the protagonist.
This is what he says in XLII,
Chapter XLII,
"After I wrote this
sonnet,"
which is about the famous
vision of Beatrice sitting at
the foot of God's throne,
and so he decides that he has
to go there.
He decides that he has to go
and meet her,
that's the last vision.
"After I wrote this sonnet
there came to me a miraculous
vision in which I saw
things,"
like a visionary burden of the
narrative is kept up from memory
now to vision,
"that made me resolve to
say no more about this blessed
one.
"Blessed"
in Italian, by the way is a pun
on the name of Beatrice,
the one who is blessed,
the one who is the bearer of
the good,
now that's really what it
means--;"...
until I will be capable of
writing about her in a nobler
way."
That's the unavoidably
unfinished quality of the text,
I can't go on to write about
her, I need to do more work.
I need to do more research and
find out what I really can say
about this woman.
So he will stop.
That's what I call an
unfinished, an inevitably
unfinished narrative.
"To achieve this I'm
striving as hard as I can,
and this she truly knows.
Accordingly,
if it be the pleasure of Him
through whom all things live
that my life continue for a few
more years,
I hope to write of her that
which has never been written
before of any other woman.
And that it may please the One
who is the Lord of graciousness
that my soul ascend to behold
the glory of its lady,
that is, of that blessed
Beatrice who in glory
contemplates the countenance of
the One qui est per omnia
secula benedictus"
--
and to all times blessed,
and ends with a pun on,
again, on Beatrice.
What is the most important--to
me the most important point of
this paragraph,
the intrusion of the verb of
the future.
The only time you find it in
the narrative,
"I hope."
The whole text is contained
between an exercise of memory,
an idea of something which is
past,
and that tempts him greatly
because if something is past and
you have--
you think that you can even
control it,
you can certainly decipher it,
you can hope to extract from it
some particular meaning,
complacently or not,
and then ends with a projection
of the self into the future,
another work is to come.
This is the preamble to
something more which I cannot
really contain,
so memory is abandoned,
the work ends with an image,
and within the horizon of the
future.
This is really very important.
The limitations of memory
are--can be understood only from
this point of view because hope,
as you know,
when you think of hope,
hope grammatically--this is
what is the future.
He says I hope to write,
there's no future there,
I hope that's the present.
But hope grammatically is a
verb, those of you who have
studied a little bit of Latin,
remember, always take the
future participle.
I hope that I will do this;
I hope I would have done this;
it doesn't work.
I wished I had done that,
but so it takes all--it's a
verb of the future.
It is literally also in
substantial terms,
it's a virtue.
This is a--to say "I
hope" is a theological
virtue, hope which always
implies the future.
It says that the past is not
really over and done with
because once you include,
or you intrude the category of
hope,
you really believe you can
change the meaning of the past.
That things may be happening
that whereby all your past
errors,
all your past mistakes can be
seen and will be seen in a new
life,
so much then for this question
of destruction.
I repeat, we have prose and
poetry,
we have the voice of the lover,
and we have the voice of the
editor,
we have a text of memory that
at the same time turns against
itself,
points out the limitations of
memory,
and opens to the future through
hope,
and you have this idea that
something amazing is going to
happen.
Something that,
though nothing concrete is
being given, everything will
take place within the self.
It's the moment where Dante
abandons Augustine.
We began by saying,
I began by saying that the
mode,
the rhetorical mode that Dante
really follows is Augustine's
Confessions which is a
text of retrospection and ends
with a commentary of Genesis,
Dante ends with what we call a
prolepsis,
a weird word that's not so
weird, but all that means,
a projection to the future;
autobiography has this kind of
future dimension and cannot be
contained.
In other words,
it's not over and done with.
The mode which,
just to make this really
intelligible to you,
the kind of text that is most
like what Dante has written in
the Vita nuova is really
Joyce who writes The Portrait
of the Artist as a Young
Man.
That's the way you can
really--if you cannot have a
conversion,
if you cannot die as Augustine
says you have to do when you
write,
write an autobiography,
in order to come back as a new
man and be able to write your
life story and find out the
meaning of your life,
then what you can do is write
about yourself with a kind of
temporal distance that is
brought by time.
I'm no longer the young man I
used to be, but I do know those
passions.
I remove myself from them in
exactly the same way Joyce does
it with The Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man which
ends with the projection of
going to the--
descending into the smithy of
this whole and writing,
and then forge the epic of the
future.
That's really the--it ends with
a project for the future so this
is a kind of a mode of
autobiographical writing that
Dante really prepares and puts
forth.
What happens in this text,
so much for the--
this--you--by the way you can
stop me at any point as I'm
talking if you want me to
clarify things or we can leave a
little bit at the end.
What happens in the text?
It's a love story.
It's a love story of a young
man who meets,
at the age of nine,
meets a young woman who is
roughly the same age,
he says she's in her ninth
year, doesn't even know who she
is but feels a kind of bliss.
Then he sees her again nine
years later, so we know that
there is a kind of numerical
symbolism running through.
The number for Beatrice is
three, 333,
a Trinitarian number,
she comes-- she reappears and
is convinced that this is going
to be the love of his life,
but he doesn't even know what
love is.
He does not know what love is,
what he does know at the
beginning,
and this is what part of the
whole--
the economy of this narrative
really focuses on trying to
ponder what love may be.
The culture of the Middle Ages
is filled with literature of
love.
This could be viewed as one of
the many love books of the
Middle Ages,
and in case some of you may be
looking already for a topic for
your paper,
you could write about the love
books of the Middle Ages.
What are the other love books,
the famous love books of the
Middle Ages,
which are completely different
from the love books of the
Middle Ages coming before.
For instance,
The Art of Courtly Love
of Andreas Capellanus,
which is as some of you know,
it's a codification of what
love is.
The idea that love is an art,
the "art of courtly
love," that it's obviously
natural instinct or thrust or
passion and yet has to be
changed as if there can be a
sentimental education.
One has to learn how to
contain, how to hold off
excesses, how to hold off the
potential disruptions and
violence that love will commute.
There are the romances of
Chrétien de Troyes that
you may know about,
which is all about love at the
court,
the place of pleasure within
the unfolding of responsible
life.
There are so many other texts,
a lot of the Provençal
poets whom Dante really evokes.
Dante writes about love.
Let me say a couple of things
so that you can really--it's not
the first time that people
reflect upon love of course.
The Greeks tried to do that and
you may remember Socrates who
always wonders what love is.
Is it a figure of speech,
a manner of feeling or is there
such a thing as love?
It's--that's just a useless
figure of love.
Is it a god that possesses me?
Is this a natural instinct that
we call love.
This variety of passions,
this variety of ways of
understanding love all figure
within this text.
The main thing is that Dante
meets Beatrice,
because if we don't know who
she is,
does not know what's happening
to him at the age of eight,
it starts in an involuntary way.
The whole point of this
narrative is that things seem to
be happening to him,
not only as a passive figure,
but even love comes to him.
It's--he doesn't will it,
he doesn't look for it,
and in many ways,
look at this passage here in
book--
in Chapter II,
"Nine times already since
my birth the heaven of light had
circled back to almost the same
point,
when there appeared before my
eyes," it's appearing,
it's an apparition,
something gives itself to him,
"before my eyes the now
glorious lady of my mind,
who was called Beatrice even by
those who did not know what her
name was.
She had been in this life long
enough for the heaven of fixed
starts to be able to move a
twelfth of a degree to the East
in her time;
that is, she appeared to me at
about the beginning of her ninth
year," so she's a little
younger than he is "and I
first saw her near the end of my
ninth year.
She appeared dressed in the
most patrician of colors,
a subdued and decorous
crimson...
At that very moment,
and I speak the truth,
the vital spirit,
the one that dwells in the most
secret chamber of the heart,
began to tremble so violently
that even the most minute veins
of my body were strangely
affected;
and trembling,
it spoke these words:
Here is a god stronger than I
who is coming to dominate me,
to rule over me."
This is--these are set
descriptions of what love is,
the point is that he doesn't
will it, he does not know what
this is about.
Why does he present himself as
unwilling this passion?
Because passions which are
unwilled seem to be more
important than the things that
we will.
If they are unwilled and they
happen to me they may have the
mark of a secret necessity.
There may be a pattern behind
them that I do not know but it
happened to me.
Do you see what I'm saying?
I do not have any
responsibility about it.
I don't know what that is.
He will find out in time that
he cannot go on obeying the
rules of the will that he has to
go on understanding that the
will needs to be in turn ruled
by reason.
Yet, nothing that he does is
that this figure of love is a
god, really a literary conceit.
He has no idea who speaks to
him or around him.
All around him he takes refuge
in the chamber of his house,
the chamber of his mind and
there he goes on engaged in
deliriums, dreams,
etc.
That is to say,
all the clinical signs of love.
He thinks that love is a
passion that disabilitates him.
This whole problem will come to
a head with the first sonnet
that he writes,
which by the way,
is really the poem we know.
Dante's seventeen years old
when he wrote this poem,
we know that this is really a
kind of--sort of--it's a dream.
It's a poem which appears as a
dream which I'll read in English
in this so and so translation,
but it's better than anything I
could try.
"To every captive
soul," it's a horrifying
dream as you can see.
To every captive soul and
loving heart
to whom these words I have
composed are sent
for your elucidation in reply,
greetings I bring for your
sweet lord's sake,
Love.
The first three hours,
the hours of the time
of shining stars,
were coming to an end,
when suddenly Love appeared
before me
(to remember how it really was
appalls me).
Joyous, Love seemed to me,
holding my heart
within his hand,
and in his arms he had
my lady, loosely wrapped in
folds, asleep.
He woke her then,
and gently fed to her
the burning heart;
she ate it, terrified.
And then I saw him disappear in
tears.
It's a dream,
a horrifying dream about a lady
which is asleep,
held in the arms of the lord of
love.
She wakes and eats the heart,
the heart was given to her.
It's a story of clearly how the
heart nourishes love,
that's the sense of it.
The meaning,
he says, it's a dream,
another involuntary experience,
a dream comes to us without our
will,
without our wanting it,
and he says the meaning of this
sonnet was unclear.
He writes the sonnet and sends
it out to his fellow poets in
Florence.
He sends one of them to the
person who's going to become his
best friend and to whom this
text is dedicated.
It will appear very soon in the
text.
His name is Guido Cavalcanti;
we shall see him in Hell by the
way.
Dante put him in Inferno
X and we'll talk about him at
length.
Guido answers,
because that was the fashion,
just write the poem,
and then by taking your own
rhyme scheme as a kind of
response,
they go on really writing about
this.
And Guido Cavalcanti says to
him, well you're really right--
you really had the vision which
means that you cannot quite
trust love,
that you really have to turn
away.
It's a kind of admonition to
you: move away from all of these
figments of love and turn to
philosophical studies.
It's only in the mind that you
can find,
and in the pursuits of the
works of the mind,
that you can find some kind of
truth and stability for
yourself.
Outside of it,
there is only--and if you
pursue love there's the world of
the arrangements.
By the way, another physician
of the time,
Dante--his name was also Dante,
Dante da Maiano,
he decides to write to him and
also writes about the sonnet.
He says, well this really means
that you have humoural problems:
take cold baths and everything
will be okay.
You really need to rebalance
the new equilibrium for your
humors.
One reduces love to a question
of bodies,
the physician,
as if it were just a disease,
the other one reduces it to a
question of love's danger
vis-a-vis the stability of the
mind.
Dante will go neither with one
and will not listen neither to
one nor to the other.
The rest of the poem will be
that of trying to understand
what this love really is.
Crucial chapters will appear.
Chapter VIII,
he describes his going to a
funeral, you remember,
he sees a dead woman,
and you wonder what is the
point of this kind of seeing.
And the point I think that--of
that scene is that there is a
body and that body is inert and
dead and that there is no
possible connection between him
and this dead body.
So that love is not reusable
only to bodies.
There must be some kind of
animation, there must be some
kind of soul that is--or life
that accompanies it.
In Chapter XII finally,
Dante seems to be moving a
little bit away from this
Provençal --
this way of describing love in
terms of conventional terms that
I have to describe to you,
and he has this other dream
about the god of love who comes
to him and says it's time for
you to put aside all simulacra,
all fictions and all emptiness.
Let me just say a little bit
about more of this point about
love and a kind of questions
that Dante raises.
Whenever we think about love in
the modern era,
as you know,
these are not my ideas,
but particularly I believe in
them.
Others have formulated these
ideas.
Whenever we think about love in
modern times that--the
formulation of love is as we
understand it today is
essentially medieval.
The Greeks do not have the
understanding of love the
way--the romantic idea of love
the way we do.
They understand love as an
intellectual pursuit,
as an ascent up the ladder of
being.
That it's the work of
philosophers that the minds can
go on from degrees--
through the various degrees of
reality and intellectual reality
and one can grasp it.
There is friendship of course,
but there's not the idea of the
love of a man for a woman which
is so crucial to the romantic
understanding of love.
The Romans had no understanding
at all about either,
what the Greeks knew,
what we know.
The most important Latin voice
of--about love is,
for instance,
I think, Catullus,
who talks about love as
something to be slightly
embarrassed about.
It's a weakness,
a serious guy does not involve
oneself in this kind of
pursuits,
this kind--you have to do the
serious work of living:
the political issues,
going to the forum,
negotiate, etc.
But come the Provençal
world in the south of France,
the Provençal courts,
love changes,
both its meaning and its
contours.
Now love is the love of a man
for a woman and it's usually
described,
and you can see in Andreas
Capellanus and The Art of
Courtly Love,
or in the texts of Chretien de
Troyes,
it's described as maybe it can
be a clandestine,
secret relationship,
it need not be within marriage
because marriages are--
usually are business
propositions.
It is a kind of emotion that's
potentially violent,
in fact the effort one
should--what is the sociology of
love?
Can a noble man fall in love
with a plebian,
can a noble woman fall love
with a plebian man?
It's an arrangement about what
love can be,
and yet also they describe it,
they always describe it as the
experience that causes insomnia,
loss of appetite,
the lover turns pale and can't
speak in the presence of the
beloved,
they go on describing the
physical properties of love.
The other great revolution
about love is what is contained
in this text.
He's not the only one;
Dante's not the only one to
have brought it about.
His teachers and people,
the likes of Guido Cavalcanti
and Guinizelli were going to the
same direction,
namely, that love has to be
explored for the changes it
brings to the mind.
How can it be?
This is the kind of problem
that they raise.
How can it be that I see a
woman and the image of that
woman obsesses me?
What is it about my mind?
Why do I want to be better than
I am?
How am I going to be educated
in the light of the love that I
feel for this woman?
And in effect,
this kind of metaphysical
aspect of love is the special
burden of this text.
Let me just give you an idea,
it happens--
the first time that this
happens is exactly with the
famous poem that I mentioned to
you that is the turning point,
Chapter XIX.
Let me just read this paragraph.
This is the turning point in
Dante's understanding of what
love is.
"Then it happened,
that while walking down a path,
along which ran a very clear
stream…"
--
we guess that it's the Arno
River.
He won't say,
he's not interested in the
outside world,
he's only interested in what
love does to his inner self,
to this thought of his mind --
"I suddenly felt a great
desire to write a poem,
and I began to think how I
would go about it."
What an extraordinary moment,
finally he's not just jotting
down words that come to him,
he just starts thinking.
This is not just about a self
as desiring or willing,
or unwilling,
and who lives that kind of
strange world;
oh it's a good thing that
things are happening to me
because I can't help it.
I can give up my whole exercise
of what I can do,
the sense of purpose about what
is happening,
changing will into a rational
activity.
Now he starts thinking and:
"I began to think how I
would go about it.
It seemed to me that to speak
of my lady would not be becoming
unless I were to address my
words to ladies,
and not just to any ladies,
but only to those who are
worthy,
not merely to women.
Then, I must tell you my
tongue,"
--
he's not out of it yet --
"as if moved of its own
accord,
spoke and said:
Ladies who have,"
--
actually he says,
"Women who have
intelligence of love.
With great delight I decided to
keep these words in mind and to
use them at the beginning of my
poem.
Later, after returning to the
aforementioned city and
reflecting for several days,
I began writing a
canzone,"
--
meaning a song,
which for Dante is the noblest
form of rhetorical form--
and "using this beginning
and then constructed it in a way
that will appear below in its
divisions.
The canzone begins:
Ladies who have intelligence of
love
I wish to speak to you about my
lady,
not thinking to complete her
litany,
but to talk in order to relieve
my heart.
Not thinking to complete her
praise--her praise,
it's a poem of praise.
Therefore, a religious kind
of--very close to religious
poems.
As you know,
they're also called
laude,
laudatory we say in English,
to come back to--to give you a
sense of what this kind of poems
can be.
To praise, which he would like
us to distinguish from flattery.
There's a difference between
praising someone and flattering
someone.
Praising you really don't
expect anything in return,
you're praising as kind of
sense that you are just trying
to describe and yielding to the
allure and the power of what is
in front of you.
Flattery always implies some
kind of circuitness,
some sort of desire to get
something.
You flatter,
it's a rhetorical form,
you flatter because
there's--implies some degree of
manipulation.
The most important word,
it is "women who have
intellect of love."
Finally, intellect and love are
not two disjointed activities of
the mind.
It's not what Guido Cavalcanti,
who really believes in part,
who really believes in a world
in which one is sundered one
from the other,
in a fragmentary world -- and
we will come to that in
Inferno X --
who really thinks that time is
all fragmented from itself
anyway,
experiences are all
fragmentary, that love--
if I have a passion I can never
quite come to understand
anything.
In fact, when I am in throes of
passion my mind ceases its
operations.
This poem is written against
Dante's best friend to whom this
text is dedicated.
We are forced to think,
and I'll go back with this poem
in a moment,
but let me make a brief
digression about the
relationship between friendship
and love.
They're two extraordinary
virtues.
We call them passions,
but they're also virtues.
Is there anything better than
friendship?
Is there anything better than
love?
Dante says -- this is the
radical way of Dante's thinking
--
he brings us to the point where
you really have to distinguish
between things that seem to be
equally powerful virtues.
What is friendship?
The text is dedicated to Guido
Cavalcanti which means that
friendship implies a
conversation,
a conversation of minds.
The word conversation,
as you know in Latin means,
things turning together.
That's why the minds--when you
are conversing,
minds are turning together in
some kind of harmonious turning,
looking for some common
agreements and there is a sort
of benevolence implied in
friendship that presupposes even
what you are going to find.
We are going to--not only its
benevolence,
it's the condition for
friendship, it's really the
point of arrival,
we've got to like each other
even more after we discuss.
We disagree,
but we are doing it
benevolently.
That's the gift of friendship.
It's a virtue.
In the Ethics of
Aristotle, it counts as this,
one of the major virtues--and
so does Dante in his own
rewriting of the Ethics
of Aristotle which is the
Banquet.
But love for Dante here is more
important than friendship and
it's more important for
friendship because it forces you
to think.
Something happens to you and
that mobilizes your mind.
You've got to go looking for
the signs of love;
you try to look for what kind
of sign is my beloved sending to
me, etc.
The mind is engaged in an
extended self -- mode of
self-reflection.
So intellect and love now
rolled together,
that's the revolution.
Let me go back to them that I
have been--with which I started.
This is the beginning of the
so-called "Sweet New
Style."
The kind of poetry that the
Tuscans write and which is a
sort of rethinking of what the
Provençal poets were
doing.
The Provençal poets are
writing poetry in the mode of
"I tremble,
and I shake,
and the image of the beloved I
cannot even tell anybody.
I have to keep my passion away
from the flatterers because they
are going to violate my secret
and so I have to always protect
this,
I have to protect the identity
of the beloved,"
--
in a sense singularity and
uniqueness to this passion.
The Tuscan poets Dante,
Cavalcanti,
Guinizelli they come along and
say no,
no what matters is that love
can become part of an
intellectual experience and
intellectual ascent.
And knowledge only favors love,
and love mobilizes the mind to
go on thinking.
See, I really don't want to say
too much now because we have so
much time ahead of us.
The great debate,
philosophical debates in the
thirteenth century,
is always the following:
it's between the so-called
voluntarists and rationalists.
Very simple don't--the
voluntarists are those who
believe that if I want to know
something,
I have to love first,
that love is crucial to my
knowledge.
If I--probably you remember
from your own early youth,
when some of you would be
interested enough in a boy,
or the boy and the girl,
someone would say,
"oh you really love that
person."
What do you mean?
I don't know--even know him;
I don't even know her,
that's really the issue--if you
love so that you may know,
that's the position of the
voluntarists.
Others would say you have to
know first in order that you may
love, and it's a fierce debate;
Dante's circumventing all of
this.
Intellect and love are like the
two feet that carry us along,
and you move one and you move
the other,
and only this way can you walk
without being hobbled.
They say it would be later when
he starts in Inferno.
So, this is the great change,
what you call the Sweet New
Style.
The Sweet New Style means,
therefore,
a highly philosophical,
highly intellectual kind of
poetry,
a poetry where the woman or the
love of a woman can take you up
to the divinity,
love through love,
and the understanding that that
which rules the world is not
just an idea,
it's just love and therefore
love is the only way of coming
to it and pursuing it.
Some examples of this kind of
experience will happen very
soon.
I want to mention this great
poem that he describes,
this little sonnet where
he--which also--which sort of
pursues immediately after
Chapter XX.
Let's look at the sonnet.
"After the canzone
had become..."
-- this canzone about
"Women who have intellect
of love"
-- "...
had become rather well known,
one of my friends who had heard
it was moved asked me to write
about the nature of
Love..."
-- that's not what he--forget
about the experiences about
being sleepless,
but Dante starts as a
Provençal poet,
he's not refining their idea
and wants to think about the
nature of love,
philosophical idea about love
having--
without losing sight of
Beatrice-- "...
having perhaps,
from reading my poem,
acquired more confidence in me
than I deserved.
So, thinking that after my
treatment with the previous
theme it would be good to treat
the theme of Love and,
feeling that I owed this to my
friend,
I decided to compose a poem
dealing with Love.
And I wrote this sonnet which
begins:
Love and the gracious heart are
a single thing
as Guinizelli [who's another
poet of the Sweet New Style ,
is the father of the sweet new
style]
tells us in his poem:
one can no more be without the
other
than can be a reasoning mind
without its reason.
Nature, when in a loving mood,
creates them
This is the shift now the full
awareness that learning about
love.
Dante's gone to the school of
the philosophers,
in order to learn about this.
This means that this whole text
really is traversed by two
inter-related themes,
they're two stories,
two thematic strains running
through.
One is the story of a love for
Beatrice, Dante's love for
Beatrice, and we have
understanding what love is.
Is it a physical impulse?
Is it a demon?
Is it a figure of speech?
Is it a simulacrum,
another fiction that we tell
each other?
Or not, and he goes on learning
about this.
The other thematic strain of
this text has to do with
learning to be a poet.
Dante is also telling us the
story of his poetic growth.
How he begins imitating the
Provençal poets,
imitating now the poets of the
Sweet New Style,
and finally finding his voice,
and how the two themes really
shed light on each other because
I can only understand this about
love and if I understand really
things about love that nobody
else has understood,
I can really go on writing
about the poem --
writing poems that nobody else
can go on writing which is a
famous promise,
the hope he expresses in
Chapter XLII.
And if I can go on writing
about love in a way that nobody
else has ever written,
it means that I understand love
more than others have understood
love.
At any rate,
the great poem that he starts
writing when he's,
in a sense, even in a kind of
rivalry with Guinizelli,
appears in the sonnet that
starts here.
I could mention 21,
"The power of Love borne
in my lady's eyes,"
where now it's not only about
the nature of love but he goes
on trying to find love within
Beatrice.
It's not the god of love that
has been abandoned,
it's not the conceit of love,
it's not the words,
the strange and enigmatic words
of love that have come to him
from oracles and traditions,
now that is love for the
concreteness of Beatrice
herself.
As I said earlier,
very much in passing,
the text has an extraordinary
sonnet that I read in Italian a
couple lines,
a few lines so you can hear the
sound of this poem.
Chapter XXVI,
this is about Beatrice,
the apparition of Beatrice,
she goes by through the streets
and the world is silent,
the world falls silent,
it's a kind of general
apparition,
but also she's wrapped in a
kind of mystery and an
inapproachable light.
There's always some kind of
distance.
This is the poem.
Such sweet decorum,
[page 57 of this edition,
Chapter XXVI]
and such gentle grace
attend my lady's greeting as
she moves
that lips can only tremble into
silence,
and eyes dare not attempt to
gaze at her.
Moving, benignly clothed in
humility,
untouched by all the praise
along the way,
she seems to be a creature come
from Heaven
to earth, to manifest a miracle.
We are now--Dante appears as a
sort of poetical caress because
of love, heaven,
and earth mixed up in his head.
Beatrice brings heaven down to
earth and asks of him that he
can rise up to heaven and these
are the words in Italian.
Listen to the repartitions,
the sounds, the "n"
sounds:
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta
pare
la donna mia quand'ella
altrui saluta,
ch'ogne lingua deven
tremando muta,
e li occhi no l'ardiscon di
guardare.
Ella si va,
sentendosi laudare
Only praise can come in toward
her--in her direction.
Finally, how does he
really--how does Dante really
get out of this sense of
constant wonder because that's a
poem about wonder.
Beatrice appears and it's a
miracle,
wonder, and that's how you
start thinking as soon as you
believe that what you perceive
is a wonder that you don't quite
understand.
You want to go on trying to
understand it.
Now that's the heart of the
effort of reflection,
right?
So there's this kind of a sense
of constant perplexity,
great excitement at the idea of
Beatrice.
Now Beatrice has died,
her death appears around
Chapter XXIX.
How real can she be now that
she's--well how are you going to
relate to someone who is dead?
Dante will do that which
probably some others can--could
do.
We try to find a replacement
and we go looking for someone
who looks exactly like her or
reminds him of her and then
finds this,
Chapter XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV;
this woman who has a lot of--so
much mercy, sense of mercy for
him that he's very drawn to her.
He understands that in the
measure in which he tries to
duplicate Beatrice,
then the love for Beatrice was
not really singular;
that his own project was at
stake here.
Either you believe in the
singularity of the figure you
love, or if you believe in the
duplication, then you are
undercutting your own project.
So he's caught in all this
drama until finally he sees some
pilgrims,
and this is really the great
direction,
and with this I will stop and
see if there are some questions.
Chapter XL, some pilgrims,
the pilgrimages that used to go
to Santiago de Compostela,
as they do now.
They used to go to the
famous--from the north of
Europe,
the so called--they would go to
Jerusalem,
they would go to the Via
Francigena as it is called,
that goes from the north
following a particular path,
they go to Rome,
and here this is some pilgrims
going--
they're called romei. He
sees some pilgrims going to Rome
and this is the poem he writes,
this is an extraordinary poem.
"Ah, pilgrims...
" he addresses them.
They don't listen to him,
they know nothing about him.
He addresses them:
..
.moving pensively along,
thinking, perhaps,
of things at home you miss,
could the land you come from be
so far away
(as anyone might guess from
your appearance)
that you show no sign of grief
as you pass through
the middle of the desolated
city...
This is a phrase that normally
is used for Jerusalem,
"desolated,
" "the abandoned
city.
" This is Florence,
though....
like people who seem not to
understand,
the grievous weight of woe it
is has to bear?
If you would stop to listen to
me speak,
I know, from what my sighing
heart tells me,
you would be weeping when you
leave this place:
lost is the city's source of
blessedness,
and I know words that could be
said of her
with power to humble any man to
tears.
This is--it's really another
great shift in the movement of
the poem.
He sees pilgrims who are going
somewhere and he realizes that
he is not like them;
he's not going anywhere;
he is moving in circles.
If you move in circles,
you get nowhere.
Now, something happens around
him that will,
in many ways,
shake him from that kind of
circular self-absorption in
which he finds himself.
The second thing is that he
understands.
This is an extraordinary poem.
Read it again for yourselves
when you have a chance.
He says he understands that the
mythology he has been
constructing about Beatrice is
an absolutely private mythology.
It means nothing to anybody
else.
You who come from afar,
and he's like them,
because he too is--they are
separated pensively,
a word that implies suspension.
The same word,
"to think"
and "to be
suspended,"
it's the same etymology in
Latin.
They are halfway:
they are here now going through
Florence,
going somewhere to a
destination, and nostalgically
separated from the world they
left behind.
And Dante too,
is not going anywhere,
but he doesn't have Beatrice
with him and has no idea of
where he -- though,
unlike the pilgrims,
where to go.
Above all, if I were to tell
you anything,
you would understand that this
is a desolated city but you do
not know,
an implication is,
you may not care.
My mythology is private.
The effort I have to make is to
transform my private mythology
into a public discourse.
This is the transition from the
Vita nuova to the
Divine Comedy.
The Divine Comedy would
be a text where finally Dante
will go on literally,
theatricalizing,
literally staging his own
passion,
through the passions of others,
involving all others in his
discourse and creating what I
would call a "public
mythology."
This is really the most
important moment that--which
ends with another journey of the
mind that will make the next
one,
Beyond the sphere that makes
the widest round,
passes the sigh arisen from my
heart;
A new intelligence that Love in
tears
endowed it with is urging it on
high.
Here he sees Beatrice far away
and decides to undertake his
journey,
the journey of knowledge,
the journey of exploration of
the journey which will--
which is the journey of life
and which is the journey at the
heart of the comedy or the
Divine Comedy with which we
start next time.
This is really the kind of
experience, poetic experience
that Dante will go on at the
start.
He's still a young man.
He's exploring a lot of
possibilities;
he's gathering all the voices
around him, but he internalizes
them.
They are not--it's not that
it's still the kind of
encyclopedic text that the
Divine Comedy will
necessarily be,
but he has to evolve all
discourses,
all whispers,
all groans, all noises.
The whole world has to speak
through his poem.
That's part of the most
inclusive vision,
not excluding anything,
but this is a time is--
it's an effort to try to find
himself as a poet with a project
and that project will be
necessarily a project for the
future.
There is no poet that I know in
the Western tradition who is so
given to the idea of the future
and who is more of a poet of
hope than Dante is.
I call him a lot of things,
and I will call him a lot of
things.
I'll call him the poet of
exile, which he is.
I'll call him the poet of love,
which he is.
I'll call him the poet of
peace, which he is.
There's an irenic thrust
underneath his whole--even his
polemics, fierce polemics.
But above all,
and now, for now he appears as
the poet of hope,
in the knowledge that hope is
the most realistic of virtues.
Because he tells us that the
past, not even the past may be
dead, that really despair is the
most crucial sin that one could
have in this universe.
Belief is to say that things
are over and done with.
Dante says I'm not done yet.
I still have a project I can't
even begin to tell you about it,
but let me stop now because I
have other things to do.
That's the substance of this
poem, and in this sense,
it's a preamble,
a preparation for the Divine
Comedy.
Since I'm trying to give you a
sense of Dante's own life as a
flesh and bone kind of guy that
he was.
What happens after this poem?
Beatrice has died;
literally in 1289 she dies.
Dante now is married--marries a
woman he will never mention,
belongs to a decent family in
Florence,
the Donati, troublemakers that
Dante doesn't really like.
And Dante will enter public
life.
This public life,
which also means,
that he will have a great
interruption to his intellectual
pursuits.
Until in 1302,
as I--probably you remember,
I mentioned,
he's banned from Florence to go
into exile.
And once he's in exile,
then his production will start
again.
He started writing about the
language, the theatre of the
language, one of the first
treatises on language in the
Western world.
He writes a text of ethics
which is the Banquet and
then the Divine Comedy.
We'll begin next time;
we'll find them in the middle
of his journey which is Canto I.
Since we have a few minutes,
do we have questions?
I said a lot of things.
I hope it was--I'll go back to
some of these things so
don't--Questions?
Student: Well,
this is not exactly about the
lecture,
it's about the text,
do you recommend that we go
over the specific text that you
recommend on the syllabus or--
I already own the Mandelbaum
translation that--
is that usable for this course
as well?
Prof: Yes,
the question is,
do I recommend that the
students stick to the text that
I mention in the syllabus or can
they go on using other texts
such as Mandelbaum's
translation?
The answer is yes you can,
it's a very good--Mandelbaum's
translation is a very good
translation.
I don't use it for one simple
reason, because he's a dear
friend of mine,
he probably will hear me now,
everything will be on record.
Poets have a weakness.
When they translate they do it
out of great love for the texts.
Deep down this idea,
look at it, I can do one better
than even Dante and he lapses
into that and I have told him
more than once.
I like this unpretentious
translation by Sinclair.
Prose sometimes is wrong;
I will tell you when it is
blatantly wrong,
but you can use Mandelbaum,
or if you have Singleton or you
have Durling and Martinez,
or if you have--actually I
think is really better than all
of these,
Hollander's, Robert Hollander.
Actually the translation is by
his wife Jean.
You can use any translation you
want.
They are not really all that
different from each other,
it's usually the sound,
and of course,
Mandelbaum as a poet has a
sense of the rhythm in English;
but absolutely.
Yes?
Student: I'm not quite
sure I understand how love as a
process of acquiring knowledge
is different or better than
friendship,
or like the harmonious turning
>.
Prof: Yeah.
The question is very good first
of all, and is why should I make
a claim that love as a process
of knowledge is better than
friendship?
You are really singling out
that which is the--
one of the dramas of the
Vita nuova,
a book dedicated to--Dante
dedicates to his best friend,
Guido Cavalcanti,
and yet it's about Beatrice.
When Cavalcanti appears he
says, forget about love,
just turn to philosophy in a
sonnet that is very well known
and that I quote in some piece
or other.
There is a tension between the
two,
love and friendship,
and we agree and you seem to be
agreeing with a very generic,
not unusual,
the description that I make of
friendship.
A friendship is really the
language of philosophers,
right?
Philosophers who get together
and believe in thought and
believe also that friendship is
a great virtue,
there's a lot of drama within
friendships and in literature,
friendships are trying to outdo
each other.
I'm a better friend than you.
To me, I'm a better friend to
you than you are to me,
as soon as you talk about that
kind of rivalry you realize that
passions also are getting to
that process.
I would say that Dante--I
understand Dante to imply here
that love is better than
friendship exactly because it
forces,
it does violence on our ways of
thinking,
because it forces us never to
take anything for granted,
and in and of itself,
because this may even be
something that you find very
romantic,
people can find very romantic.
The idea that in love you are
going to be surprised by what
the signs of love are and
ubiquitous of the idea of love,
whereas, in friendship you
really have a sort of the
clarity of an exchange.
In love you are going to have
the secret signs that lovers can
give each other.
To me, a great text that maybe
Dante--I'm sure Dante read is
really Ovid.
You go and read all these
stories,
great stories,
but the story of Pyramus and
Thisbe,
lovers who can see the smallest
chink in the wall through which
to communicate and all the
inventiveness that comes with
it.
In a sense, it's really where
the idea that love can--
I say, can force us to think
about in ways that we could
never really imagine,
because it is tied to the
imagination.
Okay?
That's what I would say.
Other questions?
Okay, I think that that's it.
I will see you next Thursday in
some detail and then goes on
writing a hermeneutics of"
with Canto I,
etc.
Thank you.
