More is packed into this passage than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book - Dante's miracle and its consequences

An “earnest and likeable” student has asked Professor Joseph Epstein for a post-graduation reading list.  He fears his Northwestern University education was inadequate.

An obvious answer would have been to tell him to read the Bible straight through – something I myself have never done – and then proceed to read the Iliad and the Odyssey back to back.  Yet this advice, I felt, would only have depressed him; and contemplating it briefly, sound though it was as advice, I had to admit that it depressed me a little too.  (“p. 34, “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan,” in Once More Around the Block, 1987)

Epstein’s actual advice can be found in this oldie.  Still, the Bible, the Odyssey – I mean, they are going to come up again.  For example, in Mimesis:

8. “Farinata and Cavalcante,” Dante

Auerbach is a real Dante specialist, so he does not need to wander too far from the exemplary passage he chooses.  It does everything.  “More is packed into this passage than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book…” (178).

Some praise: “But if we start from his predecessors, Dante’s language is a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle” (182).  The divergent Classical and Christian tracks suddenly converge in Hell, in Dante’s rhetoric and language as much as in his big, wild theological system.  The mixing of styles is going to be a running theme for the rest of Mimesis.  In Dante, “nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style” (185).

I am pulling out phrases that have some punch, but they are almost always supported by a paragraph or more of evidence.  As evidence of the Dantean linguistic miracle, Auerbach spends a page working on the Dante’s use of the word da, a preposition.

If it is funny that a book on the “representation of reality” hinges on a poet wandering around Hell with a ghost, first, Auerbach finds it funny too, and second, reality has many sides.  “More accurately than antique literature was ever able to present it, we are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding” (202).

9. “Frate Alberto”, Boccaccio and some earlier tales for the purpose of contrast

The idea here is that there is a medieval genre of short, funny, pathetic, improving, or obscene tales.  Why are the ones in Decameron any better?  The mixing of styles, especially rhetorical levels, allowing a greater emphasis on sensory detail and characters who are ordinary people.  “Boccaccio’s characters live on earth and only on earth” (224).  But it is his rhetorical skill that allows them to live at all.

It sometimes seems like Auerbach’s is steering the book towards the modern novel, towards Proust.

10.  “Madame du Chastel,” Antoine de la Sale and a bit of Fifteen Joys of Marriage

Narrative passages that are “literary representations of a night conversation between a married couple” (250), one of which is about a wife wanting a new dress. The texts are from the 15th century, but they still feel medieval.  French has not caught up with Boccaccio’s Italian.  But the next chapter is about Rabelais.  Oh yeah!

And in his speech he laugh’d and laugh’d again - D. G. Rossetti translates

Mostly with older poets I ought to stick with some kind of Selected Poems.  That is what I used to do.  I began to feel, though, like I was missing something important about the context, about the books as such, so I have been reading more poetry books in their original form, or something like it.  All of the poems in order, at least, although I have come to appreciate the scanned copies of the  original books, stray thumbs and all.  Most of what I read recently were original texts.  In only one case was this a mistake, a waste of time.  That case was not Dante Gabriel Rossetti, even if his final 1881 book was second-rate by his own standards.

Rossetti is a funny case, though, because a Selected Poems is almost moot for him.  He wrote two perfect books, if you have any taste for his verse, the 1870 Poems and the books of translated Italian verse that I think of as Dante and His Circle (1874 – there is an 1861 version titled The Early Italian Poets).  I assume any Selected edition is mostly just going to choose from these two books, perhaps just from Poems, the home of “The Blessed Damozel” and “The Woodspurge” and the best “House of Life” sonnets.

And the Villon translations.  I do not have much of a taste for Rossetti’s painting, so I selfishly wish that he had sacrificed a few to create more translations. 

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
    Where are they gone, nor yet this year,
Except with this for an overword,-
  But where are the snows of yester-year?  (from “The Ballad of Dead Ladies”)

The Dante book, which includes the strange prose-poetry hybrid The New Life (1295) along with numerous poems written by Dante and others – many written to Dante by others – now seems to me like one of the greatest Victorian translations, alongside Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat and perhaps Longfellow’s Manrique.  Rossetti had a knack for capturing the voice of the pre-Raphaelite poet:

And I wrote this sonnet:-

I felt a spirit of love begin to stir
    Within my heart, long time unfelt till then;
    And saw Love coming towards me, fair and fain
(That I scarce knew him for his joyful cheer),
Saying, “Be now indeed my worshipper!”
    And in his speech he laugh’d and laugh’d again
    Then, while it was his pleasure to remain,
I chanced to look the way he had drawn near…

And then there is some stuff about Beatrice, of course, but what I like here is the naturalness with which Rossetti understands the allegorical figure.  Rossetti has the properly archaic imagination to envision Dante and Love wandering around Florence, looking at girls, looking for one in particular.

I think one of Rossetti’s tricks is that he has studied and absorbed poets like Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the ones who brought the Italian sonnet into English in the early 16th century, so even if it is a two hundred year anachronism they feel right, not as fancied up as Shakespeare, but not antique, either.

I don’t know how he did it.