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1. Dante in Translation: Introduction
Poziom:
Temat: Edukacja
Prof: So I'm going to
give a short class,
what is known a short class,
they call it--it's an old idea.
They used to call it lectio
brevis, short class.
I just want to give you a
little introduction to what the
course will be like and an
introduction also about the
context of--
within which Dante thrives,
Dante grows,
and writes this poem of his.
A poem, that as you know,
is called the Divine
Comedy.
It's not really the title Dante
gives to the poem.
Dante called the poem simply
"comedy."
"Divine"
is the adjective,
the epithet that the readers
in--through centuries have
assigned to it,
to indicate both what struck
them as this sublime quality of
this text,
and also the content.
It deals, after all,
the fundamental theme of the
poem is the encounter of a
pilgrim,
an ordinary man,
who you'll see,
lived in the thirteenth century
or the fourteenth century and
who imagines this journey to
God.
So it's divine also because of
this particular content.
It's the--it's a journey,
it's a quest from nothing less
than seeing God face to face and
come back to talk about it.
Not just seeing God and be
overwhelmed by it and dazzled by
it,
as probably is the--what do we
know and it's most of the--
the tradition of visionary
literature,
this is really about writing
the poem about this fundamental
experience.
So we'll be reading this poem,
and if I had to give you
something of a genre -- it's
very difficult to speak of
genres.
Is it an epic?
Is it an autobiography?
Is it a romance?
I think it's all of the things
above.
It's all of these things and
probably the best way to talk
about it is that it is an
encyclopedia.
What does the word mean?
The word means a circle of
knowledge.
It's an old classical idea,
it was made--
I could tell you it was made
available in times--
in--by an architect by the name
of Vitruvius wrote actually and
talked about encyclopedia.
It really means this,
as I said, the circle of
knowledge, in the sense that to
know you have to have a point of
departure.
And that the point of departure
will take you along all the
various disciplines of the
so-called liberal arts,
and then they take you right
back to where you started.
The beginning and the end in a
liberal education will have to
coincide.
You are going to find out
things that now you will see
with a different view,
from a different standpoint,
a different perspective.
Dante writes an encyclopedia,
which also means an ordering of
the tradition of exactly the
so-called liberal arts.
What are the liberal arts?
Why are they called liberal?
They are called liberal to
distinguish them from the
so-called mechanical arts.
This is an old medieval
distinction and they're called
liberal also because the aim of
these arts is to free us.
It's as if knowledge has in
itself the power to give us some
kind of freedom.
Free us from all sorts
of--various sorts of tyranny.
The tyranny of action,
above all, the tyranny of
having to do things with your
hands that will distract you
from the great aims and great
aims are theory,
contemplation, and thinking.
The liberal arts,
what are these liberal arts?
The liberal arts are so called
the arts of words;
they distinguish them between
arts of words,
and arts of number.
The arts of words are the
grammar, fundamental,
which encompasses also poetry
and history.
They are--they are dialectics
and rhetoric.
Rhetoric, the art of persuasion;
dialectics being the art of
deciding what the truth of a
statement may be.
It's really the most difficult
of these arts.
Then there are the arts of
numbers.
The arts of numbers are
arithmetic, geometry,
music;
it's based on rhythm,
on number, and then astronomy.
The aim of these liberal arts
would be ethics;
it would be also theology,
metaphysics and then theology.
This is the way the Divine
Comedy is actually
structured as I'm going to show
you as we're going to read
this--the poem.
The implication of calling
the Divine Comedy an
encyclopedia is that clearly it
deals with education.
You cannot have an
encyclopedia--you do have the
Encyclopedia Britannica
which gives you all the possible
interesting,
important items provided in a
very disconnected way,
according to the laws of the
alphabet.
But the aim of the encyclopedia
is really to educate the
readers.
So, Dante actually shows,
in this sense it's an
autobiography.
The poem is an autobiography;
it shows the process by which
he comes to know the world
around him.
So we are going to talk about
things that have to do with
politics, that have to do with
questions that Dante raises all
the time.
What is justice in the world?
How do the claims of justice go
along with the realities of
passions and conflicting,
the collision of conflicting
desires,
conflicting parties and so on?
But also, we'll be talking
about ethics,
agency.
Am I--do I know things and
because I know things I'm all
right, or are my problems a
little bit different because my
will is really weak?
It's an old idea,
the weakness of the will,
and if I know what I should be
doing--we all know we should be
just.
That doesn't really make us
just, right?
We have--will be a kind of
frailty, a vulnerability to
wanting to do things that we
normally should be doing.
We even know that we shouldn't
do them.
We talk of--Dante raises some
of these issues in a very lucid,
and I think,
a most probing manner possible.
Then he goes on writing this
poem,
which is as you know,
written about going into hell
literally,
and trying to rectify the
belief that you can really get
out of it and rearrange the
old--
your vision about the world and
about yourself.
Because every time you talk
about ethics and every time you
talk about politics,
the real question is who am I
and what am I doing in order to
come to some kind of
understanding of the world
around myself.
We'll be talking about some of
these issues in detail and
reading in a very unassuming way
without any--
all the various cantos that are
indicated in your--
in the syllabus.
Let me go to the other part,
which is really probably the
most concrete part.
This is--I gave you the general
scheme of the lectures.
Let me just talk about the
concrete context of Dante's
life, the contour of his life.
Who is this man?
How did he end up writing a
poem that seven centuries or
more after he wrote it,
is still read,
and still been thought of as
one of the major contributions
that a human being can make to a
culture.
Well he was born,
as you know,
probably in 1265 in a city
called Florence.
A city that,
by the time Dante was of school
age, had 70,000 people.
Seven thousand--these are
little details to impress you
about how crucial,
how important that city was;
7,000 boys and girls who go to
school;
public schools were available
to them.
Dante was one of these people.
He was born in a family that
was somehow--
he claimed nobility and what
not, but actually was an
impoverished family and he was
even slightly embarrassed by the
activities of his own father.
He never mentions him,
but we do know by poems that
others had written against him,
attacking him and attacking his
genealogy,
accusing the father of
loan--being involved in the loan
and the kind of usury
activities--
activities of a usurer,
lending money at a high,
very high interest and so on.
When he--Dante--two events
happened to him,
private events happened to him,
when he was a child.
The first is,
by the time he was eight years
old, his mother died.
The second, a little bit
connected with it,
is the fact that when he was
nine years old,
he will tell us later,
he met a young woman.
He doesn't even know what her
name is, that's the fiction of
his own works,
he knew because she actually
was a neighbor,
he calls her Beatrice.
The way he goes on transferring
all the love that he felt or
wanted from his mother onto this
young woman we don't know,
unless we were just involved in
some kind of psychoanalytical
speculations about his life.
The facts we don't know,
however, he does talk about her
as if she were a mother to him.
He describes her in the poem in
very maternal language and a
language of great generosity;
the generosity of love actually.
These are the two events--then
he goes to school in Florence.
The school--of all his teachers
he'll have only one that he'll
really--
will point out and will
remember forever,
a man by the name of Brunetto
Latini,
we'll see him later in Hell.
I like--a lot of students they
all want to send their teacher
to hell, but not you of course,
but this was--he does.
Who was this man?
Why was he so important for
Dante?
Brunetto Latini would call
him--he's still talked about--
if you happen to go to Florence
and you read this kind of
memorial stones that are all--
are everywhere on the walls of
the city,
he was one of those who
civilized the city of Florence.
What was he doing?
What did he do actually?
Well he was a rhetorician first
of all, in the mode of
Ciceronian--the Ciceronian
tradition.
A rhetorician,
as we say of men who believed
that politics and rhetoric go
hand in hand.
That rhetoric is the art of
persuasion within the
parliament, within the streets
of the city, where large
decisions can be made and can be
reached.
This was the essential work of
Brunetto Latini,
Dante styles himself after
Brunetto Latini.
Because Brunetto Latini was not
only a great teacher,
he actually translated and
commented works that we have by
Cicero on rhetorical works of
Cicero.
In the belief that really the
political problems are
ultimately problems of speech,
problems of argument.
But he also was a traveler.
He went to--we do know that he
went to Toledo,
the city of Toledo in Spain.
He did bring in translations of
Avveroistic texts.
I will explain all these terms
as we go on.
Dante admires him especially
because he stands for the sort
of teacher who gets involved in
political--the political
realities of Florence.
Dante wants to follow him in
turn.
Eventually, he would meet
Beatrice again,
writes a great poem inspired by
her, which we'll be looking at
next time called the Vita
nuova.
The teacher--his teacher
Brunetto Latini will die and
Dante decides to enter--we are
already in 1290,
decides to enter political life
himself.
It was his biggest mistake.
It was his biggest mistake
because political life in
Florence really meant being in
the throes of harsh partisan
battles between the so-called
Guelfs and Ghibellines.
The issues are not so clear-cut.
The Guelfs supposedly are those
who really believe in the
loyalty to the Church.
The others, the Ghibellines,
also believe in the loyalty to
the empire.
The two institutions of the
time, things are not that
clear-cut as that--as sharply
separable as that.
We'll talk about some of the
details about this.
But Dante becomes an ambassador
for the city of Florence,
the way Brunetto had become an
ambassador for the city of
Florence and he goes a little
bit everywhere.
He's sent to the Pope in the
year 1302;
he's sent to the Pope on an
embassy and he never makes it
back to Florence.
Machinations had taken place so
that he would be banned from the
city.
Not only banned from the city,
his property is confiscated and
there is the threat on him,
that should he return and
should he get caught he would
actually be put to death.
The year 1302 is the beginning
of Dante's new education and new
experience.
He goes into exile,
an exile which at the time was
thought to be,
nothing less than the fiercest
condemnation on anybody.
Because we are--that's the
medieval idea,
we are--the value of each and
every one of us depends on the
position that we occupy within
the city.
To be without a city,
not be a holder of a place
within the city,
means that one is actually
nothing.
So he goes literally begging
from one city to another.
Maybe he even traveled as far
as Paris,
we don't know that,
but exile--though it turned out
to be a harsh punishment,
turned out to be also nothing
less than a blessing,
a blessing in disguise because
it removed Dante from any sense
of loyalty to partisan
viewpoints.
He was no longer to be a Guelf
or a Ghibelline,
he was no longer caught in
these internecine wars,
he now became nothing less than
one who could occupy a
transcendent viewpoint.
This is what the story of
the Divine Comedy is.
How does one go from perceiving
the world that armed oneself in
this partial,
provisional,
fragmentary manner,
how can one be pulling it
together?
The Divine Comedy is the
story of exile being the removal
of oneself from the city;
in order to best see what the
problems of cities can be.
He ended his life in the year
1321 in a city called Ravenna
where he was buried.
So that's--he--the way he wrote
the poem was in exile.
The poem came out of his
experience of exile.
He begins his life as an exile,
but I think a philosophical
text called The Banquet,
in the tradition of--well the
title of the Symposium on
ethics.
He abandons his project,
starts a project on language
trying to find a unified,
a possibility of unifying all
the languages of Italy,
writes a political text about
the necessity of unifying the
world with this empire,
the monarch,
finishes that,
but the real process of
unification of all his
experiences really is with
the Divine Comedy.
And we'll be reading that in a
couple of days.
That's all I have to say to you.
Let me see if there are some
questions and then I'll try to
answer those.
Yes?
Student:
>
for the final paper?
Prof: What is the
question again?
Student: When is the
final paper due?
Prof: The final paper is
due within two weeks of the end
of classes.
The question was when is the
final paper due?
Student: How important
is the knowledge of the Italian
language?
Prof: How important is
the knowledge of Italian
language?
The course is in English.
We are reading the translation
with the original text by the
side.
If you can read it in Italian
good.
If you want to write the paper
in Italian you are welcome to do
so,
but the course is going to
be--we are treating the poem as
if it were an English poem.
After all, as someone says,
Dante's an American poet,
maybe we could explore that
too.
Other questions?
Okay, we'll see you on Tuesday.
