Dante seen by SCIAMMARELLA.
The
Divine Comedy
(better to call it that, because as the illustrious dantist Anna Maria Chiavacci said,
Comedy
called it Dante,
Divine Comedy
the readers called it; and not without foundation, it should be added, since the poem describes itself as “ sacred poem ”) is a work that stands alone in the universe.
How is it possible that a book, a poem, supplants the universe?
Well, it is possible.
At least from an epistemological perspective.
Never has a poem done it so convincingly.
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Why are we Dantesque?
Dante in his colors
Dante's red, green and blue journey
It is difficult to explain why.
Perhaps it is only because it tells the story of the salvation of a man and with it, and as a rondón, the history of humanity, its meanness and its wisdom.
Never before has a poem covered such diverse subjects: aesthetic, political, theological.
The great triumph of the
Divine Comedy
is that it manages to make poetry out of all that.
Homer and Virgilio stuck to a few things.
Dante's claim is much broader: to encompass the human course, including the union of man with God.
The heterogeneity of its materials is such that it is similar to that of twentieth-century poetry.
Dante is no less varied, even more flamboyant, than the most postmodern of poets, say John Ashbery.
The
Divine Comedy
is a true poetry festival that sometimes looks like non-poetry.
It looks out, but does not fall off the cliff.
Such an abundance of references, almost cosmic, originates a certain opacity, very poetic in itself, which already surprised the first readers, who began to write comments.
The first important one, that of Jacopo della Lana, was ready seven years after the poet's death.
The example of the
Divine Comedy
is so powerful that whenever anyone has aspired to the total poem it has touched their spirit, from Pound in his
Cantos
(notoriously Dantesque) to William Carlos Williams in his
Paterson,
or Wallace Stevens in his
Notes for a Fiction of supreme
, to cite three very different examples. But it is no less present in the short poem, in Zanzotto, Rosselli or Sanguineti, or in a poet like Mandelstam and through him in Brodsky, because Dante also excels in the art of the scene, in the knobs and moldings, in the rendering of the tongue; Suffice it to recall, in the scenic, among many, the famous passage by Francesca and Paolo, a favorite of all generations, or in the semantics, the incessant creation of neologisms of
Paradise
.
One of the undeniable triumphs of the
Divine Comedy
is that it is the only medieval book that continues to be read on a universal scale beyond specialization.
It has managed to enter the collective imagination and be a “modern” work, something that the great poems of antiquity, the
Iliad
, the
Odyssey
or the
Aeneid
have not achieved, although they do not need it
.
It is the most ruminated poem, reread, reinterpreted in epochal terms, in history.
Among other things, it is at the origin of all "personal" poetry, which is why the ages of the self have elevated it: Romanticism, the 20th century.
But not ceasing to be like that, it is also something else: the opposite.
Because what is actually articulated in the poem is the deconstruction of the self (political, spiritual, aesthetic), understood as the only way of true fulfillment of the individual and the world.
Its 14,233 verses are a sum that gradually subtracts until the mystical experience is reached, in which the subject is fulfilled.
It is the first "less is more" in history.
The pyramid turned upside down.
Jorge Gimeno
is a poet.
He has published a new translation and edition of Dante Alighieri's 'Divine Comedy' (Penguin Classics, 2021).