Osip Mandelstam Read online

  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 i
n 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.