Preface
Preface
In the fall of 2008 I complied with a request to have my Dante in Translation course videotaped in the Open Yale Courses series. It is a course that I began teaching in 1969, when I was on the faculty of Cornell University, and I have been teaching it ever since, with very few occasional intermissions in between.
Over all these years (as is my wont with all other courses), I have taught without notes. This habit has one definite advantage but also at least one big disadvantage. The disadvantage is clear: my “oral” style does not directly translate into the legible prose it has become in this book thanks to the extraordinary talent for creative writing of Taylor Papallo. Taylor has masterfully transformed the nebulous approximations of the transcripts of my course’s twenty-four lectures into faultless English, and I gratefully acknowledge my debt to him. Above all, he and I have decided to keep in this book the skeleton structure, indeed the rhythm (the movement of a sentence, repetition, cadence, the improvisation, and so on), of a spoken talk.
On the other hand, one obvious stylistic advantage in the adoption of the conversational, informal tone of the classroom is that it allowed me to cut to a bare minimum the use of technical, philosophical language and to engage in spur-of-the-moment, extemporaneous, offhand remarks and interpretations. Plainly, in a book the act of improvisation, which we usually link with impromptu musical or poetic performances or the comic theater, typically finishes in mere contrivance or fiction, however desirable it may be for the sense of immediacy it conveys. The qualities associated with oral communication were replaced in this book by what could be called a deliberate artlessness. I have deployed this rhetorical mode not because I meant to write a “popular” book on the Divine Comedy, but because I think that Dante did write a poem that would be “sung” in public and would be suitable to all, to the scholars, the philosophers, the friars and the popes, political figures as well as “everyman” in the streets of medieval cities. As is known, the poem represents a wide assortment of characters, styles (the high, the low, the plain, and their mixtures), schools of thought, theological perspectives, and diverse social and political backgrounds.
To represent this variety of experiences, disciplines, and political-theological questions Dante self-consciously invents a new poetic language, which amounts to saying that he shaped a new way of thinking, one that transcends the traditional oppositions between philosophy, poetry, and theology. The premise of the Divine Comedy, which was written in the “vulgar tongue,” in Italian and not in Latin, so that a simple woman or a man at the lower end of the social ladder would understand, is that, however divergent and contradictory the exchanges and discourses among characters are, however mixed its style (lyrical songs, invectives, moral teachings, dialogues, prayers, and so on), they are all bound in a “conversation” with one another. It is a conversation that is born of familiarity and yet cannot be understood within the horizon of what is familiar. Dante has a way of turning all fixed conceptions about the values of the familiar and the known upside down, as readers discover that they are—that we are—at sea, disoriented or lost, and that the poem challenges and puts into question all that has been taken for granted as final (politics, justice, the illusoriness of limits and of the boundaries of the various worlds that are represented, the senses of history, knowledge as transgression, the failure of political and religious authority, freedom and its values, and so on).
This call to the iconoclastic, critical self-reflection that the poem unfolds suggests that, hermeneutically speaking, the Divine Comedy resists popularization. There is always something else, something more, in every line of the poem, and the palimpsests behind the overtness of the literal sense force us readers to launch headlong into the “more” that the poem offers. Beginning with the central canticle of the poem, Dante tries to chart the course for the pilgrim himself; he will do so again for the fewer brave sea-voyagers in Paradise, and, again, eventually for those the poet refers to as the “people of the future”: in reality, he wants his poem to become the everyman’s vademecum, as a way of making possible what we see from the edges, the limits and the limitlessness of the human. The poem guides the reader in acknowledging one’s actual place in the world and in wanting to find that place by breaking out of the prison of the self and its mirrors. Individually first, but also as members of the pilgrim Church, he hopes his readers will discover that they all have in common something profound: they all take different routes in a common pursuit, at the end of which it is possible to look into the knot where the human and the divine are bound together.
In short, for Dante there is nothing more fascinating than a conversation, as those waiting for a banquet to start know. It is the time when we see ourselves in another and another in ourselves.
Finally, I would like to express my thanks to the Open Yale Courses for inviting me to participate in this venture.