"Dante upstart, did not invent anything", the editorial of the German newspaper

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March 25, 2021 Dante Alighieri did not invent anything, neither the "vulgar" that is Italian, nor the journey into the afterlife described in the Divine Comedy, so it is not clear what Italians should celebrate.

In essence, this is what an editorial - "Separating the good from the bad" - published by the German newspaper

by Arno Widmann, journalist and translator,

claims

.

"Italy praises him as one of those who brought the national language to the top of great literature. In a certain sense, he created the language for his work", reads the text which analyzes the linguistic situation in the Italy by Dante, noting that "the first mother-tongue art poem in Italy was written in Provençal", and it is Brunetto Latini's "Livre du Trésor".

Nothing new, according to the German author, not even for the theme of the Comedy.

"In the Muslim tradition there is the story of Muhammad's journey to Paradise", writes Widmann who cites a study by the Spanish Arabist Miguel Asin Palacios according to which the Florentine poet would have known and used the text.

The minister of Culture Dario Franceschini responds to the not too veiled criticisms and he does so by quoting Dante: "Let's not think about them, but look and pass (Inferno III, 51)". 

L'editoriale

On 14 September 1321 - writes the German daily - the Florentine Dante Alighieri died in exile in Ravenna, so why an article on Dante today?

Last year, March 25 was introduced as Dante Day in Italy.

The greatest Italian poet is to be commemorated on this date every year.

Why March 25?

On this day, a Good Friday in the year 1300, he is said to have begun his journey through hell, purgatory and heaven.

Dante loves playing with numbers.

His great work, the "Divine Comedy", begins with the words: "In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest, that the straight path was lost".

Since a date of birth was not recorded, it was soon concluded from this information that Dante was born in 1265. A baptismal date was handed down, a Holy Saturday, March 26th.

Italy praises him as one of those who have brought the national language to the top of great literature.

In a sense, Dante created the language necessary for his work.

This language has become that of its readers and then the Italian one. "

However - explains the newspaper - the language of comedy is not easy or immediately comprehensible even to Italians: now, he adds, it is no longer said, but up to a few decades ago it was evident: "Any child in Italian schools knew he did not understand Dante.

He had to decipher his texts.

The Divine Comedy - and not just the school editions - were studded with notes that not only explained the individual words, but also helped modern readers to orient themselves through Dante's syntax.

And it was Italian, not Latin. "

In the long article, the German newspaper highlights the debt of Dante and the other Italian authors of the period with Provençal poetry." In Italy, in view of the Provençal models, the texts in the mother tongue were initially love poems.

Like the troubadours, the Italian poets too sang imaginary or real women, lifted them to heaven and showered them with metaphors.

Nothing else happens in Dante's "Divine Comedy".

We have no idea if Beatrice, sung by the author, ever existed.

But we know that - like his models - it was very important for him, in addition to the development of all the arts of eloquence, to create a warmth of sensations that would take the imagined recipient, but above all the readers, far away.

One important difference tends to be overlooked: the troubadours were pop singers, of whose masterpieces only the lyrics survived, but Dante aimed to achieve the same effect - without music.

He has always felt in competition.

He wanted to get over it.

The impossible was his element. "

The article then returns to raise a much debated issue by Dante's critics, namely the possible knowledge by Alighieri of a sort of Islamic 'ancestor' of his journey between Hell, Purgatory and Paradise: "In the Muslim tradition there is the story of Mohammed's journey to heaven.

This text is not translated into Latin or Italian at the time of Dante.

Spanish Arabist Miguel Asin Palacios published an extensive study in 1919 in which he claimed that Dante knew and used the old Arabic text.

Most Danteists consider this thesis impossible also because it would question Dante's uniqueness.

But you would do Dante an injustice if you underestimated his competitive ambitions.

Just as he made Provençal poetry seem old, so he could have dreamed of overcoming the Muslim ascension with the Christian one. "

In the analysis of the Divine Comedy published by Frankfurter Rundschau there is also a comparison between the work of Dante Alighieri and that of Shakespeare. The author critically emphasizes the Florentine author's "pleasure in judging and condemning". "Shakespeare's amorality, his description of what he is, seems to us light years more modern than Dante's effort to have a opinion on everything, to drag everything in front of the judgment of his morality.

All this gigantic work is there only to allow the poet to anticipate the Last Judgment, to do God's work "and to divide the good from the bad, concludes the journalist. 

"This is nonsense, gratuitous statements and without historical foundation. The Italian language did not exist when Dante started writing. He wrote in the Florentine vernacular and refined it so much that it became the language of Italian literature in every region and therefore over the centuries it has been adopted as the language of the entire peninsula. The prestige of the Divine Comedy has imposed its own language on all of Italy ".

This was said to Adnkronos by Enrico Malato, emeritus professor of Italian literature at the "Federico II" University of Naples, president of the Pio Rajna Center, president of the Scientific Commission of the National Edition of Dante's Comments and coordinator of the "New Commented Edition of the Works of Dante ", replying to the article in the German newspaper" Frankfurter Rundschau ".       

"Most of the European languages ​​have imposed themselves through the conquest of power, Dante's Italian has established itself for the prestige of a literary work and it was the first case in Europe", added Malato.