Osip Mandelstam Read online

  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 rema
rk 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.