Page 11 - Italian-American Herald - January 2024

LITERATURE
nature in all of its possibilities. That’s why we can make a distinction between “Dante the author,” who represents the moral authority and places those characters in Hell, and “Dante the character,” who represents all
of us and our human fallibility, and is very often touched by their stories, and sometimes even overwhelmed with empathy and pity. It’s the coexistence of these two contrasting layers that creates some of the highest poetic moments in the Comedia.
Students are also fascinated by how Dante is constantly engaging the reader within
the text. Quite often, when a character is introduced for the first time, Dante doesn’t just give out their name, but implicitly invites the audience to identify the characters.
For example, when Virgil first appears on
the scene, he doesn’t say: “I am Virgil, the Latin poet.” Rather, his self-introduction unfolds through a series of clues until an excited Dante is able to identify him. Dante introduces other characters in similar fashion. While today’s students need footnotes to help them identify these characters, they
are intrigued by this narrative strategy: it displaces us from our privileged position of readers, and places us next to Dante, in the dark of the Hell, trying to piece together the clues and guess who is the character who is
talking to us. This leads us to another point. If the journey described is fictional, the
style of Comedia is extremely realistic: Dante constantly uses metaphors and similutedes from our everyday life in order to make an image more “visible” to the reader. The devils, for example, pinch with their pitchforks the grafters trying to emerge from the black pitch in which they are being punished, “as a cook would do with some piece of meat emerging from the boiling water.” But the realism is
not confined to the vocabulary or the images adopted, but extends to the epic’s entire “filmmaking style.”
The Inferno is extremely cinematic and impressionistic. Consider the scene when Dante and his guide, Virgil, finally cross the gate of Hell, and experience a roiling tumult of sound – the agonies of the damned. When I discuss this with my students, they realize that this is precisely what would happen if they were walking underground in complete darkness. They would hear the place before their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Reading the Comedia is really a kind of cinematic experience, and that’s why the subject is so adaptable to so many different media.
Tamper-proof poetics
Finally, all this grandiose universe is framed in a perfectly structured “cage.” The
Comedia is made of 14,233 verses, all formed by 11 syllables, and all interlocked with an original rhyme pattern, named “terzina dantesca” because invented by Dante himself: ABA, BCB, CDC etc.
What is so special about this
rhyme pattern? Previous poetic
works would usually present an
ABAB or ABBA ABBA pattern.
That would allow anyone with
access to the text (for example the
monks in charge of transcribing
and distributing the work) to
alter the text, either editing it, or
adding, or removing lines. Dante,
by inventing this new intertwined
structure, provided the prosody
not only with a more narrative flow, but also with a sort of “lock,” a “copyright” device that would prevent anyone from altering even just a single line of the text. Even for this brilliant invention alone, Dante should be considered a genius.
Students are amazed by all this,
without even going into the philosophical, political and linguistic implications of this masterpiece. And what is really rewarding about my job, is the possibility to experience this amazement anew, time after time,
through the first amazement of the students. This is what makes me so fond of my profession. It’s Dante. It’s the Dante effect!
Alessandra Mirra, a native of Rome, Italy, received a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is coordinator of the Italian program at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., where she teaches courses in Italian language, culture and literature. Her publications revolve mostly around modern and contemporary Italian literature as well as Italian cinema and adaptation studies. IAH
ITALIAN-AMERICAN HERALD
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Happy New Year to Everyone !!
Buon Anno a tutti !!