Selected Essays

Conversation about Dante

Translated by Clarence Brown & Robert Hughes

Così gridai colla faccia levata.

(Inferno, XVI, 76)

I.

Poetic speech is a crossbred process, and it consists of two sonorities. The first of these is the change that we hear and sense in the very instruments of poetic speech, which arise in the process of its impulse. The second sonority is the speech proper, that is, the intonational and phonetic work performed by the said instruments.

Understood thus, poetry is not a part of nature, not even the best or choicest part. Still less is it a reflection of nature, which would lead to a mockery of the law of identity; but it is something that, with astonishing independence, settles down in a new extraspatial field of action, not so much narrating nature as acting it out by means of its instruments, which are commonly called images.

It is only very conditionally possible to speak of poetic speech or thought as sonorous, for we hear in it only the crossing of two lines, and of these one, taken by itself, is absolutely mute, while the other, taken apart from its instrumental metamorphosis, is devoid of all significance and all interest and is subject to paraphrase, which is in my opinion the truest sign of the absence of poetry. For where one finds commensurability with paraphrase, there the sheets have not been rumpled; there poetry has not, so to speak, spent the night.

Dante is a master of the instruments of poetry and not a manufacturer of images. He is a strategist of transformations and cross-breedings, and least of all is he a poet in the “All-European” and outwardly cultural sense of this word.

The wrestlers winding themselves into a tangle in the arena may be regarded as an example of a transformation of instruments and a harmony.

These naked and glistening wrestlers who walk about pluming themselves on their physical prowess before grappling in the decisive fight. . . .¹

The modern cinema, meanwhile, with its metamorphosis of the tapeworm, turns into a malicious parody on the function of instruments in poetic speech, since its frames move without any conflict and merely succeed one another.

Imagine something understood, grasped, torn out of obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately upon the completion of the act of understanding and execution.

In poetry only the executory understanding has any importance, and not the passive, the reproducing, the paraphrasing understanding. Semantic satisfaction is equivalent to the feeling of having carried out a command.

The wave signals of meaning disappear once they have done their work: the more powerful they are, the more yielding, and the less prone to linger.

Otherwise one cannot escape the rote drilling, the hammering in of those prepared nails called “cultural-poetic” images.

External, explanatory imagery is incompatible with the presence of instruments.

The quality of poetry is determined by the rapidity and decisiveness with which it instills its command, its plan of action, into the instrumentless, dictionary, purely qualitative nature of word formation. One has to run across the whole width of the river, jammed with mobile Chinese junks sailing in various directions. This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.²

Poetic speech is a carpet fabric with a multitude of textile warps which differ one from the other only in the coloring of the performance, only in the musical score of the constantly changing directives of the instrumental code of signals.

It is a most durable carpet, woven out of water: a carpet in which the currents of the Ganges (taken as a textile theme) do not mix with the samples of the Nile and the Euphrates, but remain many-hued, in braids, figures, and ornaments—but not in regular patterns, for a pattern is that very paraphrase of which we were speaking. Ornament is good by virtue of the fact that it preserves the traces of its origin as a performed piece of nature—animal, vegetable, steppe, Scythian, Egyptian, what you will, national or barbarian, it is always speaking, seeing, active.

Ornament is stanzaic.

Pattern is a matter of lines.

The poetic hunger of the old Italians is magnificent, their animal, youthful appetite for harmony, their sensual lust after rhyme—il disio.

The mouth works, the smile moves the verse line, the lips are cleverly and merrily crimson, the tongue presses itself trustfully to the roof of the mouth.

The inner image of the verse is inseparable from the numberless changes of expression which flit across the face of the teller of tales as he talks excitedly.

For that is exactly what the act of speech does: it distorts our face, explodes its calm, destroys its mask.

When I began to study Italian and had only just become slightly acquainted with its phonetics and prosody, I suddenly understood that the center of gravity of the speech movements had been shifted closer to the lips, to the external mouth. The tip of the tongue suddenly acquired a place of honor. The sound rushed toward the canal lock of the teeth. Another observation that struck me was the infantile quality of Italian phonetics, its beautiful childlike quality, its closeness to infant babbling, a sort of immemorial Dadaism:³

e, consolando, usava l’idioma

che prima i padri e le madri trastulla:

. . . . . . .

favoleggiava con la sua famiglia

de’ Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma.⁴

(Paradiso, XV, 122–123, 125–126)

Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to enter into concordanza.

There is a marvelous abundance of endings that are wed to each other. The Italian verb gains force as it approaches its end and only in the ending does it live. Every word hastens to burst forth, to fly from the lips, go away, and clear a place for the others.

When it became necessary to trace the circumference of a time for which a millennium was less than the wink of an eyelash, Dante introduced an infantile “transsense”⁵ language into his astronomical, concertante, deeply public, pulpit lexicon.

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:

I [had] fixed my gaze upon him

And he drew himself up to his full height

As though [he were] insulting Hell with his immense disdain.⁹

(Inferno, X, 34–36)

And then, like a powerful tube, the past breaks upon us in the question of Farinata: “Who were your ancestors?” (Chi fur li maggior tui?) [line 42]. How the copula, the little truncated form fur instead of furon, is stretched out here! Was this not the manner in which the French horn was formed, by lengthening the valve?

Later there is a slip of the tongue in the form of the past definite. This slip of the tongue was the final blow to the elder Cavalcanti: he heard Alighieri, one of the contemporaries and comrades of his son, Guido Cavalcanti, the poet, still living at the time, say something—it does not matter what—with the fatal past definite form ebbe.

And how remarkable that it is precisely this slip which opens the way for the main stream of the dialogue. Cavalcanti fades out like an oboe or clarinet that had played its part, and Farinata, like a deliberate chess player, continues the interrupted move and renews the attack:

e sè continuando al primo detto,

“s’elli han quell’arte,” diesse “male appresa,

ciò mi tormenta più che questo letto.”¹⁰

(Inferno, X, 76–78)

The dialogue in the tenth canto of the Inferno is an unexpected clarifier of the situation. It flows all by itself from the space between the two rivers of speech.

All useful information of an encyclopedic nature turns out to have been already furnished in the opening lines. The amplitude of the conversation slowly, steadily grows wider; mass scenes and throng images are introduced obliquely.

When Farinata stands up in his contempt for Hell like a great nobleman who has landed in prison, the pendulum of the conversation is already measuring the full diameter of the gloomy plain, broken by flames.

The notion of scandal in literature is much older than Dostoevsky, but in the thirteenth century and in Dante’s work it was far more powerful.

Dante runs up against Farinata, collides with him, in an undesired and dangerous encounter exactly as the rogues in Dostoevsky are always blundering into their tormentors in the most inopportune places. From the opposite direction comes a voice—whose it is, is so far not known. It becomes harder and harder for the reader to conduct the expanding canto. This voice—the first theme of Farinata—is the minor Dantean arioso of the suppliant type, extremely typical of the Inferno.

O Tuscan who travels alive through this city of fire and speaks so eloquently, do not refuse my request to stop for a moment. By your speech I recognize in you a citizen of that noble region to which I—alas!—was too great a burden.¹¹

Dante is a poor man. Dante is an internal raznochinets [an intellectual, not of noble birth]¹² of an ancient Roman line. Not courtesy but something completely opposite is characteristic of him. One has to be a blind mole not to notice that throughout the Divina Commedia Dante does not know how to behave, he does not know how to act, what to say, how to make a bow. This is not something I have imagined; I take it from the many admissions which Alighieri himself has strewn about in the Divina Commedia. The inner anxiety and the heavy, troubled awkwardness which attend every step of the unself-confident man, the man whose upbringing is inadequate, who does not know what application to make of his inner experience or how to objectify it in etiquette, the tortured and outcast man—it is these qualities which give the poem all its charm, all its drama, and they create its background, its psychological ground.

If Dante were to be sent out alone, without his dolce padre, without Vergil, a scandal would inevitably erupt in the very beginning, and we should not have a journey among torments and remarkable sights but the most grotesque buffoonery.

The gaucheries averted by Vergil systematically correct and straighten the course of the poem. The Divina Commedia takes us into the inner laboratory of Dante’s spiritual qualities. What for us are an unimpeachable capuche and a so-called aquiline profile were, from the inside, an awkwardness overcome with torturous difficulty, a purely Pushkinian, Kammerjunker struggle¹³ for the social dignity and social position of the poet. The shade that frightens old women and children was itself afraid, and Alighieri underwent fever and chills all the way from marvelous fits of self-esteem to feelings of utter worthlessness.

Up to now Dante’s fame has been the greatest obstacle to understanding him and to the deeper study of him and it will for a long time continue to be so. His lapidary quality is nothing other than a product of the huge inner imbalance which found its outlet in the dream executions, the imagined encounters, the exquisite retorts, prepared in advance and nurtured by biliousness, calculated to destroy utterly his enemy, to bring about the final triumph.

How many times did the loving father, preceptor, sensible man, and guardian silence the internal raznochinets of the fourteenth century, who was so troubled at finding himself in a social hierarchy at the same time that Boccaccio, practically his contemporary, delighted in the same social system, plunged into it, sported about in it?

Che fai?—“What are you doing?”—sounds literally like the shout of a teacher: “You’ve gone crazy!” Then one is rescued by the playing of the organ pipes, which drown out shame and cover embarrassment.

It is absolutely incorrect to conceive of Dante’s poem as a single narration extended in one line or even as a voice. Long before Bach and at a time when large monumental organs were not yet being built, and there existed only the modest embryonic prototypes of the future marvel, when the chief instrument was still the zither, accompanying the voice, Alighieri constructed in verbal space an infinitely powerful organ and was already delighting in all of its imaginable stops and inflating its bellows and roaring and cooing in all its pipes.

Com’avesse l’inferno in gran dispitto.¹⁴

(Inferno, X, 36)

—the line that gave rise to all of European demonism and Byronism. Meanwhile, instead of elevating his figure on a pedestal, as Hugo, for example, would have done, Dante envelops it in muted tones, wraps it about in grey half-light, hides it away at the very bottom of a dim sack of sound.

This figure is rendered in the diminuendo stop; it falls down out of the dormer window of the hearing.

In other words, the phonetic light has been switched off. The grey shadows have been blended.

The Divina Commedia does not so much take up the reader’s time as intensify it, as in the performance of a musical piece.

In lengthening, the poem moves further away from its end, and the end itself arrives unexpectedly and sounds like a beginning.

The structure of the Dantean monologue, built on a system of organ stops, can be well understood with the help of an analogy to rocks whose purity has been violated by the intrusion of foreign bodies. Granular admixtures and veins of lava point to one earth fault or catastrophe as the source of the formation. Dante’s lines are formed and colored in just such a geological way. Their material structure is infinitely more important than the famous sculptural quality. Let us imagine a monument of granite or marble the symbolic function of which is not to represent a horse or a rider but to disclose the inner structure of the very marble or granite itself. In other words, imagine a monument of granite which has been erected in honor of granite and as though for the revelation of its idea. You will then receive a rather clear notion of how form and content are related in Dante.

Every unit of poetic speech—be it a line, a stanza, or an entire composition—must be regarded as a single word. When we pronounce, for example, the word “sun,” we are not throwing out an already prepared meaning—that would be a semantic abortion—we are living through a peculiar cycle.

Every word is a bundle and the meaning sticks out of it in various directions, not striving toward any one official point. When we pronounce “sun” we are, as it were, making an immense journey which has become so familiar to us that we move along in our sleep. What distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us awake in the middle of a word. Then the word turns out to be far longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road.

The semantic cycles of Dante’s cantos are so constructed that what begins with mëd “honey,” for instance, ends with med’ “bronze,” and what begins with lai, “bark of a dog,” ends with lëd, “ice.”

Dante, when he has to, calls the eyelids “the lips of the eye.” That is when the icy crystals of frozen tears hang from the lashes and form a covering which prevents weeping.

li occhi lor, ch’eran pria pur dentro molli,

gocciar su per le labbra . . .¹⁵

(Inferno, XXXII, 46–47)

Thus, suffering crosses the organs of sense, creates hybrids, produces the labial eye.

There is not one form in Dante—there is a multitude of forms. One is driven out of another and it is only by convention that they can be inserted one into the other.

He himself says: “Io premerei di mio concetto il suco” (Inferno, XXXII, 4), “I would squeeze the juice out of my idea, out of my conception.” That is, form is conceived of by him as something wrung out, not as something that envelops. Thus, strange as it may be, form is pressed out of the content—the conception—which, as it were, envelops the form. Such is Dante’s clear thought.

But only if a sponge or rag is wet can anything, no matter what, be wrung from it. We may twist the conception into a veritable plait but we will not squeeze from it any form unless it is in itself a form. In other words, any process of creating a form in poetry presupposes lines, periods, or cycles of form on the level of sound, just as is the case with a unit of meaning that can be uttered separately.

A scientific description of Dante’s Comedy—taken as a flow, a current—would inevitably take on the aspect of a treatise on metamorphoses, and would strive to penetrate the multitudinous states of the poetic matter just as a physician making a diagnosis listens to the multitudinous unity of the organism. Literary criticism would approach the method of live medicine.

III.

Penetrating as best I can into the structure of the Divina Commedia, I come to the conclusion that the entire poem is one single unified and indivisible stanza. Or, to be more exact, not a stanza but a crystallographic shape, that is, a body. There is an unceasing drive toward the creation of form that penetrates the entire poem. The poem is a strictly stereometric body, one integral development of a crystallographic theme. It is unthinkable that one might encompass with the eye or visually imagine to oneself this shape of thirteen thousand facets with its monstrous exactitude. My lack of even the vaguest notion about crystallography—an ignorance in this field, as in many others, that is customary in my circle—deprives me of the pleasure of grasping the true structure of the Divina Commedia. But such is the astonishing, stimulating power of Dante that he has awakened in me a concrete interest in crystallography, and as a grateful reader—lettore—I shall endeavor to satisfy him.

The formation of this poem transcends our notions of invention and composition. It would be much more correct to acknowledge instinct as its guiding principle. The approximate definitions offered here have been intended as anything but a parade of my metaphoric inventiveness. This is a struggle to make the whole conceivable as an entity, to render in graphic terms what is conceivable. Only with the aid of metaphor is it possible to find a concrete sign for the forming instinct with which Dante accumulated his terza rima to the point of overflowing.

Thus, one has to imagine how it would be if bees had worked at the creation of this thirteen-thousand-faceted shape, bees endowed with instinctive stereometric genius, who attracted more and still more bees as they were needed. The work of these bees, who always keep an eye on the whole, is not equally difficult at the various stages of the process. Their cooperation broadens and becomes more complex as they proceed with the formation of the combs, by means of which space virtually arises out of itself.

The analogy with bees, by the way, is suggested by Dante himself. Here are the three lines which open Canto XVI of the Inferno:

Già era in loco, onde s’udia il rimbombo

dell’acqua che cadea nell’altro giro,

simile a quel che l’arnie fanno rombo.¹⁶

(Inferno, XVI, 1–3)

Dante’s similes are never descriptive, that is, purely representational. They always pursue the concrete goal of giving the inner image of the structure or the force. Let us take the very large group of bird similes—all those long caravans now of cranes, now of crows, and now the classical military phalanxes of swallows, now the anarchically disorderly ravens, unsuited to Latin military formations—this group of extended similes always corresponds to the instinct of pilgrimage, travel, colonization, migration. Or let us take, for example, the equally extensive group of river similes, portraying the rise in the Apennines of the river Arno, which irrigates the Tuscan plain, or the descent into the plain of Lombardy of its alpine wet nurse, the river Po. This group of similes, marked by an extraordinary liberality and a step-by-step descent from tercet to tercet, always leads to a complex of culture, homeland, and unsettled civic life, to a political and national complex, so conditioned by water boundaries and also by the power and direction of rivers.

The force of Dante’s simile, strange as it may seem, is directly proportional to our ability to get along without it. It is never dictated by some beggarly logical necessity. What, pray tell, could have been the logical necessity for comparing the poem as it neared its end to an article of attire—gonna, what we would today call “skirt” but in early Italian meant, rather, a “cloak” or “dress” in general—and himself to a tailor who, forgive the expression, had run out of stuff?

IV.

As Dante began to be more and more beyond the powers of readers in succeeding generations and even of artists themselves, he was more and more shrouded in mystery. The author himself was striving for clear and exact knowledge. For his contemporaries he was difficult, he was exhausting, but in return he bestowed the award of knowledge. Later on, things got much worse. There was the elaborate development of the ignorant cult of Dantean mysticism, devoid, like the very idea of mysticism, of any concrete substance. There appeared the “mysterious” Dante of the French etchings,¹⁷ consisting of a monk’s hood, an aquiline nose, and some sort of occupation among mountain crags. In Russia this voluptuous ignorance on the part of the ecstatic adepts of Dante, who did not read him, claimed as its victim none other than Alexander Blok:

The shade of Dante with his aquiline profile

Sings to me of the New Life . . .¹⁸

The inner illumination of Dante’s space by light—light derived from nothing more than the structural elements of his work—was of absolutely no interest to anyone.

I shall now show how little concern the early readers of Dante felt for his so-called mysteriousness. I have in front of me a photograph of a miniature from one of the very earliest copies of Dante, made in the mid-fourteenth century (from the collection in the library of Perugia). Beatrice is showing Dante the Holy Trinity. A brilliant background with peacock designs, like a gay calico print, the Holy Trinity in a willow frame—ruddy, rosy-cheeked, round as merchants. Dante Alighieri is depicted as an extremely dashing young man and Beatrice as a lively, round-faced girl. Two absolutely ordinary little figures—a scholar, exuding health, is courting a no less flourishing girl.

Spengler, who devoted some superlative pages to Dante, nevertheless saw him from his loge in a German Staatsoper, and when he says “Dante” one must nearly always understand “Wagner, as staged in Munich.”

The purely historical approach to Dante is just as unsatisfactory as the political or theological. Future commentary on Dante belongs to the natural sciences, when they shall have been brought to a sufficient degree of refinement and their capacity for thinking in images sufficiently developed.

I have an overwhelming desire to refute the disgusting legend that Dante’s coloring is inevitably dim or marked by the notorious Spenglerian brownness. To begin with, I shall refer to the testimony of one of his contemporaries, an illuminator. A miniature by him is from the same collection in the museum at Perugia. It belongs to Canto I: “I saw a beast and turned back.” Here is a description of the coloring of this remarkable miniature, which is of a higher type than the preceding one, and completely adequate to the text.

Dante’s clothing is bright blue (adzura chiara). Vergil’s beard is long and his hair is grey. His toga is also grey. His short cloak is rose. The hills are bare, grey.

Thus we see here bright azure and rose flecks in the smoky grey rock.

In Canto XVII of the Inferno there is a monster of transportation named Geryon, something like a super-tank, and with wings into the bargain. He offers his services to Dante and Vergil, having received from the sovereign hierarchy an appropriate order for the transportation of two passengers to the lower, eighth circle:

due branche avea pilose infin l’ascelle;

lo dosso e’l petto ed ambedue le coste

dipinte avea di nodi e di rotelle:

con più color, sommesse e sopraposte

non fer mai drappi Tartari nè Turchi,

nè fur tai tele per Aragne imposte.¹⁹

(Inferno, XVII, 13–18)

The subject here is the color of Geryon’s skin. His back, chest, and sides are gaily colored with decorations consisting of little knots and shields. A more brilliant coloration, Dante explains, is not to be found among the carpets of either Turkish or Tatar weavers.

The textile brilliance of this comparison is blinding, and nothing could be more unexpected than the drapery-trade perspectives which are disclosed in it.

In its subject, Canto XVII of the Inferno, devoted to usury, is very close to commercial goods assortments and banking turnover. Usury, which made up for a deficiency in the banking system, where an insistent demand was already being felt, was the crying evil of that time, but it was also a necessity which facilitated the circulation of goods in the Mediterranean world. Usurers were vilified in the church and in literature, but they were still resorted to. Usury was practiced even by noble families—odd bankers whose base was farming and ownership of land—and this especially annoyed Dante.

The landscape of Canto XVII is composed of hot sands—that is, something related to Arabian caravan routes. Sitting on the sand are the most aristocratic usurers: the Gianfigliazzi, the Ubbriachi from Florence, the Scrovigni from Padua. Around the neck of each there hangs a little sack or amulet, or purse embroidered with the family arms on a colored background: one has an azure lion on a golden background, a second has a goose whiter than freshly churned butter against a blood-red background, and a third has a blue pig against a white ground.

Before embarking on Geryon and gliding off into the abyss, Dante inspects this strange exhibit of family crests. I call your attention to the fact that the bags of the usurers are given as samples of color. The energy of the color epithets and the way they are placed in the line muffle the heraldry. The colors are named with a sort of professional brusqueness. In other words, the colors are given at the stage when they are still located on the artist’s palette in his studio. And why should this be surprising? Dante knew his way around in painting, was the friend of Giotto, and closely followed the struggle of artistic schools and fashionable tendencies.

Credette Cimabue nella pintura²⁰

(Purgatorio, XI, 94)

Having looked their fill at the usurers, they take their seats on Geryon. Vergil puts his arm around Dante’s neck and says to the official dragon: “Descend in wide, flowing circles, and remember your new burden.”

The craving to fly tormented and exhausted the men of Dante’s time no less than alchemy. It was a hunger for cleaving space. Disoriented. Nothing visible. Ahead—only that Tatar back, the terrifying silk dressing gown of Geryon’s skin. One can judge the speed and direction only by the torrent of air in one’s face. The flying machine has not yet been invented, Leonardo’s designs do not yet exist, but the problem of gliding to a landing is already solved.

And finally, falconry breaks in. The maneuvers of Geryon as he slows the rate of descent are likened to the return of a falcon who has had no success and who after his vain flight is slow to return at the call of the falconer. Once having landed, he flies off in an offended way and perches at an aloof distance.

Let us now try to grasp all of Canto XVII as a whole, but from the point of view of the organic chemistry of the Dantean imagery, which has nothing to do with allegory. Instead of retelling the so-called contents, we shall look at this link in Dante’s work as a continuous transformation of the substratum of poetic material, which preserves its unity and strives to penetrate into its own interior.

As in all true poetry, Dante’s thinking in images is accomplished with the help of a characteristic of poetic material which I propose to call its transformability or convertibility. It is only by convention that the development of an image can be called development. Indeed, imagine to yourself an airplane (forgetting the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. In just the same way, this second flying machine, completely absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch a third. In order to make this suggestive and helpful comparison more precise, I will add that the assembly and launching of these technically unthinkable machines that are sent flying off in the midst of flight do not constitute a secondary or peripheral function of the plane that is in flight; they form a most essential attribute and part of the flight itself, and they contribute no less to its feasibility and safety than the proper functioning of the steering gear or the uninterrupted working of the engine.

It is of course only by greatly straining the meaning of “development” that one can apply that term to this series of projectiles that are built in flight and flit away one after the other for the sake of preserving the integrity of the movement itself.

The seventeenth canto of the Inferno is a brilliant confirmation of the transformability of poetic material in the above sense of the term. The figures of this transformability may be drawn more or less as follows: the little flourishes and shields on the varicolored Tatar skin of Geryon—silk, ornamented carpet fabrics, spread out on a shop-counter on the shore of the Mediterranean—maritime commerce, perspective of banking and piracy—usury—the return to Florence via the heraldic bags with samples of colors that had never before been in use—the craving for flight, suggested by the oriental ornamentation, which turns the material of the canto in the direction of the Arabian fairy tale with its device of the flying carpet—and, finally, the second return to Florence with the aid of the falcon, irreplaceable precisely on account of his being unnecessary.

Not satisfied with this truly miraculous demonstration of the transformability of poetic material, which leaves all the associative process of modem European poetry simply nowhere, and as if in mockery of his slow-witted reader, Dante, when everything has already been unloaded, used up, given away, brings Geryon down to earth and benevolently fits him out for new wanderings as the nock of an arrow sent flying from a bowstring.

V.

Dante’s drafts have of course not come down to us. There is no possibility of our working on the history of his text. But it does not follow from this, of course, that there were no rough copies full of erasures and blotted lines and that the text hatched full grown, like Leda’s brood from the egg or Pallas Athene from the brow of Zeus. But the unfortunate gap of six centuries, and also the quite forgivable fact of the nonextant original, have played us a dirty trick. For how many centuries now has Dante been talked and written of as if he had put down his thoughts directly on the finest legal parchment? Dante’s laboratory—with this we are not concerned. What has ignorant piety to do with that? Dante is discussed as if he had had the completed whole before his eyes even before he began to work and had busied himself with the technique of moulage—first casting in plaster, then in bronze. At the very best, he is handed a chisel and allowed to carve or, as they love to say, “sculpt.” Here they forget one small detail: the chisel very precisely removes all excess, and the sculptor’s draft leaves no material traces behind, something of which the public is very fond. The very fact that a sculptor’s work proceeds in stages corresponds to a series of draft versions.

Draft versions are never destroyed.

In poetry, in the plastic arts, and in art generally there are no readymade things.

We are hindered from understanding this by our habit of grammatical thinking—putting the concept “art” in the nominative case. We subordinate the process of creation itself to the purposeful prepositional case, and our thinking is something like a little manikin with a lead heart who, having wavered about in various directions as he should and having undergone various jolts as he went through the questionnaire of the declension—about what? about whom? by whom? and by what?—is at the end established in the Buddhist, schoolboy tranquillity of the nominative case. A finished thing, meanwhile, is just as subject to the oblique cases as to the nominative case. Furthermore, our whole doctrine of syntax is a very powerful survival of scholasticism, and when it is put into its proper subordinate position in philosophy, in the theory of cognition, then it is completely overcome by mathematics, which has its own independent, original syntax. In the study of art this syntactic scholasticism has the upper hand and hour by hour it causes the most colossal damage. In European poetry those who are furthest away from Dante’s method and, to put it bluntly, in polar opposition to him, are precisely the ones who are called Parnassians: namely, Heredia, Leconte de Lisle. Baudelaire is much closer to him. Still closer is Verlaine, and the closest of all French poets is Arthur Rimbaud. By his very nature Dante shakes the sense and violates the integrity of the image. The composition of his cantos resembles the schedule of the air transport network or the indefatigable circulation of carrier pigeons.

Thus the conversation of the draft version is a law of the energetics of the literary work. In order to arrive at the target one has to accept and take account of the wind blowing in a different direction. This is also the rule for tacking in a sailing vessel.

Let us remember that Dante Alighieri lived at the time when navigation by sail was flourishing and the art of sailing was highly developed. Let us not disdain to keep in mind the fact that he contemplated models of tacking and maneuvering. Dante had the highest respect for the art of navigation of his day. He was a student of this supremely evasive and plastic sport, known to man from the earliest times.

Here I should like to call attention to one of the remarkable peculiarities of Dante’s psyche: his dread of direct answers, occasioned perhaps by the political situation in that most dangerous, intricate, and criminal century.

While the whole Divina Commedia, as we have already shown, is a series of questions and answers, every direct utterance of Dante’s is literally squeezed out of him through the midwifery of Vergil or with the help of the nursemaid Beatrice, and so on.

Inferno, Canto XVI. The conversation is carried on with that impassioned haste known only to prisons: to make use at all costs of the tiny moment of meeting. The questions are put by a trio of eminent Florentines. About what? About Florence, of course. Their knees tremble with impatience and they dread to hear the truth. The answer, lapidary and cruel, comes in the form of a cry. At this, even though he has made a desperate effort to control himself, even Dante’s chin quivers and he tosses back his head, and all this is conveyed in nothing more nor less than the author’s stage direction:

Così gridai colla faccia levata.²¹

(Inferno, XVI, 76)

Dante is sometimes able to describe a phenomenon in such a way that there is absolutely nothing left of it. To do this he makes use of a device which I should like to call the Heraclitean metaphor, with which he so strongly emphasizes the fluidity of the phenomenon and with such a flourish cancels it altogether that direct contemplation, once the metaphor has done its work, is really left with nothing to live on. Several times already I have had occasion to remark that the metaphoric devices of Dante surpass our notions of composition, since our critical doctrines, fettered by the syntactic mode of thinking, are powerless before him.

When the peasant, climbing to the top of a hill

At that time of the year when the being who lights the world

Least conceals his face from us

And the watery swarm of midges yields its place to the mosquitos,

See the dancing fireflies in the hollow,

The same one where he, perhaps, labored as a reaper and as a plowman;

So with little tongues of flame gleamed the eighth circle,

All of which could be surveyed from the height where I had climbed;

And as with that one who revenged himself with the help of bears,

Seeing the departing chariot of Elijah,

When the team of horses tore headlong into the sky,

Looked with all his might but saw nothing

Save one single flame

Fading away like a little cloud rising into the sky

So the tongue-like flame filled the crevices of the graves

Stealing away the property of the graves, their profit,

And wrapped in every flame there lay hidden a sinner.²²

(Inferno, XXVI, 25–42)

If you do not feel dizzy from this miraculous ascent, worthy of the organ of Sebastian Bach, then try to show what is here the second and what the first member of the comparison. What is compared with what? Where is the primary and where is the secondary, clarifying element?

In a number of Dante’s cantos we encounter impressionistic prolegomena. The purpose of these is to present in the form of a scattered alphabet, in the form of a leaping, glistening, splashed alphabet the very same elements which, according to the rule of the transformability of lyric poetry, are later to be united into the formulas of sense.

Thus, in this introduction we see the infinitely light, brilliant Heraclitean dance of the swarm of summer midges, which prepares us to hear the solemn and tragic speech of Odysseus.

Canto XXVI of the Inferno is the most saillike of all the compositions of Dante, the most given to tacking, the best at maneuvering. For resourcefulness, evasiveness, Florentine diplomacy, and a kind of Greek wiliness, it has no equals.

We can clearly discern two basic parts of the canto: the luminous, impressionistic preparatory passage and the balanced, dramatic account by Odysseus of his last voyage, how he sailed out over the deeps of the Atlantic and perished terribly under the stars of another hemisphere.

In the free flowing of its thought this canto is very close to improvisation. But if you listen attentively, it will become clear that the poet is inwardly improvising in his beloved, cherished Greek, for which nothing more than the phonetics, the fabric, is furnished by his native Italian idiom.

If you give a child a thousand rubles and then leave him the choice of keeping either the small change or the notes, he will of course choose the coins, and by this means you can take the entire amount away from him by giving him a ten-kopeck piece. Precisely the same thing has befallen European Dante criticism, which has nailed him to the landscape of Hell as depicted in the etchings. No one has yet approached Dante with a geologist’s hammer, in order to ascertain the crystalline structure of his rock, in order to study the particles of other minerals in it, to study its smoky color, its garish patterning, to judge it as a mineral crystal which has been subjected to the most varied series of accidents.

Our criticism says: distance the phenomenon from me and I can handle it, I can cope with it. For our criticism, what is “a longish way off” (Lomonosov’s²³ expression) and what is knowable are practically the same thing.

In Dante the images depart and say farewell. It is difficult to make one’s way down through the breaks of his verse with its multitude of leave-takings.

We have scarcely managed to free ourselves from that Tuscan peasant admiring the phosphorescent dance of the fireflies nor rid our eyes of the impressionistic dazzling from Elijah’s chariot as it fades away into a little cloud, before the pyre of Eteocles has already been mentioned, Penelope named, the Trojan horse has slipped past, Demosthenes has lent Odysseus his republican eloquence, and the ship of old age is already being fitted out. Old age, in Dante’s understanding of that term, is first of all breadth of mental horizon, heightened capacity, the globe itself as a frame of reference. In the Odyssean canto the world is already round.

It is a canto which deals with the composition of the human blood, which contains within itself the salt of the ocean. The beginning of the voyage is in the system of blood vessels. Blood is planetary, solar, salty . . .

With every fiber of his being Odysseus despises sclerosis just as Farinata despised Hell.

Surely we are not born for security like a cow, it cannot be that we will shrink from devoting the last handful of our fading senses to the bold venture of sailing westward, beyond the Gates of Hercules, there where the world, unpeopled, goes on?²⁴

The metabolism of the planet itself takes place in the blood, and the Atlantic absorbs Odysseus and sucks down his wooden ship.

It is unthinkable to read the cantos of Dante without aiming them in the direction of the present day. They were made for that. They are missiles for capturing the future. They demand commentary in the futurum.

Time, for Dante, is the content of history, understood as a single, synchronic act. And conversely: the content is the joint containing of time with one’s associates, competitors, codiscoverers.

Dante is an antimodernist. His contemporaneity is inexhaustible, measureless, and unending.

That is why the speech of Odysseus, bulging like the lens of a magnifying glass, may be applied to the war of the Greeks and the Persians as well as to the discovery of America by Columbus, the bold experiments of Paracelsus, and the world empire of Charles V.

Canto XXVI, devoted to Odysseus and Diomed, is a splendid introduction to the anatomy of Dante’s eye, so naturally adjusted for one thing only: the revelation of the structure of the future. Dante had the visual accommodation of birds of prey, unsuited to focusing at short range: too large was the field in which he hunted.

To Dante himself may be applied the words of the proud Farinata:

“Noi veggiam, come quei c’ha mala luce.”²⁵

(Inferno, X, 100)

We, that is, the souls of sinners, are capable of seeing and distinguishing only the distant future, for which we have a special gift. The moment the doors into the future are slammed in front of us, we become totally blind. In this regard we are like one who struggles with the twilight and, able to make out distant objects, cannot discern what is near him.

The dance basis is strongly expressed in the rhythms of the terza rima of Canto XXVI. One is struck here by the high lightheartedness of the rhythm. The feet are arranged in the movement of the waltz:

E se già fosse, non sarìa per tempo.

così foss’ ei, da che pur esser dee!

chè più mi graverà, com’più m’attempo.²⁶

(Inferno, XXVI, 10–12)

For us as foreigners it is difficult to penetrate to the ultimate secret of an alien poetry. It is not for us to judge; the last word cannot be ours. But in my opinion it is precisely here that we find that captivating pliability of the Italian language, which only the ear of a native Italian can fully grasp. Here I am quoting Marina Tsvetaeva, who once mentioned “the pliability of Russian speech.”²⁷

If you pay close attention to the mouth movements of a person who recites poetry distinctly, it will seem as if he were giving a lesson to deaf-mutes; that is, he works as if he were counting on being understood even without the sound, articulating each vowel with a pedagogic obviousness. And it is enough to see how Canto XXVI sounds in order to hear it. I should say that in this canto the vowels are agitated, throbbing.

The waltz is essentially a wavy dance. Nothing even faintly resembling it was possible in Hellenic or Egyptian culture, but it could conceivably be found in Chinese culture, and it is absolutely normal in modern European culture. (For this juxtaposition I am indebted to Spengler.) At the basis of the waltz there lies the purely European passion for periodic wavering movements, that same intent listening to the wave which runs through all our theory of light and sound, all our theory of matter, all our poetry and all our music.

VI.

Envy, O Poetry, the science of crystallography, bite your nails in wrath and impotence: for it is recognized that the mathematical combinations needed to describe the process of crystal formation are not derivable from three-dimensional space. You, however, are denied that elementary respect enjoyed by any piece of mineral crystal.

Dante and his contemporaries did not know geological time. The paleontological clock was unknown to them: the clock of coal, the clock of infusorial limestone, granular, gritty, stratified clocks. They whirled around in the calendar, dividing the twenty-four hours into quarters. The Middle Ages, however, did not fit into the Ptolemaic system: they took refuge there.

To biblical genetics they added the physics of Aristotle. The two poorly matched things were reluctant to knit together. The huge explosive power of the Book of Genesis (the idea of spontaneous generation) assailed the tiny little island of the Sorbonne from all quarters, and it would be no mistake to say that Dante’s people lived in an antiquity completely awash in the present, like the earthly globe embraced by Tiutchev’s ocean. It is difficult for us to imagine how it could be that things which were known to absolutely everyone—cribbed schoolboy’s notes, things which formed part of the required program of elementary education—how it could be that the entire biblical cosmogony with its Christian supplements could have been read by the educated men of that time quite literally as if it were today’s newspaper, a veritable special edition.

And if we approach Dante from this point of view, it will appear that he saw in tradition not so much its dazzling sacred aspects as an object which, with the aid of zealous reporting and passionate experimentation, could be used to good effect.

In Canto XXVI of the Paradiso Dante goes so far as to have a personal conversation with Adam—an actual interview. He is assisted by Saint John the Divine, author of the Apocalypse.

I maintain that every element of the modern method of conducting experiments is present in Dante’s approach to tradition. These are: the deliberate creation of special conditions for the experiment, the use of instruments of unimpeachable accuracy, the demand that the result be verifiable and demonstrable.

The situation in Canto XXVI of the Paradiso can be described as a solemn examination in the surrounding of a concert and optical instruments. Music and optics constitute the heart of the matter.

The fundamental antinomy of Dante’s “experiment” consists of the fact that he rushes back and forth between example and experiment. Example is drawn out of the patriarchal bag of ancient consciousness only to be returned to it as soon as it is no longer required. Experiment, pulling one or another needed fact out of the purse of experience, does not return them as the promissory note requires, but puts them into circulation.

The parables of the Gospel and the little scholastic examples of the science taught in school—these are cereals eaten and done away with. But the experimental sciences, taking facts out of coherent reality, make of them a kind of seed-fund which is reserved, inviolable, and which constitutes, as it were, the property of a time that is unborn but must come. The position of the experimenter as regards factology is, insofar as he strives to be joined with it in truth, unstable by its very nature, agitated and awry. It resembles the figure of the waltz that has already been mentioned, for, after every halfturn on the extended toe of the shoe, the heels of the dancer may be brought together, but they are always brought together on a new square of the parquet and in a way that is different in kind. The dizzying Mephisto Waltz of experimentation was conceived in the trecento or perhaps even long before that, and it was conceived in the process of poetic formation, the undulating proceduralness, the transformability of the poetic matter—the most precise of all matter, the most prophetic and indomitable.

Because of the theological terminology, the scholastic grammar, and our ignorance of the allegory, we overlooked the experimental dances of Dante’s Comedy, to suit the ways of a dead scholarship, we made Dante look more presentable, while his theology was a vessel of dynamics.

A sensitive palm touching the neck of a heated pitcher identifies its form because it is warm. Warmth in this case has priority over form and it is that which fulfills the sculptural function. In a cold state, forcibly divorced from its incandescence, Dante’s Comedy is suitable only for analysis with mechanistic tweezers, but not for reading, not for performing.

Come quando dall’acqua o dallo specchio

salta lo raggio all’opposita parte,

salendo su per lo modo parecchio

a quel che scende, e tanto si diparte

dal cader della pietra in igual tratta,

sì come mostra esperienza ed arte.

(Purgatorio, XV, 16–21)

“As a ray of sunlight that strikes the surface of water or a mirror reflects back at an angle corresponding to the angle of its fall, which differentiates it from a falling stone that bounces back perpendicularly from the ground—which is confirmed by experience and by art.”

At the moment when the necessity of an empirical verification of the legend’s data first dawned on Dante, when he first developed a taste for what I propose to call a sacred—in inverted commas—induction, the conception of the Divina Commedia had already been formed and its success intrinsically secured.

The poem in its most densely foliated aspect is oriented toward authority, it is most resonantly rustling, most concertante just when it is caressed by dogma, by canon, by the firm chrysostomatic word. But the whole trouble is that in authority—or, to put it more precisely, in authoritarianism—we see only insurance against error, and we fail to perceive anything in that grandiose music of trustfulness, of trust, in the nuances—delicate as an alpine rainbow—of probability and conviction, which Dante has at his command.

Col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma—²⁸

(Purgatorio, XXX, 44)

thus does Dante fawn upon authority.

Many cantos of the Paradiso are encased in the hard capsule of an examination. In some passages one can even hear clearly the examiner’s hoarse bass and the candidate’s quavering voice. The embedding-in of a grotesque and a genre picture (the examination of a baccalaureate candidate) constitutes a necessary attribute of the elevated and concertante compositions of the third part. And the first sample of it is given as early as in the second canto of the Paradiso (in Beatrice’s discussion of the origin of the moon’s dark patches).

To grasp the very nature of Dante’s intercourse with authoritative sources, that is, the form and methods of his cognition, it is necessary to take into account both the concertolike setting of the Comedy’s scholastic cantos and the conditioning of the very organs of perception. Let alone the really remarkably staged experiment with the candle and the three mirrors, where it is demonstrated that the return path of light has as its source the refraction of the ray, I cannot fail to note the conditioning of vision for the apperception of new things.

This conditioning is developed into a genuine dissection: Dante divines the layered structure of the retina: di gonna in gonna . . .²⁹

Music here is not a guest invited in from without, but a participant in the argument; or, to be more precise, it facilitates the exchange of opinions, coordinates it, encourages syllogistic digestion, extends premises, and compresses conclusions. Its role is both absorptive and resolvent—its role is a purely chemical one.

When you plunge into Dante and read with complete conviction, when you transplant yourself entirely onto the poetic material’s field of action, when you join in and harmonize your own intonations with the echoings of the orchestral and thematic groups which arise incessantly on the pocked and shaken semantic surface, when you begin to perceive through the smoky-crystalline matter of sound-form the glimmerings embedded within, that is, the extra sounds and thoughts conferred on it not by a poetic but by a geologic intelligence, then the purely vocal, intonational and rhythmic work gives way to a more powerful coordinating activity—to conducting—and, assuming control over the area of polyphony and jutting out from the voice like a more complex mathematical dimension out of a three-dimensional state, the hegemony of the conductor’s baton is established.

Which has primacy, listening or conducting? If conducting is only a prodding of music which anyway rolls on of its own accord, what use is it, provided the orchestra is good in and of itself and displays an irreproachable ensemble? An orchestra without a conductor, that cherished dream, belongs to the same category of “ideals” of pan-European banality as the universal Esperanto language that symbolizes the linguistic ensemble of all mankind.

Let us consider how the conductor’s baton appeared and we shall see that it arrived neither too late nor too soon, but exactly when it should have, as a new, original mode of activity, creating in the air its own new domain.

Let us hear about the birth or, rather, the hatching of the modern conductor’s baton from the orchestra.

1732: Time (tempo or beat)—once beaten with the foot, now usually with the hand. Conductor—conducteur—der Anführer (Walther, Musical Dictionary).

1753: Baron Grimm calls the conductor of the Paris Opera a woodchopper because of his habit of beating time aloud, a habit which has reigned in French opera since the day of Lully (Schünemann, Geschichte des Dirigierens, 1913).

1810: At the Frankenhausen music festival, Spohr conducted with a baton rolled up out of paper, without any noise, without any grimacing (Spohr, Selbstbiographie).*

The birth of the conductor’s baton was considerably delayed—the chemically reactive orchestra had preceded it. The usefulness of a conductor’s baton is far from being its whole justification. The chemical nature of orchestral sonorities finds its expression in the dance of the conductor, who has his back to the audience. And this baton is far from being an external, administrative accessory or a sui generis symphonic police which could be abolished in an ideal state. It is nothing other than a dancing chemical formula that integrates reactions comprehensible to the ear. I also ask that it not be regarded a supplementary, mute instrument invented for greater clarity and to provide additional pleasure. In a sense, this invulnerable baton contains within itself qualitatively all the elements of the orchestra. But how does it contain them? It is not redolent of them, nor could it be. It is not redolent in the same way the chemical symbol of chlorine is not redolent of chlorine or the formula of ammonia or ammonium chloride is not redolent of ammonium chloride or of ammonia.

Dante was chosen as the theme of this talk not because I intended to concentrate on him as a means of learning from the classics and to seat him together with Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy at a kind of table d’hôte in Kirpotin’s manner, but because he is the greatest, the incontestible proprietor of convertible and currently circulating poetic material, the earliest and at the same time most powerful chemical conductor of a poetic composition that exists only in swells and waves, in upsurges and maneuverings.

VII.

Dante’s cantos are scores for a special chemical orchestra in which, for the external ear, the most easily discernible comparisons are those identical with the outbursts, and the solo roles, that is, the arias and ariosos, are varieties of self-confessions, self-flagellations or autobiographies, sometimes brief and compact, sometimes lapidary, like a tombstone inscription; sometimes extended like a testimonial from a medieval university; sometimes powerfully developed, articulated, and reaching a dramatic operatic maturity, such as, for example, Francesca’s famous cantilena.

Canto XXXIII of the Inferno, which contains Ugolino’s account of how he and his three sons were starved to death in a prison tower by Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa, is encased in a cello timbre, dense and heavy, like rancid, poisoned honey.

The density of the cello timbre is best suited to convey a sense of expectation and of agonizing impatience. There exists no power on earth which could hasten the movement of honey flowing from a tilted glass jar. Therefore the cello could come about and be given form only when the European analysis of time had made sufficient progress, when the thoughtless sundial had been transcended and the one-time observer of the shade stick moving across Roman numerals on the sand had been transformed into a passionate participant of a differential torture and into a martyr of the infinitesimal. A cello delays sound, hurry how it may. Ask Brahms—he knows it. Ask Dante—he has heard it.

Ugolino’s narrative is one of Dante’s most significant arias, one of those instances when a man, who has been given a unique, never-to-be-repeated chance to be heard out, is completely transformed under the eyes of his audience, plays like a virtuoso on his unhappiness, draws out of his misfortune a timbre never before heard and unknown even to himself.

It must be remembered that timbre is a structural principle, like the alkalinity or the acidity of this or that chemical compound. The retort is not the space in which the chemical reaction occurs. This would be much too simple.

The cello voice of Ugolino, overgrown with a prison beard, starving and confined with his three fledgling sons, one of whom bears a sharp, violin name, Anselmuccio, pours out of the narrow slit:

Breve pertugio dentro dalla muda,³⁰

(Inferno, XXXIII, 22)

—it ripens in the box of the prison resonator—here the cello’s fraternization with the prison is no joking matter.

Il carcere—the prison supplements and acoustically conditions the verbalizing work of the autobiographic cello.

Prison has played an outstanding role in the subconscious of the Italian people. Nightmares of prison were imbibed with the mother’s milk. The trecento threw men into prison with an amazing unconcern. Common prisons were open to the public, like churches or our museums. The interest in prisons was exploited by the jailers themselves as well as by the fear-instilling apparatus of the small states. Between the prison and the free world outside there existed a lively intercourse, resembling diffusion—the process of osmosis.

Hence the story of Ugolino is one of the migratory anecdotes, a bugaboo with which mothers frighten children—one of those amusing horrors which are pleasurably mumbled through the night as a remedy for insomnia, as one tosses and turns in bed. By way of ballad it is a well-known type, like Bürger’s Lenore, the Lorelei, or the Erlkönig.

In such a guise, it corresponds to the glass retort, so accessible and comprehensible irrespective of the quality of the chemical process taking place within.

But the largo for cello, proffered by Dante on behalf of Ugolino, has its own space and its own structure, which are revealed in the timbre. The ballad-retort, along with the general knowledge of it, is smashed to bits. Chemistry takes over with its architectonic drama.

“Io non so chi tu se’, nè per che modo

venuto se ‘qua giù; ma fiorentino

mi sembri veramente quand’ io t’odo.

Tu dei saper ch’i ’fui conte Ugolino.”

(Inferno, XXXIII, 10–13)

“I do not know who you are or how you came down here, but by your speech you seem to me a real Florentine. You ought to know that I was Ugolino.”

“You ought to know”—tu dei saper—the first stroke on the cello, the first out-thrusting of the theme.

The second stroke: “If you do not burst out weeping now, I know not what can wring tears from your eyes.”

Here are opened up the truly limitless horizons of compassion. What is more, the compassionate one is invited in as a new partner, and already his vibrating voice is heard from the distant future.

However, it wasn’t by chance I mentioned the ballad: Ugolino’s narrative is precisely a ballad in its chemical make-up, even though it is confined in a prison retort. Present are the following elements of the ballad: the conversation between father and sons (recall the Erlkönig), the pursuit of a swiftness that slips away, that is—continuing the parallel with the Erlkönig—in one instance a mad dash with his trembling son in arms, in the other, the situation in prison, that is, the counting of trickling tempi, which bring the father and his three sons closer to the threshold of death by starvation, mathematically imaginable, but to the father’s mind unthinkable. It is the same rhythm of the race in disguise—in the dampened wailing of the cello, which is struggling with all its might to break out of the situation and which presents an auditory picture of a still more terrible, slow pursuit, decomposing the swiftness into the most delicate fibers.

Finally, in just the way the cello eccentrically converses with itself and wrings from itself questions and answers, Ugolino’s story is interpolated with his sons’ touching and helpless interjections:

. . . ed Anselmuccio mio

disse: “Tu guardi sì, padre: che hai?”

(Inferno, XXXIII, 50–51)

. . . and my Anselmuccio said:

“Father, why do you look so? What is the matter?”

That is, the timbre is not at all sought out and forced onto the story as onto a shoemaker’s last, but rather the dramatic structure of the narrative arises out of the timbre.

VIII.

It seems to me that Dante has carefully studied all speech defects, that he has listened to stutterers and lispers, to whiners and mispronouncers, and that he has learned a good deal from them.

So I should like to speak about the auditory coloring in Canto XXXII of the Inferno.

A peculiar labial music: abbo, gabbo, babbo, Tebe, plebe, zebe, converrebbe. As if a wet-nurse were taking part in the creation of the phonetics. Lips now protrude like a child’s, now are distended into a proboscis.

The labials form a kind of “enciphered bass”—basso continuo, that is, the chordal basis of harmonization. They are joined by smacking, sucking, whistling dentals as well as by clicking and hissing ones.

At random, I pull out a single strand: cagnazzi, riprezzo, quazzi, mezzo, gravezza . . .

Not for a second do the tweakings, the smacking, and the labial explosions cease.

The canto is sprinkled with a vocabulary that I would describe as an assortment of seminary ragging or of the blood thirsty taunting-rhymes of schoolboys: cuticagna (“nape”); dischiomi (“pull out hair, locks of hair”); sonar con le mascella (“to yell,” “to bark”); pigliare a gabbo (“to brag,” “to loaf”). With the aid of this deliberately shameless, intentionally infantile orchestration, Dante forms the crystals for the auditory landscape of Giudecca (Judas’ circle) and Caina (Cain’s circle).

Non fece al corso suo sì grosso velo

d’inverno la Danoia in Osteric,

nè Tanaì là sotto il freddo cielo,

com’era quivi: chè, se Tambernic

vi fosse su caduto, o Pietrapana,

non avrìa pur dall’orlo fatto cric.³¹

(Inferno, XXXII, 25–30)

All of a sudden, for no reason at all, a Slavonic duck sets up a squawk: Osteric, Tambernic, cric (an onomatopoeic little word—“crackle”).

Ice produces a phonetic explosion and it crumbles into the names of the Danube and the Don. The cold-producing draught of Canto XXXII resulted from the entry of physics into a moral idea: from betrayal to frozen conscience to the ataraxy of shame to absolute zero.

In tempo, Canto XXXII is a modern scherzo. But what kind? An anatomic scherzo that uses the onomatopoeic infantile material to study the degeneration of speech.

A new link is revealed here: between feeding and speaking. Shameful speaking can be turned back, is turned back to champing, biting, gurgling, to chewing.

The articulation of feeding and speaking almost coincide. A strange, locust phonetics is created.

Mettendo i denti in nota di cicogna—

(Inferno, XXXII, 36)

—using their teeth like grasshoppers’ mandibles.

Finally, it is necessary to note that Canto XXXII is overflowing with anatomical lustfulness.

“That same famous blow which simultaneously destroyed the wholeness of the body and injured its shadow.” There, too, with a purely surgical pleasure: “He whose jugular vertebra was chopped through by Florence.”

Di cui segò Fiorenza la gorgiera.

(Inferno, XXXII, 120)

And further: “Like a hungry man who greedily falls on bread, one of them fell on another and sank his teeth into the place where the neck and the nape join.”

Là’ve ‘l cervel s’aggiugne colla nuca.

(Inferno, XXXII, 129)

All this jigs like a Dürer skeleton on hinges and takes us to German anatomy.

After all, a murderer is a bit of an anatomist.

After all, for the Middle Ages an executioner was a little like a scientific researcher.

The art of war and the trade of execution are a bit like a dissection amphitheater’s antechamber.

IX.

The Inferno is a pawnshop where all the countries and towns known to Dante lie unredeemed. There is a framework for the very powerful structure of the infernal circles. It cannot be conveyed in the form of a funnel. It cannot be represented on a relief map. Hell is suspended on the iron wires of urban egoism.

It is wrong to conceive of the Inferno as something volumetric, as some combination of enormous circuses, deserts with burning sands, stinking swamps, Babylonian capitals and mosques heated to red-hot incandescence. Hell contains nothing, and it has no volume, the way an epidemic, an infectious disease, or the plague has none; it is like any contagion, which spreads even though it is not spatial.

Love of the city, passion for the city, hatred of the city—these are the material of the Inferno. The circles of hell are nothing but the Saturn rings of exile. For the exile his sole, forbidden, and for-ever-lost city is scattered everywhere—he is surrounded by it. I should say that the Inferno is surrounded by Florence. The Italian cities in Dante—Pisa, Florence, Lucca, Verona—these dear civic planets—are stretched out into monstrous circles, extended into belts, restored to a nebulous, gaseous state.

The antilandscape character of the Inferno constitutes as it were the condition of its graphic quality.

Imagine that grandiose experiment of Foucault’s carried out not with a single pendulum, but with a multitude of crisscrossing pendulums. Here space exists only insofar as it is a receptacle for amplitudes. To make specific Dante’s images is as unthinkable as to enumerate the names of those who took part in the migration of peoples.

As the Flemish between Wissant and Bruges, fearing the sea’s flood tide, erect dikes to force back the sea, and as the Paduans construct embankments along the quays of the Brenta out of concern for the safety of their cities and bays, and in expectation of spring which melts the snows of the Chiarentana (a part of the snowclad Alps)—such were these dams, albeit not so monumental, whoever the engineer who built them.

(Inferno, XV, 4–12)

The moons of the polynomial pendulum swing here from Bruges to Padua, teach a course in European geography, give a lecture on the art of engineering, on the techniques of city safety, on the organization of public works, and on the significance of the alpine watershed for national interests.

Crawling as we do on our knees before a line of verse, what have we retained from these riches? Where are its godfathers, where its zealots? What are we to do about our poetry, which lags so shamefully behind science?

It is frightening to think that the blinding explosions of present-day physics and kinetics were put to use six hundred years before their thunder sounded: there are no words to brand the shameful, barbaric indifference to them on the part of the sad compositors of readymade meaning.

Poetic speech creates its tools on the move and in the same breath does away with them.

Of all our arts only painting, and at that only modern French painting, still has an ear for Dante. This is the painting which elongates the bodies of the horses approaching the finish line at the race track.

Whenever a metaphor raises the vegetable colors of existence to an articulate impulse, I remember Dante with gratitude.

We describe just what cannot be described, that is, nature’s text brought to a standstill; and we have forgotten how to describe the only thing which by its structure yields to poetic representation, namely the impulses, intentions, and amplitudes of oscillation.

Ptolemy has returned by the back door! . . . Giordano Bruno was burned in vain!

While still in the womb, our creations are known to each and every one, but Dante’s polynomial, multi-sailed and kinetically incandescent comparisons still retain the charm of that which has been told to no one.

Amazing is his “reflexology of speech”—the science, still not well established, of the spontaneous psycho-physiological influence of the word on the discussants, the audience, and the speaker himself, and also on the means by which he conveys the impulse to speech, that is, signals by light a sudden desire to express himself.

Here he approaches closest of all the wave theory of sound and light, he establishes their relationship.

As a beast, covered with a cloth, is nervous and shudders, and only the moving folds of the material betray its dissatisfaction, thus did the first created soul [Adam’s] express to me through the covering [of light] how pleasant and joyous it was to answer my question.

(Paradiso, XXVI, 97–102)

In the third part of the Comedy (the Paradiso) I see a genuine kinetic ballet. Here we have all possible kinds of luminous figures and dances, all the way up to the clacking of heels at a wedding feast.

Before me four torches burned and the nearest suddenly came to life and became as rosy as if Jupiter and Mars were suddenly to become birds and exchange their plumage.

(Paradiso, XXVII, 10–15)

It’s odd, isn’t it: a man, who intends to speak, arms himself with a taut bow, lays up a supply of bearded arrows, prepares mirrors and convex lenses, and squints at the stars like a tailor threading a needle . . .

I have devised this composite quotation, which is drawn from various passages in the Comedy, to bring into more emphatic relief the speech-preparatory strategies of Dante’s poetry.

The preparation of speech is even more his sphere than the articulation, that is, than speech itself.

Recall the marvelous supplication which Vergil addresses to the wiliest of Greeks.

It is all arippling with the softness of the Italian diphthongs.

Those curly, ingratiating and sputtering flame-tongues of unprotected lamps, muttering about the oiled wick . . .

O voi, che siete due dentro ad un foco,

s’io meritai di voi mentre ch’io vissi,

s’io meritai di voi assai o poco.³²

(Inferno, XXVI, 79–81)

Dante determines the origin, fate and character of a man by his voice, just as medical science of his time made diagnoses by the color of urine.

X.

He is brimming over with a sense of ineffable gratitude toward the copious richness which is falling into his hands. He has a lot to do: space must be prepared for the influx, the cataract must be removed from rigid vision, care must be taken that the abundance of out-pouring poetic material does not trickle through his fingers, that it does not disappear into an empty sieve.

Tutti dicean: “Benedictus qui venis,”

e fior gittando di sopra e dintorno,

“Manibus o date lilia plenis.”³³

(Purgatorio, XXX, 19–21)

The secret of his scope is that not a single word of his own is introduced. He is set in motion by everything except fabrication, except inventiveness. Dante and fantasy—why this is incompatible! For shame, French romantics, you miserable incroyables in red vests, slanderers of Alighieri! What fantasy is there in him? He writes to dictation, he is a copyist, a translator. He is bent double in the posture of a scribe who squints in fright at the illuminated original lent him from the prior’s library.

I think I forgot to say that a hypnotist’s seance was a sort of precondition to the Comedy. This is true, but perhaps overstated. If one takes this amazing work from the viewpoint of written language, from the viewpoint of the independent art of writing, which in 1300 enjoyed equal rights with painting and music and was among the most venerated professions, then to all the earlier suggested analogies a new one can be added—writing down dictation, copying, transcribing.

Sometimes, very seldom, he shows us his writing tools: A pen is called penna, that is, it participates in a bird’s flight; ink is inchiostro, that is, belonging to a cloister; lines of verse are also called inchiostri, or are designated by the Latin scholastic versi, or, still more modestly, carte, that is, an amazing substitution, pages instead of lines of verse.

And when it is written down and ready, there is still no full stop, for it must be taken somewhere, it must be shown to someone to be checked and praised.

To say “copying” is not enough—rather it is calligraphy at the most terrible and impatient dictation. The dictator, the taskmaster, is far more important than the so-called poet.

. . . I will labor a little more, and then I must show my notebook, drenched with the tears of a bearded schoolboy, to a most strict Beatrice, who radiates not only glory but literacy too.

Long before Arthur Rimbaud’s alphabet of colors, Dante conjoined color with the full vocalization of articulate speech. But he is a dyer, a textile worker. His ABC is an alphabet of fluttering fabrics tinted with colored powders, with vegetable dyes.

Sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva

donna m’apparve, sotto verde manto,

vestita di color di flamma viva.³⁴

(Purgatorio, XXX, 31–33)

His impulses toward colors can be more readily called textile impulses than alphabetic ones. Color for him is displayed only in the fabric. For Dante the highest concentration of material nature, as a substance determined by its coloration, is in textiles. And weaving is the occupation closest to qualitativeness, to quality.

Now I shall attempt to describe one of the innumerable conductorial flights of Dante’s baton. We shall take this flight as it is, embedded in the actual setting of precious and instantaneous labor.

Let us begin with the writing. The pen draws calligraphic letters, it traces out proper and common nouns. A pen is a small piece of bird’s flesh. Of course Dante, who never forgets the origin of things, remembers this. His technique of writing in broad strokes and curves grows into the figured flight of flocks of birds.

E come augelli surti di riviera,

quasi congratulando a lor pasture,

fanno di sè or tonda or altra schiera,

si dentro ai lumi sante creature

volitando cantavano, e faciensi

or D, or I, or L, in sue figure.³⁵

(Paradiso, XVIII, 73–78)

Just as the letters under the hand of the scribe, who is obedient to the one who dictates and stands outside literature, as a finished product, are lured to the decoy of meaning, as to an inviting forage, so exactly do birds, magnetized by green grass—now separately, now together—peck at what they find, now forming a circle, now stretching out into a line.

Writing and speech are incommensurate. Letters correspond to intervals. Old Italian grammar—just as our Russian one—is always that same fluttering flock of birds, that same motley Tuscan schiera, that is, the Florentine mob, which changes laws like gloves, which forgets by evening the decrees promulgated that same morning for the public welfare.

There is no syntax: there is a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of worms, a longing for an unpromulgated law, a longing for Florence.

XI.

Let us turn again to the question of Dantean coloring.

The interior of a mountain crystal, Aladdin’s expanse concealed within it, the lanternlike, lamplike, the candelabralike suspension of the piscine rooms implicit within it—this is the best of keys to a comprehension of the Comedy’s coloring.

A mineralogical collection is a most excellent organic commentary to Dante.

I permit myself a little autobiographical confession. Black Sea pebbles, tossed up by the surf, were of great help to me when the conception of this talk was ripening. I consulted frankly with the chalcedony, the cornelian, crystallized gypsum, spar, quartz, etc. I understood then that a stone is a kind of diary of the weather, a meteorological concentrate as it were. A stone is nothing but weather excluded from atmospheric space and put away in functional space. In order to understand this, it is necessary to imagine that all geological changes and displacements can be resolved completely into elements of the weather. In this sense, meteorology is more basic than mineralogy: it encompasses it, washes over it, it ages and gives meaning to it.

The delightful pages which Novalis³⁶ devotes to miners and mining make specific the interconnection of stone and culture and, by causing culture to grow like a rock formation, illumine it out of the stone-weather.

A stone is an impressionistic diary of weather, accumulated by millions of years of disasters, but it is not only the past, it is also the future: there is periodicity in it. It is Aladdin’s lamp penetrating into the geologic murk of future times.

In combining the uncombinable, Dante altered the structure of time or, perhaps, the other way around: he was forced to resort to a glossolalia of facts, to a synchronism of events, names, and traditions separated by centuries, precisely because he heard the overtones of time.

The method chosen by Dante is one of anachronism, and Homer, who appears with a sword at his side, in company with Vergil, Horace, and Lucan, from the dim shadow of the pleasant Orphic choirs, where the four together while away a tearless eternity in literary discussion, is its best expression.

Evidences of the standing-still of time in Dante are not only the round astronomical bodies, but absolutely all things and all persons’ characters. Anything automatic is alien to him. He is disdainful of causality: such prophecies are fit for bedding down swine.

Faccian le bestie fiesolane strame

di lor medesme, e non tocchin la pianta,

s’alcuna surge ancor nel lor letame.³⁷

(Inferno, XV, 73–75)

If I were asked bluntly, “What is a Dantean metaphor?” I would answer, “I don’t know,” for a metaphor can be defined only metaphorically—and this can be substantiated scientifically. But it seems to me that Dante’s metaphor designates the standing-still of time. Its root is not in the little word how, but in the word when. His quando sounds like come. Ovid’s rumbling is closer to him than the French eloquence of Vergil.

Again and again I turn to the reader and ask him to “imagine” something, that is, I resort to analogy, which has a single goal: to fill up the insufficiency of our system of definition.

So, imagine that the patriarch Abraham and King David, and all of Israel, including Isaac, Jacob, and all their kinsmen, and Rachel, for whom Jacob endured so much, have entered into a singing and roaring organ, as into a house with the door ajar, and have disappeared within.

And our forefather Adam with his son Abel, and old Noah, and Moses the giver and obeyer of the law had entered into it even earlier.

Trasseci l’ombra del primo parente,

d’Abèl suo figlio, e quella di Noè,

di Moisè legista e obediente;

Abraàm patriarca, e Davìd re,

Israèl con lo padre, e co’ suoi nati,

e con Rachele, per cui tanto fè.³⁸

(Inferno, IV, 55–60)

And after this the organ acquires the ability to move—all its pipes and bellows become extraordinarily agitated and, raging and storming, it suddenly begins to back away.

If the halls of the Hermitage should suddenly go mad, if the paintings of all schools and masters should suddenly break loose from the nails, should fuse, intermingle, and fill the air of the rooms with futuristic howling and colors in violent agitation, the result then would be something like Dante’s Comedy.

To wrench Dante away from scholastic rhetoric is to render the whole of European civilization a service of no small importance. I hope centuries of labor will not be required for this, but only joint international efforts will succeed in creating a true anticommentary to the work of many generations of scholiasts, creeping philologues, and pseudobiographers. Lack of respect for the poetic material—which can be comprehended only through the performance of it, only by a conductorial flight—was precisely the reason for the general blindness to Dante, to the greatest master-manager of this material, to European art’s greatest conductor, who by many centuries anticipated the formation of an orchestra adequate—to what?—to the integral of the conductor’s baton.

Calligraphic composition realized by means of improvisation: such is the approximate formula of a Dantean impulse, taken simultaneously both as a flight and as something finished. His comparisons are articulated impulses.

The most complex structural passages of the poem are performed on the fife, on a birdcall. Almost always the fife is sent out ahead.

Here I have in mind Dante’s introductions, released by him as if they were trial balloons.

Quando si parte il giuoco della zara,

colui che perde si riman dolente,

ripetendo le volte, e tristo impara:

con l’altro se ne va tutta la gente:

qual va dinanzi, e qual di retro il prende,

e qual da lato li si reca a mente.

EI non s’arresta, e questo e quello intende;

a cui porge la man, più non fa pressa;

e così dalla calca si difende.

(Purgatorio, VI, 1–9)

When the dice game is finished, the loser in sad solitude replays the game, dejectedly throwing the dice. The whole crowd dogs the footsteps of the lucky gambler: one runs out ahead, one plucks at him from behind, one curries favor asking to be remembered; but fortune’s favorite continues on, he listens to all alike, and by shaking hands, he frees himself from the importunate hangers-on.

And thus the “street” song of the Purgatorio—with its crush of importunate Florentine souls who desire gossip first, intercession second, and then gossip again—proceeds in the birdcall of genre, on the typical Flemish fife that became painting only three hundred years later.

Another curious consideration suggests itself: the commentary (explanatory) is an integral structural part of the Comedy itself. The miracle ship left the shipyard with barnacles sticking to it. The commentary is derived from the hubbub of the streets, from rumor, from hundred-mouthed Florentine slander. It is unavoidable, like the halcyon hovering behind Batiushkov’s ship.³⁹

There, there, look: old Marzzuco—how well he bore himself at his son’s burial! A remarkably courageous old man. . . . And do you know, they were quite wrong to chop off the head of Pietro de la Broccia—they had nothing on him A woman’s evil hand is implicated here. . . . By the way, there he is himself—Let’s go up and ask.

Poetic material has no voice. It does not paint and it does not express itself in words. It knows no form, and by the same token it is devoid of content for the simple reason that it exists only in performance. The finished work is nothing but a calligraphic product, the inevitable result of the performing impulse. If a pen is dipped into an inkwell, the work created, stopped in its tracks, is nothing but a stock of letters, fully commensurate with the inkwell.

In talking of Dante, it is more proper to have in mind the generation of impulses and not the generation of forms: impulses to textiles, to sails, to scholastics, to meteorology, to engineering, to municipalities, to artisans and craftsmen, a list that could be continued ad infinitum.

In other words, the syntax confuses us. All nominative cases should be replaced by datives of direction. This is the law of reversible and convertible poetic material, which exists only in the performing impulse.

—Everything is here turned inside out: the substantive is the goal, and not the subject of the sentence. It is my hope that the object of Dante scholarship will become the coordination of the impulse and the text.

Note

Note: This translation was originally published as “Talking about Dante” in Delos, no. 6 (1971): 65–107. A few minor editorial changes have been made in the interest of conformity with the other essays in this volume, and endnotes have been added.

*A. Kars, Istorija orkestrovki [History of orchestration] (Muzgiz, 1932). (Brown and Hughes’ note.)