I was just reviewing some of Dante’s work and was curious what this community thinks of it. Out of every epic poet, I despise him the most if only for his assertion that he was a greater poet than Ovid. I cannot also but lament the role he played in the transmogrification of Latin to vernacular Italian. In addition to the poll question, I also wonder what you think of some obvious misuses of references to the Aeneid in the Inferno.
It appears, amico mio, that you are wholly ignorant of the Italian language! and all its beauties and wonders, for truly it is a language classical as well as modern. Have you even read the whole Commedia in the original?
Well, unfortunately, for now I only know these works in translation, which is tremendously important of course, but with that in mind, I actually enjoyed Dante’s work more. I suppose that’s based on certain things that come through in translation, like the structure of the poem, and his brilliant idea to make himself the subject. That is among my favorite innovations in literature, along with the way that Cervantes, in the second part of Don Quixote, made his characters aware of the publication of the first part.
I personally was underwhelmed when I tried reading Inferno (again, in translation), but the Divine Comdey does not inspire in me the feelings which it inspires in you, and I want to vote for option e - eh!
And quite frankly I think Dante’s choice to use Italian rather than Latin helped revitalize the literature of Europe, so I give him props for that.
I don’t see why this is a problem. Latin wasn’t exactly widely spoken in the 1300s. He was merely reflecting the state of his culture, and if he had written it in Latin the poem would never have achieved such success.
I am in no way criticizing his poetry but rather his content. Latin before Dante was the language used by the scholastic community and it was after Dante that it began to wane. I also think it was an egregious error to try to create a composite between two very different perceptions of the afterlife; furthermore, his usage of the Aeneid in certain areas essentially amounts to him taking details from the poem and utterly changing their significance to fit his purposes. I do not believe this is the manner in which allusion should be used. And, again, anyone who purports to be greater than Ovid exposes himself to vituperation.
Not really. Latin had its florescence as the language was rediscovered in all its beauty and glory after Dante, once the humanism that followed him came to recognize the true glory of the ancients.
I also think it was an egregious error to try to create a composite between two very different perceptions of the afterlife;
If you mean the fusion of paganism with orthodox Christianity, Dante was hardly an instigator; pagan and Christian traditions have been fusing ever since their confluence. Why do you think the Christian holy day is the day of the Sun; and don’t forget where Christmas trees come from.
furthermore, his usage of the Aeneid in certain areas essentially amounts to him taking details from the poem and utterly changing their significance to fit his purposes. I do not believe this is the manner in which allusion should be used.
Creativity. 
A variation on a theme.
La Commedia è davvero divina.
I haven’t read Dante’s work in the original but in the translation I read it was a very, very interesting book with its ups and downs, cons and pros. Now, while I am all for knowing both Latin and Ancient Greek, I can’t see why it is bad (ref to “lament” ) to produce a work of scientific or literary value in the form of the language one speaks.
A language evolves. (Italian is one of the most beautiful languages if you ask me, by the way) . Ideas can be expressed in all forms of a language. Why do the Latin, or the AG for that matter, “deserve” to oust the form of language one speaks as means of producing literature?Should one lament that the works of i.e. Sophocles is not in Homeric dialect? That the gospels where written in Koine?
As for taking Aenid and changing it
a) it’s not as if he’s the only one who ever used a classic work more as inspiration than anything else
b) Well, seen from a Greek point of view, the Romans (Aenid includid) took the Greek mythos of the Trojan war and at times stood it on its head 
But the Inferno is different than just changing mythology because it refers in specific to one work rather than mythology in general. Dante by having Vergil lead him through the underworld implicitly asserts that Vergil’s work will lead his poem also through hell. This goes beyon mere allusion; it is intentional reinterpretation of an author’s work. I am not saying this is immoral or anything; rather, I am only asserting that Dante took some poignant scenes from the Aeneid and vitiated them by inept usage.
These two sentences do not follow logically. Either there are several steps in your thinking that you have omitted, or you have not fully thought out what you mean to say.
I am not saying this is immoral or anything; rather, I am only asserting that Dante took some poignant scenes from the Aeneid and vitiated them by inept usage.
Inept? vitiated? I can only imagine what you must think of 20th century art. Amico, it seems to me that you are applying a great deal of qualitative, emotional adjectives to you conclusions without having explained your reasons for them. Although plainly obvious to you, they are not at all to me, and I know both the Aeneid and the Commedia very well in their original forms. If you care to, please explicate your thought process on the matter and provide examples and support for your hypotheses. Otherwise, I shall feel free to keep teasing you for being so silly.
Ciao,
Luca
Ditto, at least for the Commedia. I’ve been reading the Aeneid more closely recently (read Book I yesterday), particularly because Vergil was so important to Dante.
IMO Dante was indeed the great epic poet after Vergil. He is not necessarily an easy read, his subject matter may have deep resonance for some readers and none at all for others. He does not fare well in translation. Not many trecento and quattrocento Italian poets do.
Pound enjoyed Binyon’s translation, and that’s the one I knew before reading the original. I’ve looked at Ciardi’s and others, they all have their virtues, but none come close to the effect of the original Italian. At his best Dante has the Homeric virtues; at his worst he can be pedantic and offensive to modern tastes.
I’ve also read some of Dante’s Latin works. His Latinity was that of a scholar, and assertions that he somehow corrupted the language are simply badly informed. Btw, Latin was indeed a living spoken language during his times. [Added: To clarify, I mean that Dante’s Latin was certainly spoken by a certain class or classes of willing participants.]
The Middle Ages are so poorly understood. Sigh…
A word to the wise reader of Dante: Make sure you read La Vita Nuova before or after the Commedia (preferably before). It is important to the later work.
OT: It’s interesting how differently Vergil presents Aeneas and Dido. Aeneas comes off as rather bloodless, more committed to pietas than humanitas. By comparison Dido is drawn from life, and her internal struggles are beautifully rendered by the poet. No doubt about it, Vergil was one of the giants (obviously Dante concurred).
As for Dante and Latin, I think De vulgari eloquentia is amazing, if only for its sociological implications:
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost14/Dante/dan_v101.html
Keep in mind when reading: in the Middle Ages, the sense of a dynamic world where things (like language) can change was not understood. Therefore Dante believed, as you can see from De vulgari eloquentia, that the ancient Romans were much in the same position as he was: that Latin was not a truly natural, spoken-from-birth language; he believed that Virgil only wrote in Latin, but that in fact he spoke in Italian — or in Mantuan, to be precise.
Actually, I just resurrected a part of a paper I was writing — on a topic quite different from the history of the Italian languge; needless to say, my obtuse interest in the subject had driven my paper quite off topic. I saved what I had written, however, though it remains unedited; perhaps it will be appropriate to our discussion here:
ITALIAN LANGUAGE
by Luke Amadeus Ranieri
The Italian language possesses a very singular position in history. The only official language in Europe since the Roman Empire had been Latin, and remained the widely spoken and solely written language on the Continent well through the Middle Ages. Dante Alighieri, born in Florence A.D. 1265, led a political life in his native town and engaged the poetic arts. In 1308, he expressed his discontent with the contemporary bilingual, even hypocritical nature of modern existence in his treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia, “About the Common Tongue.? Writing in Latin, Dante explains that vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam qua infantes assuefiunt ab assistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt; vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus, quam sine omni regola, nutricem imitantes accipimus, that the “common tongue, as we call it, is what infants grow accustomed to as soon as they first begin to distinguish the voices of those around them; or rather, as may be said more briefly, we grasp the common tongue first, without any rule, receiving it by imitating our nursemaids,? as he relates in the very first chapter. For in Dante’s time, it was believed that there always had existed a natural language, upon which Latin was artificially imposed, even in the times of the ancient Romans; to be precise, Dante believed that Virgil spoke Italian (or rather his native Mantuan), while writing in Latin. This is proven to us by his following statements, that est et inde alia locutio secundaria nobis, quam Romani grammaticam vocaverunt. hanc quidem secundariam Graeci habent et alii, sed non omnes: “we have a another, secondary language, which the Romans called ‘grammar’. Indeed, the Greeks also have such a secondary language, as do others, but not everyone.? With regard to the Greeks, Dante refers to the long-standing bilinguism of Greece, where the literary and written tongue for thousands of years had been based on the artificially constructed but extremely rich language of Homer, while the common tongue that lay beneath it, known as the δημοτική, continued to change and evolve rather independently. This glottal bipolarity existed in Greece until just thirty years ago, when at last the καθα?εύουσα, or “pure language,” a speech based upon Biblical κοινή and the ancient poets, was finally dethroned, and the common tongue accepted as the official national language.
Dante opines, harum quoque duarum nobilior est vulgaris, tum quia prima fuit humano generi usitata, tum quia totus orbis ipsa perfruitur, licet in diversas prolationes et vocabula sit divisa; tum quia naturalis est nobis, cum illa potius artificialis existat, that “of the two languages, nobler is the common because it was the first possessed by human kind, and because the whole of the world has fully enjoyed it, albeit divided by differences of vocabulary [meaning the different dialects of Italy and Europe], while the other rather artificial one has stood in its place.” In this way, Dante was to think himself an incredible revolutionary, perhaps more than he actually was: the first in history to write in the “natural language.” And that is exactly what he would do, for in the following and final decade of his life he would compose his Commedia, known to us today as “The Divine Comedy,” wherein the poet describes himself led on an imaginary journey into Inferno by Virgil, his greatest literary influence and “teacher,” and then through Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is worth noting at this juncture that Dante was an extremely active polititian, a member of the Guelf party in Florence, which defeated the Ghibellines in 1289, and subsequently split into the White and Black Guelfs. The Black Guelfs supported Papal control of Florence, while Dante’s White Guelfs desired political freedom from Rome, only to be exiled for the rest of his life for this stance. It is to be noted that Dante sought to free his city from Rome, both politically, and linguistically.
And in the latter, he succeeded. For his Divine Comedy was the most significant literary achievement of the Middle Ages: not only was it highly read in Florence and Tuscany, but it was an extraordinary success in all of Italy. Within the span of relatively few years, Dante’s work came to be the basis of the new literary language shared among the Penninsula’s many disparate city-states. The speech that Dante formed was based primarily on the Tuscan dialects, but was also highly enriched by poetry from the Sicilian School, in which Giacomo da Lentini had invented the sonnet, and equally by Provençal ballads and literature. Soon, Dante’s somewhat invented, even artificial, though incredibly beautiful language would come to be recognized as the universal tongue in all of Italy. Indeed, in the centuries that followed, countless operas, the masterpieces of music, were composed with libretti exclusively in the Italian tongue. Even though it would not be before the 19th Century and the Unification that the speech would come to be officially instituted, the common tongue of Italy has for hundreds of years been Italian, due entirely to the work of Dante Alighieri, and his two most notable successors, Boccaccio and Petrarch.
Upon asking my Greek tutor of his opinion on this miraculous cultural transformation and unification, long predating any political solidarity, Gianfranco replied, “It is indeed an amazing thing. In history, or at least in the West, there has been nothing else similar, except perhaps Homer and the Greek language. For Homer,” he informed me, “created an artificial language, very beautiful and very rich, with which he combined other Greek dialects, different languages really, and formed a single, new, literary language. Then all the other city-states imitated him, turning his works into plays, quoting him constantly.” And eventually, under Alexander the Great, the descendent of this tongue would come to be imposed as the official language of the Alexandrine Empire of the Hellenic Era. It is therefore somewhat of an ironic circle, that Greece only just recently threw off the constraints of that same artificial language, while Italy has thrived for hundreds of years with a similarly constructed tongue whose popularity and universality were only realized through literary imitation in the very same manner.
But the revolution that Dante initiated did not stop with Italy. Sig. Alighieri’s literary audacity inspired the French, the Spanish, the Germans, and in particular the English to write in their native languages, separating themselves in turn from the Church, laying the foundations for the secularized humanism of Europe that was to come in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, Italian’s unique place among the world’s languages remains relatively unchallenged, for French, Spanish, English all came to be imposed upon the people of their native countries by monarchs in various periods of history; truly, the “Queen’s English,” for example, is the standard of our tongue in the world today, with the official American variant only just barely divergent (nor may we possibly accept the frightful alternative “The BBC English,” for the ridiculously numerous quantity of errors, malelocutions, and brutalizations of the language to be found there would shame even the least literary of Americans). The indirect but powerful influence of example, as is the case with the history of Italian, most effectively compares to the inspiration for democracy and self-rule in Europe after the American Revolution. . . .
[quote="Lucus Eques"]
But the revolution that Dante initiated did not stop with Italy. Sig. Alighieri’s literary audacity inspired the French, the Spanish, the Germans,
[/quote]
Err… no. That revolution started in southern France with the Troubadors producing their hugely popular verses in a composite Occitan (once called Provençal) literary language. That inspired their northern neighbors, as well as revitalizing the German Minnesingers.
Dante understood this debt, including troubadors and even a few lines of Occitan in the Divine Comedy.
The Spanish already had a native vernacular poetry going strong, in both Arabic and Spanish. A good argument can be made that the troubadors owe at least part of their origin to Spainish influence.
That statement rang a chime:
“To the medieval scholar, with no sense of perspective, but a strong sense of continuity, Virgil and Cicero are but upper reaches of the river that still flows past his door. The language in which they write is still the medium of the artist, even the creative artist: it was so, even in the seventeenth century…”
Helen Waddell, from “The Wandering Scholars”
Thanks for the correction, Will.
That’s neat, Cantator.
It’s all like totally connected, man. While the Arabs didn’t have much use for Greek poetry, they did take on the philosophy and what we’d call the sciences now, including music and metrical theory. Arabic poetry sites link to the Aoidoi.org metrical guide, and an earlier version was even translated into Arabic. Of course there was a metrical tradition already, but they found the theory useful.
So between the Troubadors and Virgil, Dante absorbed two entirely distinct streams of classical learning, though one was only a trickle after circumnavigating the Mediterranean. Pretty cool.