Osip Mandelstam Read online

  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 opposit
e 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, t
o 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: