How we became dantisti

Rachel Jacoff

In the fall of 1958 several things happened that had unforeseeable and connected consequences. It was my senior year at Cornell and, looking for a fifth course, I signed up for a Dante in Translation course taught by Joseph Mazzeo. This course swept me away. I was an English major but I felt that Dante was my first real experience of “Literature.” Mazzeo’s dazzling command of Dante’s literary and philosophical sources, especially Plato, expanded the intellectual framework of the course. I was so taken with the stilnovistic poetry that Mazzeo read to us that I set out to memorize Cavalcanti’s Perch’i’ no spero di tornar giammai before I knew any Italian.

Mazzeo had just written a book on Paradiso and he made reading the third canticle especially glorious; since most Dante courses privilege Inferno, this was unusual. I remember the day when I first heard the Gloria of the Bach B-minor Mass and thought it was the musical equivalent of Paradiso. I wrote my term paper on the final cantos of the Commedia, and received the Dante Society of America prize for that essay. Mazzeo was leaving to go to Florence with a Guggenheim; before leaving he urged me to go to Italy to learn Italian. I had never been out of New York state, but I decided to go to Italy after graduation and to take a course at the Università per Stranieri in Florence. When Mazzeo left for Florence, the spring semester of the class was taught by Bob Durling who was beginning his career at Cornell and who became a mentor and a friend.

I began the six-week course at the Università per Stranieri trying to learn the rudiments of Italian grammar. On one of the first days of the course an Italian woman looking for someone with whom to speak English asked me if I would like to meet with her to practice speaking in both Italian and English. Her name was Emma Mallardi and she had recently married a Florentine and was living with his parents in Via San Zanobi; Emma was Milanese and she enjoyed being a tourist in Florence with me. We met regularly, speaking both Italian and English, visiting the Uffizi, and enjoying our friendship. I was living that summer in the Pensione Rigatti on the Lungarno at the Ponte alle Grazie. I had a tiny room from which I could see the wonderful crenelated top of the Palazzo Vecchio. When I returned to Florence three years later Emma invited me to live with her family in the place they had just built in the Via delle Campora, a marvelous road above the Via Senese that had wonderful views of the Tuscan paesaggio while being only a short bus ride from the city center. In my subsequent visits to Italy I was fortunate to return to the house on the Via delle Campora which I thought of as my home in Italy. It was in the summer that I first lived with Emma’s family that I really learned Italian, thanks to Emma’s patience and encouragement.

There were some interesting students in the course I took that first summer in 1959. One of them, a British man, became my informal tutor. Jeremy Prynne had just graduated from Cambridge and was steeped in Pound and Adrian Stokes; with him I went to Rimini and learned to be obsessed with the marvelous Tempio Malatestiano. And with Jeremy I also went to Siena where I fell in love with Simone Martini, Duccio, and the Lorenzetti.

I returned from that first summer in Italy to begin graduate work in English at Harvard. I had chosen to go to Harvard rather than Berkeley because Mazzeo told me that he might be going there to teach. He did come to give a lecture that fall, but did not get the job. Dante was taught by Nicolae Iliescu and occasionally by Renato Poggioli. Mazzeo went to Columbia where I used to visit with him once a year. We would go to the Café Madison on 69th Street and Madison Avenue, and would drink Manhattans while he told me about his latest interests in the Renaissance, Montaigne and Machiavelli. At Harvard I found the English Department less than inspirational. I ended up working on Henry James with Harry Levin who was always encouraging. But I reached a kind of dead end as I struggled with my thesis, and I decided that I would rather be a James heroine than read about them. I felt very close to Isabel Archer and Portrait of a Lady was “my” book. I left graduate school without finishing the thesis, going to New York City in search of “more life.”

My New York life was delightful, but it needed some direction. I thought of going back to school, but I did not want to return to Harvard or to English. Bob Durling urged me to leave English for Italian, saying that writing on James when you could write on Dante was like going to Chicago when you could go to Rome. I had been reading Dante and about Dante on my own and was very taken with the work of John Freccero. I learned that Freccero had just left Cornell for Yale. I phoned him and we made a date for me to come to Yale and attend a class. Halfway through the class (on the earthly Paradise) I decided that I would do anything to come to Yale and study Dante with Freccero. Yale generously made this possible.

In the fall of 1969 I entered Yale. The Italian Department consisted of Freccero, Tom Bergin, and Giuseppe Mazzotta – three dantisti. The other graduate students, Penny Marcus and Rebecca West, were welcoming and quickly became good friends. The three of us were particularly fond of Mr. Bergin who called us his “chickies” and supported our careers in every way. For years he sent us kiddie Valentine’s Day cards. Although he had opposed co-education at Yale, his last students were all women; and both he and they were happy about this.

Yale in the Seventies was a hotbed of literary studies, with deconstruction its hallmark. We audited classes by Bloom and De Man, and Comp Lit students sat in on Freccero’s Dante class. Classes were intense and expansive. There was much talk about Italian film, too, with the great Antonioni and Fellini films appearing yearly. The Last Tango was one of the “events” of those years. And the Godfather films too. The cinematic power of Italian-American actors like De Niro and Al Pacino was similar to the charisma of Freccero; this world felt familiar to me because my father had grown up in Corona, the same town where Freccero had grown up and which films like Goodfellas made archetypal. The attractive quality of these Italian-Americans is something I recognize in the wonderful Dr Fauci these days.

Penny, Rebecca, and I left Yale at the same time, lucky to find positions that we wanted in Chicago, Austin, and Charlottesville. When I went to Charlottesville I never imagined how much I would love the place. I had not wanted to go far from NY, but the world I found in Virginia was full of surprises. My friendship with Del Kolve was its first gift.

Del inspired the turn to art history in my work. His epic work on “speaking images” in Chaucer showed me possibilities in Dante that led in many directions. In my semester at I Tatti (1982) a trip to Ravenna changed my project. I became fascinated with the visual language of the church of San Vitale; reading Otto von Simson I found connections between the iconography of Empire and the idea of sacrifice, connections that are in the opening cantos of Paradiso where, as in San Vitale, the emperor Justinian is a major figure. Later I explored the connections between Simone Martini’s Maestà and the skywriting of Paradiso 18, both of which entail the first sentence of the Book of Wisdom (“Diligite justitiam”); the Maestà seems to contain a few lines in terza rima suggesting the possibility that the poem was already in circulation before Dante’s death in 1321. My most recent work has connected visual accounts of the Coronation of the Virgin with Paradiso 23.

I left UVA very reluctantly after four years, and returned to New England to teach at Wellesley. This move allowed me to live in Boston where I found an apartment on the Waterfront in a building where one of my neighbors was the poet Elizabeth Bishop. I enjoyed her friendship but had no idea what a fabulous poet she was until after her death. Once again David Kalstone was my teacher, since he had written beautifully about her in Five Temperaments, his study of five contemporary poets. Another poet that David wrote about in Five Temperaments was James Merrill who I came to know through David in the Seventies. At that time Merrill was writing his extraordinary epic of Afterlife Encounters, The Changing Light at Sandover. The first part of the trilogy, Divine Comedies, gestures to Dante in several ways. As Merrill continued to add two more sections to this initial slim volume, he used to send me drafts of the poem in progress. I would walk out to my mailbox in the Virginia countryside to find these drafts, feeling like Cangrande della Scala, Dante’s Paradiso patron. In 1976 Jimmy came to do a reading in the Jefferson Rotunda as part of the Bicentennial celebration. There was a huge crowd and we were allowed to sit on the floor encircling Merrill who read, standing under the Oculus of the great room, summoning the voices of his Otherworld interlocutors. It was the most thrilling poetry reading I have ever been to.

During my years at Wellesley I had leave time in beautiful Bogliasco where Peter Hawkins and I put together The Poets’ Dante, our book on Dante’s legacy in modern poetry. Peter and I had met in Freccero’s Yale Dante class, then worked together in the NEH Summer Dante Institutes held at Dartmouth (1985 and 1986) and then at Stanford (1988). These marathon readings of the Commedia, shared with Nancy Vickers, Kevin Brownlee, Bill Stephany, and Jeffrey Schnapp included two major conferences on Virgil and then on Ovid in Dante, now collected in The Poetry of Allusion. Another great conference experience was Dante e la Bibbia, held in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, in 1987. We Americans could not believe that we were actually there, speaking in Italian to a large crowd. I met Piero Boitani at that conference and later he became my most cherished Italian colleague. He came to Harvard for several weeks after 9/11 and we became friends in that raw time.

Twenty-five years after I took Mazzeo’s Dante Course I was invited to teach that course at Cornell. In my one semester there (spring 1984) I met two of the great students of my career, John Kleiner and Robert Harrison. It was very special to be with the two of them, two years later, in 1986-87 when I was at the Stanford Humanities Center and Robert began to teach at Stanford (and John was completing his PhD). Robert is a student who became my teacher. Conversations with Robert over the years remain a source of pleasure and illumination.

Dante was my way to Italy and Italian, to many friendships, to Virgil and Ovid, to Charles Wright, James Merrill, and other poets who were inspired by him.

Lino Pertile

In September 1968, I left my two jobs as unpaid Assistant in French at the University of Padua and high school teacher of Italian to take up a temporary appointment, which became permanent within the year, in the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Reading in the UK. The Department was thriving at the time. Its student body was growing in numbers and quality, while its faculty was pedagogically innovative and intellectually vibrant, boasting scholars and writers of international reputation such as the novelist Luigi Meneghello (1922–2007), the dantista John A Scott, the linguist Giulio C Lepschy, and the historian Stuart Wolf. However, in 1974, after just five years at Reading, I moved to Sussex University, a change that made sense to me but to anyone else must have seemed odd. Italian at Sussex was just a tiny section of the School of European Studies, heroically managed by the excellent linguist and Ottocentista Giovanni Carsaniga (1934–2016) with the help of a younger Novecentista whom I had been hired to replace.

However, my transfer made sense to me because at that stage my research interests were comparative, and at Sussex, inscribed in the collective consciousness of faculty and students alike, there was a profound and genuine belief in the interdependence of all humanistic studies. This meant that, regardless of the specialty in which they were trained, most colleagues were committed to teaching in a variety of ‘contextual’ fields as well as in their own. For example, for one contextual course entitled Foundations of European Civilization, I offered weekly seminars on Homer, Virgil and Dante, and for another, Medieval and Renaissance Europe, I taught a course that combined Erasmus, Rabelais, Ariosto and Montaigne. It was also a very interdisciplinary environment in which, already in the Seventies, it was normal to co-teach courses with colleagues from other disciplines. In my case, I regularly taught Literature and Society in Post-War Italy with a colleague from History, John Rosselli (1927–2001), and Literature and Art in Renaissance Italy with the art historian Erika Langmuir (1931–2015).

This exciting and challenging environment suited me well, for my research interests were then in French (from Montaigne to Baudelaire) more than Italian writers; indeed, my long-term plan was to devote myself entirely to French rather than Italian literature. For the time being, however, there was a problem. With my modest research activity, I was feathering the French nest rather than the Italian. As a consequence, and rather paradoxically, in the multidisciplinary and comparative environment of Sussex University it became imperative for me to defend the interests of Italian, i.e. to do exactly that which I could happily have done at Reading, and the opposite of that for which I had come to Sussex. That is how a series of lectures on Dante, a Lectura Dantis, was born at Sussex University in 1976–77, I think, and how, within a few years of moving there, I began not just teaching but also writing and publishing on Dante.

I must say that Sussex Lectura Dantis could not have materialized without the enthusiastic support of colleagues from English and Classics who, from the very beginning, contributed actively to the series. This impassioned interest in Dante on the part of colleagues who did not speak Italian or teach Italian literature was a thrilling discovery and an extremely enriching experience for me. Quite simply, Dante surpassed the boundaries of different languages and subjects, he was a common foundation for all of us in the Arts. To be sure, this dantismo was different than the dantismo professed in Italy, but its results seemed fresher and more compelling. I still remember from our first series Tony Nuttall (1937–2007) on If 1, Stephen Medcalf (1936–2007) on If 10, and Charles Martindale on If 33. But there were other original and innovative interpreters of the Comedy, such as Gabriel Josipovici. ¹ I can’t remember whether Gabriel gave a lecture in that first series, as he was already teaching the regular course on Dante which I attended, I think, that same academic year 1976–77.

Though there hardly were any funds for the series, we were occasionally able to invite outside speakers: I remember Father Kenelm Foster (1910–86) from Cambridge, Cecil Grayson (1920–98) from Oxford, and the inimitable Guido Almansi (1931–2001) from Norwich who, predictably, focused on the unspeakable practices of Dante’s snakes in the seventh bolgia to a lecture hall packed with students, faculty and cigarette smoke., Though not compulsory, the lectures were well attended by students and faculty. I was in charge of the arrangements, but this did not exempt me from giving at least one lecture every year. The first I ever offered, with a good dose of youthful bravado, was on Inferno 26, the canto of Ulysses.

Why Ulysses? School memories might have played a part in my selection, but memories might not have been enough had they not been recently revived at Reading by the passion, critical insight and philological rigor of my dear colleague and friend, John A Scott. In 1971, John had published in Lettere Italiane a seminal essay on Dante’s Ulysses in which, with great subtlety and balance, he made a number of original points about the Homeric character as antithesis of such positive figures as Cato, Aeneas, Solomon and Dante himself as character. I greatly admired that essay for its originality, doctrine and vigor; yet, I remained perplexed by John’s capsizing of the standard Italian interpretation of Ulysses from De Sanctis and Croce to Nardi, Fubini, Bosco, Pagliaro, Forti, Sapegno, and so forth. Ulysses was my favorite character in Dante’s Inferno, one of the few I found exciting and still very relevant (‘relevance’ was crucial at the time). I should also explain that, in those days, Dante studies was a canonical field, but hardly a popular one. In the Sixties, dantisti were thin on the ground in Italy and by and large, as scholars and people, they were considered rather musty, intellectually unadventurous, dedicated to writing immense footnotes on allegory. They were also suspected of being politically conservative – another mortal sin. The life of our field was deemed to be in the study of the interaction between literature, politics and society, not of otherworldly visions. As for me, my main research interests in Italian were in the twentieth century, in particular the postwar period. I taught the literature of the Italian Resistance, Pavese, Fenoglio, Vittorini, Calvino. I respected Dante, but I kept well out of his way. The reason why Dante’s Ulysses seemed salvageable was precisely his courage, his intelligence, his resistance to a tyrannical God who strikes him down: in one word, his hubris. In Dante’s Ulysses we felt that there was something heroic, that’s why we liked him and identified with him.

However, a profound change was taking place, and I think it originated in the US, though it had strong representatives in Italy too, such as Giorgio Padoan (1933–1999). To put it simply, in major American universities, in the wake of Singleton’s interpretation and Freccero’s teaching, Dante was attracting many brilliant students and scholars, and the Dante professor was becoming the focus of Italian departments. At the same time, what I would call a rigidly ‘moralistic’ or ‘theological’ reading of Dante’s Inferno was gaining ground. Based on the notion that the characters that are found in Dante’s Hell are not only justly condemned for their mortal sins but also inherently nasty, this reading maintained that, if Dante the character (or ‘the pilgrim’, as American colleagues significantly preferred to call him) is seen to feel pity for any of them, “we are meant to realize that – as my dear friend Bob Hollander put it – “he is at fault for doing so”. In other words, regardless of the sympathy that some infernal characters may elicit from us, we must consider them absolutely rotten. This was believed to be true especially of Ulysses. Far from being a tragic hero, Dante’s Ulysses was turned into an irresponsible, selfish deceiver, a trickster, a con man who, in order to satisfy his lust for new experiences, turns his back on family and country, and unscrupulously drives his crew to destruction.

This was too much to bear. How could they have been so naïve? Now the Sussex Lectura offered me an opportunity to defend the Greek hero from what I considered to be an extreme, in theory interesting but in practice unjustified and pernicious, form of character assassination. The task was urgent, for the new reading was spreading quickly and everywhere. And besides, my lecture was going to be a one-off thing, an isolated sortie, after which I would return to my usual and more comfortable Italo-French or Franco-Italian topics – or so I believed.

To start with, researching Ulysses turned out to be more challenging and engrossing than I had anticipated. Already fifty years ago the bibliography looked formidable, but more formidable were the literary implications and ramifications of the topic, ranging as it did from Homer, Virgil and Ovid to Eliot, Joyce, Beckett and Primo Levi, just to mention a few writers who had been touched by the now reviled, so-called “romantic” Ulysses. At the same time, it was thoroughly exhilarating. It was like rediscovering anew the immense riches of literature. The questions posed by the episode were totally absorbing: did Dante know the Odyssey? And if he did, why did he change Homer’s storyline? And if he didn’t, why did he write about Ulysses and why in that intriguing way? What is his Ulysses searching for? Does he really abandon his country and family, and does he really betray his companions? Is his marvelous little speech a lie? And what is the mysterious island he is not allowed to reach? I wrote and discarded pages and pages until, eventually, my defense of Ulysses was finished with a great deal of passion and many footnotes. It opened with Ovid and closed with Eliot. All along I kept telling myself that it was just a temporary diversion. But once entered into the world of Dante I found it at first difficult and soon impossible to abandon it. After the lecture, Giulio Lepschy advised me to send the paper to Franco Fido who, having just moved to Stanford, had launched a new periodical, the Stanford Italian Review. Fido accepted the paper and published it in the first issue of the journal, dated 1979. By then I was already working on my second paper on the Comedy.

At that time, I did not know Franco Fido (1931-2020) personally, nor did I imagine that he would leave Stanford and its Italian journal to return to Brown within the year. Above all, I could not imagine that, a dozen years later, thanks to a generous invitation by Tony Oldcorn, I would for the first time meet Franco in Providence, RI, while I was visiting Brown and he was in the process of moving to Harvard, nor could I imagine that, in 1995, thanks to Dante, I would join him there to take charge of the Dante teaching.

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Fifty years ago, when we started our journeys as university teachers in the US and the UK, the Renaissance was the strongest and most popular field in Italian studies. Dante was certainly a fundamental author at the top of the canon, but he did not attract the scholarly interest and the number of students that usually flocked to Renaissance and twentieth-century studies. The situation is now reversed, and it has been for several decades. While the field of contemporary cultural studies is growing stronger by the year, Dante has replaced the Renaissance as the main focus of interest in both the US and the UK. Even in Italy, where traditionally he was the preserve of a highly specialized group of scholars, Dante is now the object of intense interest not only of all Italianists, regardless of their specialization, but also of historians, philosophers, and pandits of all persuasions who write and publicly speak on him. To be sure, Dante is not universally liked, let alone loved. There is a vocal opposition to the official Dante cult, especially in Italy. Calls for the elimination of the compulsory study of the Comedy in high school erupt at regular intervals in Italy causing scandal and lively debates on TV and national newspapers. And of course, Dante is regularly charged with being a reactionary, racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic poet and thinker. However, charges come and go, and Dante remains after seven centuries one of the few national figures with which, ultimately, the overwhelming majority of Italians are likely to want to identify, regardless of their knowledge of his work, their geographical provenance, social and cultural position and political and religious persuasion.

No doubt this year, on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of our deathless poet, many solemn celebrations will be held and many volumes of essays will be published in both Europe and the US. This special issue of Forum Italicum is probably going to be one out of many examples of this global flowering. When we wrote the “Call for Papers” we hoped that a great variety of contributors would respond with different approaches and different ideas as to what Dante may be about. This hope has been fully met. The essays included here, in their variety, show that Dante remains in the twenty-first century a powerful inspiration for readers and scholars of different ages, formation, and intellectual interests. Most of these essays, by established professors and graduate students alike, come from the US. They demonstrate the vitality of Dante studies in this country. But we have also received many contributions from further afield, from Italy to China, and are happy to publish a selection as examples of the vitality and reach of our poet beyond languages, beliefs, and critical approaches.