2021 is Dante’s year, which marks the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri’s death. In the world there will be a flowering of initiatives dedicated to Dante: conferences, lectures, exhibitions, temporary installations, books and so on and so forth. The whole world will celebrate our poet. And this already seems to me an element to offer to your attention. Before being the father of Italian culture, stubbornly claimed as such by the many intellectuals of the Risorgimento, Dante is a world poet, and a poetic beacon that illuminates the earth. Someone said the world is too small to ignore Dante. And then we learn this: Italy has offered Dante to the world and the world has offered him back to us in a new light. The tribute to Dante Alighieri
A few examples (I could offer you numerous but I will choose only a couple):
Ezra Pound invited us to reflect on the fact that the one who says “I” in the Comedy is not only Dante, a Florentine poet, but it is also me, it is you too, it is we, it is all the men of the earth, humanity on its way to individual and collective salvation. Dante and the everyman, the every man, and each of us. So all for one and one for all. Th. S. Eliot, Borges, Mandelstam and all the great writers of the world have dedicated memorable pages to Dante.
In conclusion: Dante is the brightest star in the universal poetic firmament.
Now we in Italy always repeat that Dante is the father of our language and that our entire linguistic and literary tradition depends on him. Nobody can question Dante’s authorship of the language we speak every day. The basic lexicon of the Italian language is made up of 2000 very high frequency words, combining which we make up 90% of our utterances. Of these 2000 words, 1600 are already attested in Dante. Father of the Italian language
Yet when I was a high school student and approached the study of his work I always had a perplexity, that is, I asked myself this: when we attribute the linguistic authorship of Italian to Dante, we do not involuntarily risk committing an injustice towards those poets and those writers who lived before him and who also had a role in the formation of our literary language
Because the father of Italian is Dante and not – for example – Giacomo da Lentini, a poet who lived and worked at Federico’s court II, and that – when the author of the Divine Comedy was not yet born – already gave us compositions, small masterpieces that show an indisputable linguistic and literary maturity
You all know that we credit Giacomo da Lentini with the invention of the sonnet (the most perfect enclosure of Italian poetry: it consists of fourteen hendecasyllable verses grouped into four stanzas that an immense fortune will have in the history of European poetry, starting right from Dante for get to Caproni and Pasolini, passing through Petrarch, Shakespeare, Baudelaire).
Having said this: Giacomo da Lentini is not also a father of our linguistic tradition.
And the same could be said for eminent authors of the thirteenth century: Guido Faba, illustrious Bolognese prose writer; Guittone d’Arezzo (the founder of Italian civil opera); not to mention Guido Guinizzelli and Guido Cavalcanti, towards whom Alighieri has a decidedly conspicuous poetic and cultural debt.
So, first of all, let’s make this clear: Italian does not come out of Dante’s pen like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. There is an exceptional linguistic heritage that the Florentine poet collects and re-elaborates, and offers the future in a new guise. In other words: our author inherits from tradition a language that is still young, a language that entered the literary use splendidly only a few decades ago, and reserved before him ALMOST only to the love lyric, albeit with some very significant exceptions (just think of poetry religious; to the patriotic chord of Guittone or to the doctrinal songs of the first stilnovists).
So let’s answer the starting question: Dante is referred to as the faber, the inventor of Italian for this reason: he was not the first to use the vernacular in a literary work, but he was the one who made him capable of an unlimited literary use.
In other words: the poets and writers of the earlier tradition had laid the foundations of a linguistic edifice that Dante Alighieri raised. Subsequently, over the centuries, Italian writers have – each in the context of their own work – contributed to furnish and expand the rooms of this linguistic building. So, I repeat: Dante has given the vernacular an extraordinary acceleration, proving it capable of touching all arguments, of expressing all the folds of the human soul. The divine Comedy
This Comedy of yours is a poetic miniature of the Universe, a world work that recapitulates all the previous tradition. The great Anglo-American poet Eliot calls it “the most comprehensive, the most orderly presentation of sentiments that has ever been given.” He means that there is no aspect, there is no moment of us men that is not poetically recorded. The attention of the readers has always been captured above all by those passages of the poem in which Dante explores the most terrible and excruciating, most inhuman inner sufferings.
After we were in the fourth quarter of comings, he / Gaddo threw himself down at my feet / saying: “My Father, do not help me
“. / There he died; and as you see me, / saw I fall three by one / between the fifth of and the sixth; so I gave myself, / already blind, to grope over each one, / and I called two of them, after they were dead. / Then, more than pain, fasting was able to do so ».
Of course, also from the linguistic point of view the poem is an all-encompassing work.
I mean that this almost indelimitable thematic variety implies the author’s adoption of a completely new linguistic structure. So the poem is a great encyclopedia of styles, in the sense that Dante continuously orchestrates different expressive registers and mixes together the most heterogeneous linguistic ingredients. In short: the Divine Comedy is a bit of a wonderful, rich mixed salad …
There are steps full of Provençalism or even Provençal. There are some verses in Latin. We find triplets teeming with neologisms (words that did not exist and that the author invents) and then – alongside this multilingualism – we record a prodigious stylistic excursion (therefore a multistylism). Dante is both a theologian poet and sometimes a hooligan of the language who uses rough and unadorned words (forerunner of dirty realism).
Dante – Natalino Sapegno taught us – is a classic without classicism, and after centuries of alternating and contrasted fortune only in the twentieth century (a century that has finally understood that the ways of art are infinite and capable of implying any referent) his temperament linguistic has become a guide, an example for many poets from all over the world. Joyce in Finnegans Wake and Pound in Cantos inherit the multilingualism of the Comedy. Dante’s legacy
Dante has given Italian most of the current lexicon and very often we quote Dante verses without realizing it. This shows that if we also ignore the linguistic tradition, the linguistic tradition does not ignore us. Now, Dante is not only the father of the Italian, but also his mother. Ed is a mother who fed all subsequent writers with the milk of his poetry. Poetry is therefore a milk. This is the metaphor on which I intend to stop your attention. There are moments in the poem
Black milk of dawn we drink it in the evening
we drink it at noon and in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and drink we
dig a tomb in the air we don’t lie
tight also mother of Italian. A metaphor
recurring in the three canticles and that of the milk of the poem. A quick reconnaissance: Stazio
– In Purgatory – tells Virgil (his literary idol of him) that Homer is the one whom the Muses
suckled more than anyone else. Stazio always manifests his love for Virgil by
revealing to him that the Aeneid was a mother for him, and in the bosom of this poem he
sucked the milk of the poem. At the end of Paradise, Dante represents himself as
an infant, a baby who still wets the tongue on the breast. The creative word of him is unable
to say being and then he stops at the threshold of the inexpressible.
Many poets of the last century will take up this metaphor (I am thinking of Paul Celan et al
relationship between lallation, that is the prelinguistic production of infants and the ineffability,
the impossibility of telling certain tragedies). And finally Andrea Zanzotto, who
taught us that the language is learned with mother’s milk. We don’t know where the
language comes from. We know – continues Zanzotto – that it mounts like milk and that the dialect (this
old speaking) has a drop of Eve’s milk inside its flavor.
The Comedy was therefore a mother who nursed many poets, Italians
as well as foreigners, who grew up poetically thanks to this
poetic milk from Dante.
We – who are the children, the great-grandchildren of Dante, who is both the father and mother of the language
that we live every day (writes Pierluigi Cappello: “between the last word spoken and the first
new word to say / and there we live”), we entrust ourselves with the task of defending this
language that has given us, so nourishing and indispensable , just like a latte, so rich
in all the pronunciations, intonations and accents of previous poets (Italian, Latin,
Provençal).
This language is one of the most precious intangibles on earth; more than any other
poetic language, Dante’s has the gift of epiphaning our trepidation, our
amazement, our emotion of existing, our surprise of being here, right now, in
this moment, on earth, in life …
Happy Dante New Year to all!
Dario Pisano
