The creation of Dante is above all the emergence into the world arena of the Italian language of his day, its emergence as a whole, as a system.
The most Dadaist of all the Romance languages moved into first place internationally.
II.
It is essential to demonstrate some bits and pieces of Dante’s rhythms. This is an unexplored area, but one that must become known. Whoever says, “Dante is sculptural,” is enslaved by beggarly definitions of a magnificent European. Dante’s poetry is characterized by all the forms of energy known to modern science. Unity of light, sound, and matter constitutes its inner nature. The labor of reading Dante is above all endless, and the more we succeed at it the farther we are from our goal. If the first reading results only in shortness of breath and wholesome fatigue, then equip yourself for subsequent readings with a pair of indestructible Swiss boots with hobnails. The question occurs to me—and quite seriously—how many sandals did Alighieri wear out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goat paths of Italy?
The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape.
The step, linked to the breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante understands as the beginning of prosody. In order to indicate walking he uses a multitude of varied and charming turns of phrase.
In Dante philosophy and poetry are forever on the move, forever on their feet. Even standing still is a variety of accumulated motion; making a space for people to stand and talk takes as much trouble as scaling an alp. The metrical foot of his poetry is the inhalation; the exhalation is the step. The step draws a conclusion, invigorates, syllogizes.
A good education is a school of the most rapid associations: you grasp things on the wing, you are sensitive to allusions—this is Dante’s favorite form of praise.
As Dante understands it, the teacher is younger than the pupil, because he “runs faster.”
He [Brunetto Latini] turned aside and seemed to me like one of those who run races through the green meadows in the environs of Verona, and his whole bearing bespoke his belonging to the number of winners, not the vanquished.6
(Inferno, XV, 121–124)
The rejuvenating force of metaphor returns to us the educated old man Brunetto Latini in the guise of a youthful victor in a track race in Verona.
What is Dantean erudition?
Aristotle, like a downy butterfly, is fringed with the Arabian border of Averroës.
Averroìs, che il gran comento feo.7
(Inferno, IV, 144)
In the present case the Arab Averroës accompanies the Greek Aristotle. They are the components of the same drawing. There is room for them on the membrane of one wing.
The end of Canto IV of the Inferno is a genuine orgy of quotations. I find here a pure and unalloyed demonstration of Dante’s keyboard of allusions.
It is a keyboard promenade around the entire mental horizon of antiquity. A kind of Chopin polonaise in which an armed Caesar with the blood-red eyes of a griffin appears alongside Democritus, who took matter apart into atoms.
A quotation is not an excerpt. A quotation is a cicada. It is part of its nature never to quiet down. Once having got hold of the air, it does not release it. Erudition is far from being the same thing as the keyboard of allusions, which is the main essence of an education.
I mean to say that a composition is formed not from heaping up of particulars but in consequence of the fact that one detail after another is torn away from the object, leaves it, flutters out, is hacked away from the system, and goes off into its own functional space or dimension, but each time at a strictly specified moment and provided the general situation is sufficiently mature and unique.
Things themselves we do not know; on the other hand, we are highly sensitive to their location. And so, when we read the cantos of Dante, we receive as it were communiqués from a military field of operations and from them we can very well surmise how the sounds of the symphony of war are struggling with each other, even though each bulletin taken separately brings the news of some slight shift here or there of the flags showing strategic positions or indicates some change or other in the timbre of the cannonade.
Thus, the thing arises as an integral whole as a result of the one differentiating impulse which runs all through it. It does not continue looking like itself for the space of a single minute. If a physicist should conceive the desire, after taking apart the nucleus of an atom, to put it back together again, he would be like the partisans of descriptive and explanatory poetry, for whom Dante represents, for all time, a plague and a threat.
If we were to learn to hear Dante, we should hear the ripening of the clarinet and the trombone, we should hear the viola transformed into the violin and the lengthening of the valve of the French horn. And we should see forming around the lute and the theorbo the hazy nucleus of the homophonic three-part orchestra of the future.
Further, if we were to hear Dante, we should be unexpectedly plunged into a power flow which is sometimes, as a whole, called “composition,” sometimes, in particular, “metaphor,” and sometimes, because of its evasive quality, “simile,” and which gives birth to attributes in order that they might return into it, increase it by their melting and, having scarcely achieved the first joy of coming into existence, immediately lose their primogeniture in attaching themselves to the matter that is straining in among the thoughts and washing against them.
The beginning of Canto X of the Inferno. Dante shoves us into the inner blindness of the compositional clot: “We now entered upon a narrow path between the wall of the cliff and those in torment—my teacher and I at his back.” Every effort is directed toward the struggle against the density and gloom of the place. Lighted shapes break through like teeth. Conversation is as necessary here as torches in a cave.
Dante never enters upon single-handed combat with his material unless he has prepared an organ with which to apprehend it, unless he has equipped himself with some measuring instrument for calculating concrete time, dripping or melting. In poetry, where everything is measure and everything proceeds out of measure and turns around it and for its sake, measuring instruments are tools of a special quality, performing a special, active function. Here the trembling hand of the compass not only humors the magnetic storm, but produces it.
And thus we see that the dialogue of Canto X of the Inferno is magnetized by the tense forms of the verbs. The past imperfect and perfect, the past subjunctive, the present itself and the future are, in the tenth canto, given categorically, authoritatively.
The entire canto is built on several verbal thrusts, which leap boldly out of the text. Here the table of conjunctions has an air of fencing about it, and we literally hear how the verbs kill time. First lunge:
La gente che per li sepolcri giace
potrebessi veder? . . .
(Inferno, X, 7–8)
These people, laid in open graves,
may I be permitted to see?
Second lunge: “Volgiti: che fai?”8 [line 31]. This contains the horror of the present tense, a kind of terror praesentis. Here the unalloyed present is taken as a charm to ward off evil. In complete isolation from the future and the past, the present tense is conjugated like pure fear, like danger.
Three nuances of the past tense, washing its hands of any responsibility for what has already taken place, are given in this tercet: