Dante's verses: Odysseus imaginary

Do not deny yourself the experience of

Non vogliate negar l'esperïenza,

(Inferno XXVI, 116–117)

The speech of Odysseus in the 26th song of Dante's “Inferno” is a masterpiece of narrative concentration and world-historical complexity.

It is at the same time a center of Dante's poetic anthropology.

Odysseus is Dante's favorite figure.

He refers to them again and again in all parts of the Commedia.

When Dante and Virgil look down on the sea of ​​flames of the punished souls in the eighth circle of hell, the circle of hell of the language abusers, they discover a double flame that arouses Dante's passionate curiosity. As Virgil already knows, it is Odysseus and Diomedes who together atone for their crimes before Troy. When the flame approaches, Dante only wants to know one thing: how Odysseus died. Then the voice of Odysseus sounds from the flame, telling the story of his new self-conception and his downfall as if it were an elaborated sculpture of his memory.

After Odysseus has freed himself from the magic of the Circe, who held him captive on her island for more than a year, instead of returning to Ithaca, he wants to explore the whole of the western as yet unknown Mediterranean "per divenir del mondo esperto" (about the world knowledgeable to become). Finally, with his companions, old and tired, arrived at the extreme end of the Mediterranean, where Hercules erected two pillars to set a sign at the end of the inhabited world, “afin che l'uom più oltre non si metta”, so that people would not get away venture beyond that, he finally wants to return home. He has already turned the ship around when suddenly, in a flash of his ingenuity, the unprecedented possibility of crossing the border and exploring the "mondo sanza gente", the deserted world, and, like Dante's alter ego, venturing into the absolutely open dare.

With a short, passionate speech, which Carlo Levi brought to new life, he ignited his companions to youthful fire. The ship now turns once more to a triumphant “più oltre”: “And with the stern facing east, we turned the oars into wings for a crazy flight.” The ship is drifting more and more to the south until it finally, perhaps in front of the Purgatory island, which is at the same time the island of the earthly paradise, from where Adam was once expelled, is torn down by a storm at the behest of the unnamed God.

In the imaginary, Dante opens the path that Columbus will take.

The “più oltre non”, which “no further” becomes (in bad Latin) a “plus ultra”, the great gesture of Charles V's discovery of the world, in which Adam's original gesture, the “trapassar del segno”, is crossing of the sign, repeated, with which Adam lost Paradise and won the world.

Karlheinz Stierle

taught Romance studies in Konstanz until his retirement.

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