Posts Tagged ‘Dante Alighieri’

On April 19, Stanford celebrated the remarkable and many-faceted career of Professor Robert Pogue Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature in the Department of French & Italian. We published Andrea Capra‘s tribute to him “How to Think with Robert Pogue Harrison,” on the Book Haven. Capra, a grateful former student, is now Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton. Today, we share the presentation from a colleague who attended the festivities. Pierre Saint-Amand, Yale University’s Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French (he was formerly at Stanford), focuses his research on 18th-century literature, especially the libertine novel, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and literary criticism and theory. Some of you may remember also him from the Another Look 2019 discussion of Madame de LaFayette’s landmark 1678 novella, The Princesse de Clèves. He was a brilliant addition to the Another Look panel, and a lively presence at Stanford day-long symposium for Robert Harrison as he officially transitioned to “emeritus.” Here’s what he said:

I am pleased to say a few words about Robert Harrison as we open this conference on the occasion of his retirement. These will be not savant words but words of affection. Robert and I were both young assistant professors in the early eighties, here at Stanford. Robert was then a specialist of Dante, fresh from Cornell, having written on the Vita Nuova. I am glad I had a front row seat to the immediate rise of his global success and his amazing career. I saw him mutate to become a philosopher, in the old sense of the term, one expressing his views on the human condition, and a public intellectual as he took to the waves. Everything started with Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, a prescient book of which I remember the humble and patient beginning. Robert put it together assembling erudition and swaps of visionary poetic language, going from Vico to Zanzotto. I am attached to Robert’s early books, as I felt a part of them when they were being written, and as they got especially a second distinguished life in French. Robert enjoyed naming these translations (beautifully realized by Florence Naugrette): he repeated those names as if they contained a special essence; he would say Forêts, Jardins, Les Morts. They were not books but some kinds of ecstatic emanations of the originals. Robert was a true professor of French and Italian; he was the eminent bridge of these two linguistic regions of this department and certainly the major intellectual spirit linking the two communities.

 He writes beautifully of this place, Stanford, that he will never attempt to leave, as I did (for Robert likes the woods as much as I like the city life). The university, he writes in Jardins, gave him so much. It’s strange to think of Robert as a man of institution, but he valued the university, this university, as a place of humanist exception and certainly of civilized friendship. He sees the university positively as a perfected garden. He has stayed here to live at Stanford, finding his habitat, his habitation, on the most perfect and secret street, Gerona Road, a hidden route in a wooden local. Robert finally left a modest cottage in a garden where he wrote his most precious books, now, for his house: a modern construction barely elevated above the land; an almost invisible structure hidden in the landscape of trees. This place resembles him and entertains his monastic and savage legend. I am reminded that in the cottage the forest once came magically to him when a branch of foliage pierced through a window to keep company to his computer. That was an awesome sight, a miracle of provoked thought, we could say, that wanted to prove to Robert he was writing the right books on nature.

 Robert is retiring. He will be gone from his classroom, gone from the Quadrangle, but you will still be able to hear him when he takes to the waves. For he has this other life, really a voice, a mix of rock’n’roll and oracular antiquity. Who says KZSU like Robert Harrison? Where is the location of that electronic space that invites his baritone eloquence? You say it comes from the Stanford campus, better it is a global digital agora. That’s where you will find Robert Harrison, Robert the prophet, warning us of the impending doom and delivering an activism of the thought. In the manner of Hannah Arendt, his muse, he sees those dark clouds threatening of a rain that doesn’t come. Recently, Robert has left the forest for the cosmos (I mean by that the worlds) making an even more giant intellectual, philosophical, and critical leap. We have all become followers of Entitled Opinions, hooked to the news of dark times. Robert though has a secret, a pharmakos at the ready, nothing other than the poetry of his vision, a poetry that is always the promise of a survivable redemption.

Purgatory seems to be on people’s minds this year – we have several new translations of Dante’s canticle to consider in time for Christmas. Fortunately, we have Dantista Robert Pogue Harrison to do the considering for us in the current holiday issue of the New York Review of Books.

Your choices: a Graywolf Purgatorio translated by poet Mary Jo Bang, another translation by Scottish poet and psychoanalyst D.M. Black (with a preface by Harrison himself – read about it here) from New York Review Books, and finally After Dante: Poets in Purgatory: Translations by Contemporary Poets edited by Nick Havely with Bernard O’Donoghue and published by Arc in Yorkshire. Harrison gives especial attention to a different kind of translation, from words into art: Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno by the late Rachel Owen, edited by David Bowe and published by Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Why the abundance of translations? “Given Merwin’s excellent version of Purgatorio, plus dozens of others in English, the only reason to undertake yet another translation of it—or any other part of The Divine Comedy, for that matter—is love. ‘Love makes me speak,’ as Dante said…”

Purgatorio is the most approachable of the three canticles of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It has always been my favorite. As Harrison points out, it is the only one of the three in which time matters. And effort matters, too – its inhabitants are all in the struggle to work out their own salvation.

But there’s more. As Harrison writes: “Whereas Hell has no stars, sunsets, or seashores, on Mount Purgatory we are once again under the open sky, where the sun’s movement marks the hours and seasons; where night gives birth to day, and day dies into night; and where the shimmering seas of the southern hemisphere surround the island from all sides.”

“A palpable terraphilia informs the canticle. We find here a love of the planet and everything that makes it our cosmic home—its rivers, valleys, seas, and mountains; its diurnal cycles; its ever-changing light and color; and above all its celestial dome. Not to mention its plant life. After Dante enters the earthly paradise of Eden at the summit of Mount Purgatory, the fair Matelda informs him that he has risen above Earth’s zone of meteorological disturbance. The gentle breeze that graces the ancient forest of Eden comes, she says, from the heavenly spheres as they move from east to west around the planet. This rotational wind scatters seeds from the flora of that primal place to the rest of the planet below: ‘And then the Earth, according to its character/and where it is beneath the heavens, conceives/and by its various powers bears various plants.’ In sum, all the plant life of our burgeoning, self-renewing biosphere has Edenic origins.”

Harrison suggests that Dante had roamed Hell as an insomniac, and that his nightmarish visions were the result of extended sleep deprivation. “

In Purgatory he and Virgil are under strict orders from the angelic guardians of the realm to halt their ascent of the mountain toward evening and, at least in Dante’s case, to sleep at night. On each of the three nights he spends on Mount Purgatory, Dante has vivid dreams, and with each new dawn he wakes up restored.

“Indeed, restoration marks the very purpose of the purgatorial process. While Hell figures as a great gash in the body of Earth, where all the vices that disfigure the soul and human history fester, Purgatory is where the slow, laborious work of healing takes place. Dante, whose pilgrim arrives on the realm’s shores on Easter morning, calls it the soul’s rebeautification (“Creature who cleanse yourself/to go back beautiful to your Creator,” he addresses a penitent in Purgatorio 16). The penitential ordeals of Dante’s Purgatory—many of them as harsh as the punishments in Hell—are intended to restore the prelapsarian probity of human nature and prepare the way for a return to Eden, which Dante locates at the mountain’s summit. Dante himself will enter Eden at the end of his journey through the second realm, and so will all the other penitents after completing their purgation. From that garden of recovered innocence they too, like Dante’s pilgrim, will ascend into heaven.”

Read the whole thing here.

Postscript: Here’s poet and psychoanalyst D.M. Black talking about his translation with NYRB’s Edwin Frank. It’s fascinating.

One wonders what Stanford Prof. John Freccero, one of the world’s leading Dante scholars, would have made of his own death, during the year the world is celebrating as the 700th anniversary of his Florentine master’s demise. No doubt he would have been honored and gratified. The author of the seminal Dante: The Poetics of Conversion had long since disappeared from the scene, quietly retreating within his home on Amherst Avenue. He died on Nov. 22.

“It seems natural that Freccero chose to devote his academic studies to Dante,” according to Johns Hopkins Magazine in 2008. “In one of his earliest memories, he’s a boy sitting on the lap of his Italian immigrant grandfather, staring at the frightening images accompanying The Inferno. ‘There is no Italian of my grandfather’s generation who didn’t know Dante,’ Freccero says. ‘That’s one of the things that’s so bizarre about him, that he is at once the most learned and the most popular of poets. Can you imagine a barber in Baltimore reciting Shakespeare? Of course you can’t. But you can’t imagine a barber in Italy not knowing Dante.'”

I interviewed him in the summer of 2012, and those encounters are cited in my book about his close friend and colleague, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. (“I feel sometimes I am not worthy” of the friendship, he told me.)

Going back through those interviews this morning, I was surprised at their offhand depth and range, the casual erudition. (I’ve written about him before: Early sci-fi: how Dante warps time and space, and “By Love Possessed”? René Girard and John Freccero on Francesca da Rimini, among other places.)

I had studied with the Dantista some years before, in the late 1980s or early 1990s. As I wrote in Evolution of Desire:

“I met John Freccero at Stanford decades ago, when I attended his lectures on Dante—I remembered a potent concoction of urbanity, insight, and endless erudition. He assigned the multi-volume Charles Singleton prose translation of The Divine Comedy, urging us to buy the epic poem and commentary by Singleton as the definitive translation in English. Because of him, I still regularly refer to the thick gray volumes I found secondhand at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. “Why not a poetic translation?” a plaintive voice had queried from somewhere at the back of the large lecture hall. Freccero volleyed back with an appealing smile, “Because you should never give up on learning the Italian.”

“He disappeared from my life after the course was over, and returned when I realized that he had been a friend of Girard’s for nearly sixty years. He was a pivotal figure during Girard’s time at Johns Hopkins. Years later, Freccero helped bring Girard to Stanford. His observations were persuasive, and helped shape my understanding of the theorist I knew only in his last decade. Girard acknowledged the role of two Dantisti in his life during these years …”

The outpouring since John Freccero’s death has been subdued – it occurred during Thanksgiving week, and the 90-year-old Dante scholar had long been in frail health. So far, the only comments I’ve seen have been on Twitter. (See below.)

In a life as intellectually radiant as his own, such a quiet death seems out of place – but perhaps one could say the same of Dante’s own malarial death, on returning from Venice, in 1321.

Let us quote another maestro, “Rest perturbèd spirit,” may angels guide thee… Dante described so many of them, after all.

Postscript on 12/3 from Stanford Prof. Grisha Freidin: Farewell, John. Your Dante course I sat through at Stanford in 1980 changed my life. For one, it was clear to me that one ought to be ashamed of teaching lit in a university without a serious study of Dante. I was fortunate to be able to audit his course at the outset of my career. It shaped my research, too, in many ineffable ways. John was also a good friend during his stint at Stanford that ended tragically when he lost his wife, a ballet dancer, to cancer. We lost touch after that, though I ran into him on occasion. Robert Harrison was his student, too, and held him in great esteem. Passing of a giant, who was part of the great tradition of Dante scholarship going back to Curtius and Auerbach.

Who is the most magnetic bad guy in world lit? BigThink comes up with a number of candidates here. The article considers several for the personification of evil: Dante‘s Satan, Goethe‘s Mephistopheles, and Bulgakov‘s Woland in Master and Margarita. Perhaps you can come up with a few names of your own.

From the unsigned article:

“In her book, The Origins of Satan, religious historian Elaine Pagels argues that Satan did not become a true antagonist to God until the 1st century. Looking to unite the Jewish followers of Christ during their relentless persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire, Gospel writers adopted an us-versus-them narrative that depicted their oppressors as incarnations of the Devil himself.”

“As the personification of evil — be it mindful or mindless — Satan soon began appearing in nonreligious writings. Placing this larger-than-life figure outside of the scriptures in which he was first introduced, these storytellers not only influenced our thoughts on the nature of sin, but also taught us a thing or two about the religious institutions that have claimed to protect us from it.”

But it looks like BigThink will plump for Lucifer in Paradise Lost.

From the unsigned article:

Lucifer, the antagonist of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, is often considered as one of the most striking characters in all of British literature. As far as depictions of Satan in modern media are concerned including the titularly titled Netflix show as well as series such as Breaking Bad and Peaky Blinders, Milton’s version of the character – mobile and full of personality – has proven to be far more influential.

As with Dante, Milton’s poetic genius was so great that he was essentially able to add his own chapters to a religious narrative that had been passed down for centuries. In the poem, he attempts no less than to offer an alternative version to the book of Genesis, built around the theme of “Man’s disobedience, and loss thereupon of Paradise.”

Spending considerable time and effort on developing the personal motivations behind Lucifer’s rebellion, Milton speaks concretely about things the Divine Comedy had only hinted at. Milton’s take on the character likewise wants autonomy, but this desire is made to seem all but pathological. “Better to reign in Hell,” this Lucifer famously speaks, “than to serve in Heaven.”

The Satan found in Paradise Lost became especially popular among western readers. Writing for The Atlantic, editor and literary critic Ed Simon proposed that this particular iteration had an “independent streak that appeals to the iconoclasm of some Americans.” His need for freedom, even if it would lead to chaos and suffering, perfectly matched the spirit of a developing capitalist economy.

Read the whole thing here.

Not many Americans read The Australian, the leading national newspaper Down Under. It’s a shame – they’re going to miss Janet Albrechtsen’s excellent profile of the man who has been called America’s leading humanist, born in what may be Homer’s birthplace – Izmir, Turkey. Stanford’s Professor Robert Pogue Harrison, a leading Dante scholar (we’ve written about him lots on the Book Haven), has taught literature at Stanford for almost three decades. His books include The Dominion of The Dead, where he explores how the living maintain a connection with those we’ve buried, and Juvenescence, where he considers how we are growing younger culturally, losing a very necessary reciprocity with our past.

Albrechtson writes: “Harrison is not part of the splurge of political podcasts waging war with the left or the right. One of the original long-form podcasters, before the word was born, Harrison started recording his meandering interviews, called Entitled Opinions, in 2005 in what he calls the catacombs of Stanford University’s radio station KZSU. He chooses “catacomb” deliberately. This is where, as he tells his listeners, new religions are born, his being ‘the persecuted religion of thinking.’”

A couple excerpts from the article:

Dead voices are writ large in Harrison’s life and work. He is concerned that the genius of innovation and change, now at speeds not seen over the course of human history, is breaching our connection with the wisdom of the past. “Genius liberates the novelties of the future, (and) wisdom inherits the legacies of the past, renewing them in the process of handing them down,” he writes in Juvenescence.

Harrison is too cool to be a ­curmudgeon. He recognises that being young is positive. “It’s ­vibrant, it’s energetic, it’s creative,” he tells me.

“But if we forget our cultural age and pretend like we’re children, then it’s really dangerous. And when you lose your cultural memory and connection with the past and with the dead voices that speak from the deep past, then you also, I think, lose the sources of rejuvenation. You can either rejuvenate or you can juvenilise. I don’t know how we can go forward into the future viably without a solid kind of foundation in the past.”

Harrison draws on Dante to explain the dynamic synergy between genius and wisdom. “Dante in the Middle Ages is in a deeply Christian society, and he becomes the first person to write a Christian epic in the first person singular. That was very radical. That was very new. That opened up a whole new genre for the future. But he did not just invent it like Silicon Valley start-up companies say they are all about innovation. He found his way into the new possibilities of a Christian epic by the systematic study of Virgil, and with Virgil, the epic tradition that came from Greek and Roman sources,” he says.

He points to the same intellectual synergy between genius and wisdom when the Founding Fathers created a new nation. “Thomas Jefferson used to translate the Greek Bible into Latin and the Latin Bible into Greek when he was in high school. President Garfield, a century later, when he wanted to amuse his friends … he would take two pencils (one in each hand) and write Greek and Latin letters – sentences – at the same time.

“The framers of the American constitution … would go back and pour over the annals of the history of Rome and where Carthage went wrong. The whole new nation of America, the new republic, was thought up very deliberately by this constant persistent reference to antiquities and its models of the future.”

***

He laments that education, especially the humanities, is deliberately trouncing dead voices. And he is unsurprised that humanities degrees at Australian universities have been penalised by a fee hike by the government.

He blames a cynical crusade over the past few decades where the humanities have become “more of a deconstructive enterprise rather than a reconstructive one. If we, the teachers, are the first ones to put into the tribunal all of the white males that represent the tradition, and invariably, when you put them in the tribunal, almost all of them are going to be indicted and proclaimed guilty, then it’s not unusual that governments should say, ‘Why should we fund a dead story?’”

What is a humanist? Obviously, Harrison is one. I’m not going to attempt a definition, but I will describe a characteristic. A humanist is someone who explores, explains, and inhabits literature, or philosophy, or history, or any of the other explorations are the essence civilization and human endeavor. They do this not (or at least not only) self-interested motives – a degree, a tenured appointment, a prize, or prestige as a PBS commentator – but because it is the world they inhabit, one that they wish to carry into the future by offering at least a single perishable link in an unbroken chain – not only for humanity’s sake, but also because it is their own lifeblood.

Read the whole thing here, if you can evade the paywall.

The supreme translator honors the supreme poet. It is the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri‘s death – and Robert Chandler, who has translated Vasily Grossman‘s Life and Fate and Stalingrad, among other Russian stunners, turns his attention from the Russian classics to Dante’s Italian masterpiece.

The occasion for the article is a new translation of The Purgatorio, by poet D.M. Black, published by New York Review Books with a preface by Robert Pogue Harrison, who estimates that there are more than a hundred translations of The Divine Comedy into English already. So why do we need a new one? Because The Purgatorio is special.

If Russia seems a long way from Florence, Chandler threads the connections together in his new article, “Divinity and Damnation: Why Dante Still Matters,” at The Financial Times: “Anna Akhmatova’s last public appearance was in October 1965, during a celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth.  In a moving affirmation of loyalty, she wrote in her preparatory notes that the deepest bond between her and her fellow-poets Nikolay Gumiliov and Osip Mandelstam, both killed decades earlier by the Soviets, was ‘love for Dante.’” (Mandelstam described the Divine Comedy as a perfect crystal with 14,233 facets – the number of lines in the poem.)

Readers are generally drawn to the Inferno, partly because of the set pieces like Paolo and Francesca, but also for the same reason people prefer horror films to mid-century musicals.

“Some have see Dante as a vengeful sadist, while for T. S. Eliot he was an epitome of classical restraint.  Some see Dante as a mystic visionary; others see the Divine Comedy as Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian Catholicism put into verse,” Chandler writes. “In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Judith Thurman has described him, during his long exile from Florence, as ‘an itinerant diplomat and secretary for the lords of northern Italy’ and as an ’embittered asylum-seeker.’”

I’ll plump for The Purgatorio too. It has more movement. But Stanford’s William Mahrt would also point out that it is the only one of the three sections of the Divine Comedy that has music. There is no music in The Inferno – just noise and wails and grunts. The Paradiso leads us beyond music. But the Purgatorio rings with hymns and psalms and chant. Chandler adds: “The Purgatorio, however, is a more satisfying whole.  The structure is more meaningful, the verbal music more delicate – and, above all, it is more human.  In Hell and Paradise everyone is fixed in their despair or bliss; in Purgatory everyone and everything is in flux.  Sinners struggle to resolve their inner conflicts.  Above all, there is a sense of freshness and hope.”

Chandler concludes: “The Purgatorio is, above all, a search for meaning, and in the final cantos Beatrice enables Dante to understand that the only source of meaning is love.  One of Black’s previous publications is titled Why Things Matter: The Place of Values in Science, Psychoanalysis and Religion (Routledge, 2011).  Both in this translation and in his afterword Black shows us why Dante matters, and how, 700 years after his death, he can still help us to understand what may give meaning to our own lives.”

Read the whole thing here.