Pubblicata in Gradiva: Rivista internazionale di poesia italiana, n. 60, autunno 2021, pp. 21-33, nella sezione: "Speciale Dante in occasione del settimo centenario 1321-2021"; traduzione di Maria Silvia Riccio di “Escape from Paradise,” Twelve Winters Journal, vol. 1, 2021: https://twelvewinters.com/matteo-escape-from-paradise/.  Ringrazio Alessandro Carrera, Editor-in-Chief di Gradiva, e Luigi Fontanella, Senior Editor, per la pubblicazione e per il permesso di riprodurre il testo qui.

FUGA DAL PARADISO

Traduzione dal franco-veneto di Mathieu Toussaint

A Donna Laura de Noves, Contessa de Sade,

Riservata a lei sola

Donna Laura, permettimi di darti un consiglio: muori e scappa!

Ha funzionato per me e potrebbe funzionare anche per te.

In realtà non sono affatto morta, ho solo finto di esserlo, ma la messinscena mi ha permesso di sottrarmi a una vita che si era fatta intollerabile.

Perdona il mio ardire, ma da quanto mi è stato detto, la tua situazione parrebbe essere simile a quella in cui ebbi a trovarmi io, e forse anche tu potresti accogliere con favore la prospettiva di scappare. Se la tua situazione familiare lo consente, il mio stratagemma potrebbe essere d’aiuto anche a te.

Tu ed io non ci siamo mai incontrate: so di te tramite mio nipote che vive ad Avignone e conosce la tua famiglia, ed è possibile che tu sappia di me, probabilmente non attraverso mio nipote, che ha giurato di mantenere il segreto su di me, ma per aver letto il mio nome in versi. Prima di fuggire da Firenze per diventare un’altra persona, io ero infatti Beatrice Portinari. Sì, la Beatrice cantata da Dante Alighieri, le cui opere sono conosciute anche ad Avignone tra i fiorentini che là risiedono.

Mio nipote mi racconta che anche tu scrivi versi – brava! – e che conosci le poesie d’amore scritte da Dante, come pure la Commedia, nonostante sia stata bandita dalla Chiesa per le critiche che muove contro il Pontificato e per aver collocato diversi papi all’Inferno, anche Clemente V, il primo pontefice avignonese. Se conosci la Commedia, saprai che a me Dante ha affidato il ruolo di guidarlo dal Purgatorio al Paradiso.

Mio nipote, il tuo vicino, mi ha parlato della tua situazione. Sua madre era mia sorella – la più giovane di quelle che furono cinque sorelle amorevoli e amabili, che Dio le abbia in gloria! – che era andata in sposa a uno dei guelfi bianchi esiliati da Firenze nel 1302, tra i quali figuravano anche Dante e l’amico suo, Ser Petracco, che sarebbe poi divenuto il tuo vicino ad Avignone.

Mia sorella e il marito si trasferirono ad Arezzo insieme alla famiglia Petracco. Il figlio di mia sorella vi nacque nel 1304, nello stesso anno in cui nacque il figlio di Ser Petracco, Francesco – il poeta che, per ragioni a me ignote, è conosciuto da tutti come Petrarca.

Entrambe le famiglie si spostarono poi ad Avignone, la città in cui il Papa si era trasferito con la sua corte nel 1309. Mio nipote è cresciuto insieme a Francesco e sono rimasti buoni amici, e così gli ha sentito recitare i versi italiani in cui canta le tue lodi e la sua adorazione per te. Le poesie, mi dice, sono state distribuite tra gli amici, che a loro volta le hanno trascritte per farne dono ad altri amici, nello stesso modo in cui Dante aveva fatto circolare le poesie a me dedicate.

Mio nipote mi ha consegnato copie delle poesie di Francesco: era curioso di sapere se trovassi delle somiglianze tra la Laura del Petrarca e la Beatrice di Dante. Sostiene che Francesco voglia oscurare la stella di Dante e superarlo per fama e onori; io che conoscevo il padre e il resto della famiglia Petracco non fatico a crederci: sono una genìa ambiziosa. Mia sorella mi aveva confermato che, con il trasferimento ad Avignone, Petracco ed Eletta aspiravano a guadagnarsi il favore del Papa e della sua corte per ottenere gloria e fama per quel figlio tanto dotato, che già in tenera età spiccava per la sua intelligenza. È così dunque che ho saputo della tua situazione, e l’affinità con la mia situazione di un tempo mi spinge a condividere la mia storia con te, nella speranza che possa esserti d’aiuto.

Non fui mai la Beatrice descritta nella poesia di Dante. La guisa in cui mi si presenta nei suoi scritti è falsa, dannatamente falsa, e le conseguenze delle sue parole sulla mia vita furono devastanti. A un certo punto, l’unico rimedio rimastomi era la fuga da Firenze, in quanto, dedicandomi poesie e canti che attiravano attenzione e discredito su di me, il signor Durante Alighieri mi aveva reso la vita impossibile. Non potevo andare al mercato o in chiesa senza che al mio passaggio si ammiccasse, senza che mi si criticasse o deridesse.

Come se non bastasse, la situazione si era fatta veramente intollerabile perché mio marito, Simone di Bardi, ricco e potente banchiere avvezzo ad avere l’ultima parola su ogni faccenda e il controllo su tutte le persone che gli ruotavano intorno, estremamente infastidito dalla notorietà impostami da quei versi amorosi, era diventato geloso e aveva cominciato ad accusarmi di infedeltà. Si era convinto che dovessi essere stata io a illudere i miei “ammiratori”, a sedurli, così aveva finito per limitare i miei spostamenti e scegliere gli abiti che potevo indossare e, non pago, mi insultava con le parole e con gli atti in modo sempre più crudele e violento. Arrivò anche a picchiarmi, prima a mani nude, poi anche con il bastone o con il frustino se erano a portata di mano.

La mia vita era un inferno, e tutto a causa di un poeta presuntuoso e incosciente che non ne voleva sapere di lasciarmi in pace, e mi impediva di vivere la vita di una giovane donna qualsiasi, perché si era messo in testa di eleggermi a ideale, dipingendomi come un angelo inarrivabile il cui nome, Beatrice, doveva per forza essere anche una funzione, uno scopo esistenziale, la manifestazione della Provvidenza la quale, tramite me, distribuiva beatitudine. Io non avevo alcun desiderio di essere innalzata a una perfezione tale, né di incarnare un ruolo simile! L’unico mio desiderio era essere una persona qualsiasi e poter vivere la mia vita: questa vita, gli anni che ci sono concessi sulla terra, e di poterlo fare in salute, non con i segni delle percosse su tutto il corpo.

Se Dante si fosse tenuto le poesie per sé, io non avrei mai saputo che ruolo mi avesse dato, né lo avrebbero saputo altri. Oppure, se le avesse consegnate solo a me, io le avrei bruciate e avrei preteso che non ne scrivesse altre, o che scegliesse un’altra donna, o perlomeno un altro nome, per i suoi versi. Ma no, Dante aveva dovuto condividere le sue opere con altri, con persone che mi conoscevano e che mio marito conosceva, senza nemmeno pensare alla sofferenza di cui ti ho già detto, senza curarsi che la sua avventatezza potesse arrivare a costarmi la vita!

Il sollievo l’ho trovato nella morte. Lascia che ti spieghi.

Mio padre morì alla fine del 1289 durante uno dei periodi di pestilenza che si verificano di tanto in tanto. La sua morte rendeva la mia situazione ancora più pericolosa, privandomi di quel poco di protezione che poteva venirmi da lui. Ma siccome a portarlo via era stata la peste, a una delle mie sorelle venne un’idea: se avessimo inscenato la mia morte attribuendola alla stessa causa, non sarei forse potuta fuggire senza temere di essere rintracciata? Per paura del contagio, tutti evitavano gli appestati, veri o presunti, per cui le mie sorelle lasciarono trapelare che, nel prendermi cura di nostro padre, anche io ero stata contagiata dalla peste, e questo servì a tenere tutti alla larga da me, compreso mio marito: che io fossi malata, morta o persino sepolta, nessuno si sarebbe sognato di venire a verificare con i suoi occhi. I beccamorti che vennero a prendermi per la sepoltura non seppero mai che nella bara che portarono via c’era il cadavere di una pecora. E così, nella primavera del 1290, Beatrice Portinari in Bardi morì, e io lasciai Firenze per cominciare una vita nuova.

Quella nuova vita, però, era assai diversa da quel che Dante illustra nella Vita nuova, l’opera scritta dopo la mia “morte”, che probabilmente avrai letto. Non avevo lasciato questa terra per salire in cielo. La mia dimora non è il paradiso; io abito a Venezia – una città che per molti è quanto di più distante dal paradiso ci sia al mondo, mentre diversi veneziani potrebbero controbattere che è quanto di più simile al paradiso si trovi in terra. In ogni caso, paradisiaca o infernale che fosse, Venezia per me era il miglior rifugio possibile: una popolosa città di mare con un porto mercantile in cui viaggiatori e forestieri andavano e venivano era il posto migliore in cui mescolarsi alla folla per poi sparire dopo la fuga da Firenze, che è invece una città dove tutti si conoscono.

Senza dare nell’occhio e con un altro nome, in pochi anni a Venezia ero riuscita a costruirmi un’altra identità, sposandomi – di fatto ero bigama, sì – con uno dei Polo, i mercanti che ora molti conoscono. L’uomo che avevo sposato era il cugino di Marco Polo; nessuno sapeva chi fosse allora, ma Marco sarebbe presto diventato famoso per aver raccontato le terre sconosciute del lontano Oriente in cui aveva viaggiato insieme al padre e allo zio. All’epoca del mio matrimonio, i tre non erano ancora tornati da un viaggio che durava da oltre due decenni, tanto che si pensava fossero morti. Quando invece fecero ritorno a Venezia, io mi ero già trasferita altrove e non ebbi mai occasione di conoscerli di persona. Mi dicono che circolino molte copie e traduzioni del libro in cui si parla delle loro esperienze e presumo che tu stessa lo conosca.

Quel secondo matrimonio mi portò ancor più lontano da Firenze, sulle rotte commerciali veneziane, verso città affacciate sul Mar Nero e sul Mar Caspio, al riparo da occhi che avrebbero potuto riconoscermi. Tornai a Venezia solo dopo la morte del mio secondo marito, ma a quel punto ero troppo vecchia per attirare l’attenzione ed essere riconosciuta. Anche Dante era morto, e così il cugino Marco Polo. Devo ammettere che la notizia della morte precoce di Dante mi aveva addolorata; dopo tutto eravamo stati bambini insieme, e si ha sempre un po’ di nostalgia per la propria infanzia. Inoltre, non potevo non pensare che mi aveva amata, anche se di un amore per me inaccettabile, e che per lui ero stata importante – troppo importante, e nel modo sbagliato.

Mi dissero che era morto non molto tempo dopo essersi recato qui, a Venezia, in missione come ambasciatore del signore di Ravenna, e che in quell’occasione aveva fatto in modo di incontrare il cugino Marco, e la loro conversazione sembra sia stata una delle ultime per lui. Si era ammalato a Venezia, o forse nelle paludi che la separano da Ravenna, ed era morto a pochi giorni di distanza.

Che curiosa coincidenza che, dopo aver finito la stesura del Paradiso e aver fatto raggiungere all’anima la fine del suo percorso, la beatitudine eterna, la vita dello stesso Dante si dovesse interrompere proprio a Venezia, la città più mondana che ci sia, in quel suo pullulare di tutte le distrazioni e le tentazioni peccaminose che sbarrano la strada per il Paradiso! E non posso fare a meno di chiedermi cosa sarebbe successo se io e mio marito avessimo deciso di tornare a Venezia prima di quel momento, e io mi fossi trovata faccia a faccia con l’ospite di Marco, Dante. Mi avrebbe riconosciuta? Chi poteva immaginare che sarei entrata a far parte della famiglia Polo e che Dante sarebbe venuto a conoscere Marco e a confrontarsi con lui?

Ma mettiamo da parte queste speculazioni oziose e torniamo ai nostri moutons, come dite da quella parte delle Alpi – un’espressione che mi piace e che tendo a usare io stessa, perché la lana era una delle merci più importanti tra quelle che commerciavamo.

Non era la prima volta che Marco e Dante si incontravano. Si erano già visti a Padova, una quindicina d’anni prima, a qualche anno di distanza da quando il libro di Marco – scritto nella tua lingua, mi dicono – aveva cominciato a circolare, non molto tempo dopo la cacciata di Dante da Firenze, all’inizio del secolo. La fama del libro di Marco era già molto vasta allora, mentre gli scritti di Dante probabilmente non erano ancora così conosciuti come lo sono ora, o perlomeno non fuori da Firenze, e non oltre quella cerchia di letterati che leggevano gli uni le opere degli altri e se le passavano tra loro. Probabilmente Dante non aveva ancora nemmeno cominciato a scrivere la Commedia a quel punto, e potrebbe essere che sia stato proprio l’incontro con Marco a fargliene venire l’idea.

Dante venne mandato in esilio da Firenze nel 1302 (insieme ad alcuni dei fiorentini che vivono vicino a te, ad Avignone, inclusa mia sorella e la sua famiglia) e vagò di città in città per diversi anni. Si trovava a Padova quando Pietro D’Abano venne nominato professore all’università, nel 1306. Era stato lo stesso Pietro, che aveva letto le prime parti del Convivio, a invitare Dante perché prendesse parte a un seminario in cui si sarebbe discusso di filosofia aristotelica e di cosmologia con gli studenti; Dante, dal canto suo, conosceva i testi medici e filosofici di Pietro D’Abano e accettò l’invito. Stando a quanto racconta la figlia di Marco Polo, anche suo padre aveva preso parte alle discussioni che si tennero in quell’occasione. Forse non hai mai sentito nominare Pietro D’Abano: mi dicono che i suoi scritti siano stati considerati eretici e che leggerli o discuterne sia proibito, specialmente là dove risiede il Papa con la sua corte. Le sue idee invece sono piuttosto note e apprezzate qui a Venezia, in parte perché Padova e Abano, il suo paese d’origine, sono qui vicino; in parte perché ai veneziani piace farsi beffe dell’autorità papale ogni volta che possono permetterselo. Io sono venuta a sapere di lui e dei suoi scritti perché la famiglia Polo lo tiene in grande considerazione per essere stato tra i primi studiosi importanti e influenti a sostenere e a promuovere il libro di Marco e, di conseguenza, lo considera un amico di famiglia. Raccontano che, dopo aver letto Le Devisement du monde a Costantinopoli, dove era andato a stabilirsi per molti anni con l’intento di imparare il greco e l’arabo e di studiare testi non disponibili in latino, questo grande studioso fosse partito alla volta di Venezia solo per incontrare Marco, in parte per accertarsi della veridicità di quanto si racconta nel libro, ma anche per soddisfare curiosità di cui nel libro non si dice, con l’intento di approfondire la sua conoscenza alla ricerca di elementi che potessero validare i suoi studi e le sue ipotesi sulla terra e sul cosmo.

Quando venne chiamato a insegnare all’Università di Padova, Pietro ebbe nuove occasioni per incontrare Marco e continuare a discutere con lui. Marco era ospite di Pietro quando Dante andò a Padova, e si unì alle loro discussioni all’università, insieme agli studenti, durante i pasti in casa di Pietro, nel corso di lunghe passeggiate per le strade della città e durante varie visite alla vicina Cappella degli Scrovegni, dove il pittore fiorentino Giotto aveva appena terminato un ciclo di affreschi.

Dante era particolarmente desideroso di vedere gli affreschi, avendo conosciuto Giotto in gioventù. Giotto aveva la nostra età e avevamo avuto modo di conoscerlo dopo il suo arrivo a Firenze, dove era venuto per lavorare come apprendista nella bottega di Cimabue. Ci si incontrava spesso in città, in occasione di raduni o di eventi. Il modo di dipingere di Giotto mi era piaciuto subito e mi aveva entusiasmato sapere che la stima e la fama che si era guadagnato fossero così grandi da procurargli una commissione così importante in un’altra città. Ero anche segretamente orgogliosa che un fiorentino che avevo conosciuto in gioventù avesse fatto così tanta strada – segretamente, perché non potevo darlo a vedere. Così spronavo i miei famigliari a raccontarmi quei conversari per sentire notizie di Dante e di Giotto, ma davo loro ad intendere che il mio interesse si concentrasse principalmente sul contributo di Marco alle discussioni. Però, più ascoltavo il racconto di quel che diceva Marco, più i suoi concetti mi incuriosivano, e finii col rendermi conto di quanto fosse importante quel suo libro, al punto da convincermi che potesse aver influenzato il pensiero di Dante in modo significativo, anche se dubito che si sappia.

Quando, molto tempo dopo, ebbi modo di vedere gli affreschi di Giotto, mi fu chiaro che dovevano essere stati una cornice proficua per Dante, Marco e Pietro D’Abano. C’era qualcosa di familiare nel modo di dipingere di Giotto, qualcosa che mi ricordava quel che dipingeva nella bottega di Cimabue: penso che avrei riconosciuto la sua mano anche se non avessi saputo che l’opera era sua. C’era però anche qualcosa di diverso, non saprei dire bene cosa. Le scene dipinte avevano più consistenza, una maggiore imponenza fisica. I corpi sembravano avere solidità e peso; le persone, i paesaggi e gli edifici sembravano essere inseriti nella fisicità del mondo, piuttosto che fluttuare senza peso in una dimensione eterea. Se insisto nel provare a descrivere qualcosa su cui non ho una preparazione adeguata è perché ritengo che il dibattito tra Marco e Dante si sia soffermato soprattutto sulla corporeità che a quel punto percepivo negli affreschi di Giotto: la distinzione e la relazione tra il corpo e l’anima.

In un certo senso, era un’eco delle nostre discussioni di gioventù. Quando Cimabue portò Giotto a Firenze come suo apprendista, Giotto si unì presto a una cerchia di giovani della nostra età, tra cui c’era anche Dante. Eravamo incantati da un giovane filosofo e poeta di qualche anno più grande di noi, Guido Cavalcanti. Le ragazze in effetti non partecipavano direttamente alle discussioni, ma io avevo avuto modo di farmene un’idea abbastanza precisa sentendone parlare. Ero affascinata da quel che mi veniva riferito – anche un po’ scandalizzata, in verità, ma questo mi affascinava ancor più. A Guido piaceva lasciare le persone a bocca aperta quando citava le idee non cristiane del cosiddetto Commentatore Moresco, Averroè. Guido suggeriva la possibilità che non ci fosse alcuna anima personale e nessuna vita oltre la morte così come la concepiamo noi. Sosteneva persino la sconcertante idea che le donne dovessero avere un ruolo negli affari pubblici e nell’amministrazione, idea che io trovavo particolarmente attraente. Questa cerchia di giovani ammiratori, tra cui Dante e Giotto, lo stimava e lo ammirava per il suo vasto sapere unito a un’intelligenza vivace, e per la sua arguzia – le ragazze anche perché era molto avvenente, forse soprattutto per questo. (Devo ammettere che mi è rimasto impresso anche perché aveva sposato una mia omonima, Beatrice degli Uberti, di una delle famiglie fiorentine più in vista, che io avevo molto invidiato).

Dante si era molto affezionato a Guido, e lo aveva eletto a sua guida e mentore. Erano stati molto legati per lungo tempo, e so che il dissidio su questioni politiche, filosofiche e teologiche che li allontanò uno dall’altro doveva essere stato tremendo per entrambi. Rimasi sconvolta quando seppi da mia sorella che, da Priore, Dante aveva esiliato il suo amico da Firenze. E chissà che senso di colpa schiacciante doveva aver provato quando Guido era morto di lì a pochi mesi! Mi chiedo se, due anni dopo, avesse vissuto il suo stesso esilio dall’amata Firenze come un castigo per aver tradito l’amico.

Il loro allontanamento si verificò molto tempo dopo la mia fuga da Firenze, e ne parlo perché penso che siano state le idee di Guido a farmi progressivamente perdere la fede, o perlomeno quella che viene insegnata dalla Chiesa. Il mio punto di vista e le mie convinzioni continuarono a cambiare quando ebbi modo di vedere il mondo con l’occhio del mercante e del viaggiatore, proprio come Marco Polo. La mia “trasformazione” si deve anche al fatto di aver vissuto a lungo tra i cosiddetti “infedeli”, il che mi aveva permesso di rendermi conto che le loro convinzioni erano salde quanto le nostre e la loro vita non era né migliore né peggiore a causa del loro credo.

Adesso che ci penso, suppongo che questo mio cedere allo scetticismo possa servire come prova che le paure di Dante erano fondate, e dimostrare che seguire le tracce di Marco Polo, adottando un punto di vista concentrato sul commercio, avrebbe veramente potuto indurre le persone a mettere in discussione il dogma che la Chiesa ci inculca dalla nascita fino ad abbandonarlo del tutto.

Ecco, mi rendo conto di aver divagato. Tornando a quell’incontro a Padova, da quanto ho potuto dedurre, quelle discussioni con Pietro e Marco dovevano aver portato Dante a rivedere le sue convinzioni filosofiche, cosmologiche e teologiche, e a modificare di conseguenza quel che aveva in mente di scrivere. Fu in quel frangente che decise di abbandonare la stesura del Convivio a cui lavorava da tempo, per dedicarsi a comporre un lungo poema sul cammino che conduce alla salvezza dell’anima. Ritengo che quello che arrivò a chiamare Commedia dovesse servire come una sorta di antidoto al Devisement du monde di Marco, un libro che Dante doveva aver considerato alla stregua di un veleno in grado di distogliere dalla destinazione divina e di condurre alla perdizione le persone incantate dalla descrizione delle meraviglie e delle ricchezze incontrate da un uomo nel corso di un viaggio terreno. Il fascino e l’attrattiva delle meraviglie descritte da Marco avrebbero portato le persone a concentrarsi su faccende terrene piuttosto che su questioni divine e a tenere in maggior conto il benessere materiale rispetto agli obiettivi spirituali, a preferire la salvezza del corpo a quella dell’anima. Si era perciò risolto a descrivere un viaggio diverso e “migliore”, che parlasse del percorso dell’anima verso il Paradiso non attraverso il commercio e l’acquisizione di ricchezze materiali, ma per mezzo della fede e della grazia.

Dal suo punto di vista, la strada per la salvezza eterna era più utile della descrizione dei viaggi di un mercante alla ricerca delle ricchezze materiali, delle meraviglie naturali e dei progressi sociali di parti del mondo sconosciute. Quel che di più agghiacciante e minaccioso doveva aver trovato nei racconti di Marco era l’esistenza di regioni del mondo fino ad allora ignote dove la parola di Cristo non era mai arrivata; dove, tredici secoli dopo la diffusione del Vangelo, non si sapeva nemmeno chi fosse, il Cristo. Com’era possibile? Quel che doveva essergli parso ancora più sbalorditivo è che il racconto di queste regioni sconfinate che non conoscevano il Cristo narrava di popoli più prosperosi, più civili e più contenti dei cristiani di casa nostra, e doveva aver deciso che quel libro poteva solo condurre al dubbio o alla disperazione. Era perciò suo dovere fornire un’alternativa e mostrare un’altra via in grado di restituire fede e speranza.

Potrebbe non essere stata solo una forte antipatia per le descrizioni delle meraviglie di questo mondo raccontate da Marco a spingere Dante nell’impresa di scrivere la Commedia. Dopotutto, era Pietro D’Abano ad aver organizzato le loro discussioni, delle quali è plausibile che fosse anche il principale animatore. È probabile che Dante si fosse fatto convincere da alcune delle idee di Pietro riguardo al cosmo, sostenute dall’ammirazione che entrambi nutrivano per Aristotele. Ad ogni modo, al termine di quegli incontri, Dante abbandonò il Convivio dopo aver composto e spiegato solo tre delle canzoni che si era ripromesso di scrivere. A questo riguardo mio nipote una volta disse scherzando che, prima che il banchetto fosse finito, Dante aveva lasciato il convivio per andare all’Inferno; gli avevo fatto notare che però era andato anche in Paradiso, perché la stessa strada portava a entrambe le destinazioni.

Dopo le discussioni di Padova, quindi, Dante aveva cominciato a comporre il favoloso racconto di un viaggio fisico, che avrebbe coinvolto il corpo, ma anche spirituale, in quanto avrebbe narrato il percorso dal peccato alla beatitudine. Sul suo cammino si sarebbe trovato ad attraversare luoghi fisici: l’Inferno, situato sottoterra; la montagna del Purgatorio che si trova dall’altra parte del globo, e il Paradiso con stelle e pianeti visibili nel cielo sopra di noi. Ma questi sono anche luoghi spirituali dell’aldilà, popolati dalle anime dei defunti. Il viaggio da intraprendere non sarebbe stato come quello di Marco che si svolgeva sulla superficie della Terra, con occhi e menti fissate solo su cose mondane; no, avrebbe dovuto guardare attraverso le tentazioni di questo mondo per concentrarsi sulla ricompensa, la salvezza dell’anima. Il viaggio non sarebbe servito a scoprire e a magnificare le meraviglie di questo mondo, quanto piuttosto a fuggirne.

E chi mai sarebbe stato l’araldo di Dio, il messaggero di grazia con il compito di guidare Dante nel suo cammino se non Beatrice?! Forse scelse proprio quel nome per via del significato, colei che rende beati, ma la sua Beatrice non è un’astrazione, rappresenta una persona reale, con un corpo e una mente; non è solo un’idea, ma una donna precisa con una storia personale e un’identità: la mia. Dante scelse me come dispensatrice di beatitudine.

Cose dell’altro mondo! Se solo avesse saputo che la sua angelica Beatrice, colei che doveva guidare la sua anima verso la “salvezza” ultraterrena, era entrata a far parte di una famiglia, quella dei Polo, la cui occupazione principale era l’esplorazione e lo sfruttamento delle risorse e delle “benedizioni” del mondo terreno, altro che trascendenza! La sua Beatrice beata e beatificante altri non era se non la moglie di un mercante, abile mercante lei stessa! Avrei potuto veramente fare da guida, tra le voci di un libro mastro, però, non certo per mostrare a qualcuno la strada verso il Paradiso facendogli chiudere gli occhi su questo mondo.

Sto divagando, dev’essere l’età: ho finito per spingermi molto lontano dal discorso da cui ero partita e per perdere di vista la ragione per cui ti scrivo. Mi dispiace, ma faccio parte della famiglia Polo da troppo tempo per non cedere all’impulso di divagare o, per dirla con Dante, di ritrovarmi «in una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita».

Di divagazione in divagazione, mi preme chiederti venia per il modo in cui mi esprimo in questa lettera, e per il disordine con cui la scrivo. Di norma l’avrei dettata a uno scrivano che avrebbe saputo scegliere i termini più appropriati e cortesi per rivolgersi al destinatario, correggere i miei errori e riordinare i miei pensieri sconclusionati mettendoli in fila. Ma la segretezza che si conviene a questo scritto mi ha indotto a prendere carta e penna e a scriverti di mio pugno, così ti chiedo di essere indulgente e di perdonare le digressioni e i numerosi errori che questa missiva sicuramente contiene.

Per tornare alla ragione che mi ha spinto a scrivere, io temo che tu possa essere alle prese con lo stesso dilemma che dovetti affrontare io tanto tempo fa, quando ero idolatrata e idealizzata da un poeta, derisa da buona parte della società di cui facevo parte, maltrattata e vessata da mio marito e dalla sua famiglia. Mi chiedo se, avendoti idealizzata contro la tua volontà al pari di una figura “angelica” con attributi ultraterreni, Francesco Petrarca non abbia reso la tua esistenza tanto grama quanto lo era stata la mia. E se davvero tu sei derelitta quanto lo ero io, forse il rimedio che avevo escogitato per me potrebbe servire anche a te.

La mia fuga risale a più di cinquant’anni fa; una volta lasciata Firenze, la vita ha cominciato a sorridermi e, prosperando, sono serenamente approdata alla vecchiaia. Tornare a vivere fuori dalla poesia (in particolare fuori dal Paradiso, diversamente da quel che il poeta a me devoto aveva immaginato per me) era stata una liberazione e un sollievo. La fuga mi aveva dato la libertà di vivere la mia vita a modo mio; non del tutto, ovviamente, perché tutte le società impongono restrizioni e obblighi, ma certamente con libertà maggiore rispetto a quella che avrei avuto a Firenze.

Ma perché non riescono a lasciarci in pace, questi poeti? Cosa li induce a pensare che possiamo sentirci al sicuro, o addirittura a nostro agio e felici, appollaiate su quei ridicoli trespoli che erigono per noi, pensando di farlo in nostro onore e a nostra futura gloria, quando invece è per disfarsi di noi e tenerci alla larga dalle funzioni e dalle istituzioni della vita sociale, così da non lasciarci alcuna voce in capitolo su come vivere le nostre vite? «Guardate – ci dicono – vi abbiamo elevato a un rango molto più importante del nostro, su su fino in Paradiso. Adesso però non vi muovete, sorridete beate e tacete!». Devo ammettere che mi sono sentita molto più soddisfatta e contenta quando sono stata coinvolta negli affari del mio secondo marito e quando ho avuto modo di occuparmene direttamente dopo la sua morte.

Ma ancora più fastidiose sono le voci che mio nipote mi ha riferito su tuo marito, il conte Hugues de Sade: dice che sei costretta a sopportare torture fisiche e mentali, supplizi viziosi e crudeltà – tutto questo, se confermato, farebbe impallidire le percosse e le abiezioni che io ebbi a sopportare dal mio primo marito al confronto. Mio nipote non sa dire se le attenzioni e l’esaltazione di Francesco per la tua bellezza e i tuoi divini attributi siano la causa di questo comportamento o se le poesie semplicemente forniscano a tuo marito una scusa per scatenare tendenze aberranti che si tramandano nella sua famiglia; mi racconta che circolano da tempo dicerie in merito a strani avvenimenti occorsi nel castello in cui dimorano i de Sade.

In ogni caso, che queste orrende voci siano giustificate o meno, se anche a te riesce insopportabile trovarti tra due fuochi, così come lo ero io, attaccata su due fronti: idealizzata nell’astrazione di un poeta con la testa tra le nuvole e brutalizzata in maniera abbietta e squallida da un coniuge violento, allora potrebbe esserti utile prendere spunto dalla soluzione che io trovai per me. Se aveva funzionato per me, perché non potrebbe funzionare anche per te?

Il momento sembra propizio affinché uno stratagemma di questo tipo possa funzionare. Qui a Venezia gira voce che dalle coste del Mediterraneo stia per attraversare il mare e sbarcare anche in Italia una terribile pestilenza; si dice che sia la peggiore mai vista e che si abbatterà con particolare ferocia sulle città molto popolose – come Venezia e Firenze, ahimè! Qualcuno la chiama “peste nera”.

Se queste voci si riveleranno corrette, in realtà, “propizio” potrebbe non essere il termine più appropriato; la minaccia di una peste in arrivo è un pericolo niente affatto “propizio”, casomai infausto, eppure potrebbe fornirti le circostanze necessarie ad attuare il piano che fu il mio. Se le voci dell’imminente arrivo di una peste catastrofica dovessero essere confermate dai fatti, la morte potrebbe liberarti comunque, in un modo o nell’altro, mettendo fine alla tua vita o a quella dei tuoi aguzzini. In ogni caso, per assicurarti la libertà senza lasciarla al caso, ti consiglio vivamente di fare quel che feci anche io e di prendere al volo l’opportunità di usare la peste per inscenare la tua morte e ricominciare altrove a vivere la tua vita di donna nei panni di un’altra. Buona fortuna!

Luce (che un tempo fu Bice)

Nota del Ricercatore/traduttore

Mi sono imbattuto in questa lettera mentre mi dedicavo ad alcune ricerche sugli antenati del Marchese de Sade (1740-1814). Le mie indagini miravano a determinare se e in quale misura le inclinazioni “libertine” a cui viene associato, inclusi comportamenti e patologie che da lui prendono il nome, come “sadismo” e “sadomasochismo”, fossero: 1, inventate ex novo dal marchese; 2, determinate dagli usi e costumi della società in cui viveva; 3, ereditate, tramandate da una generazione all’altra all’interno della stessa famiglia, e 4, se “ereditate”, in quale modo: geneticamente, attraverso tratti caratteriali ereditari, o culturalmente, per mezzo di tradizioni, istruzioni ed emulazione?

È stata questa ricerca a condurmi agli archivi del conte Hugues de Sade (circa 13001364), un antenato del Marchese del diciottesimo secolo, e in quegli archivi era nascosta la corrispondenza, mai rinvenuta fino ad allora, della sua prima moglie, Laura de Noves, in cui era conservata anche questa lettera. Se fosse autentica, la lettera non solo proverebbe che Laura de Noves era proprio la Laura cantata dal Petrarca e che Beatrice Portinari era la Beatrice di cui parla Dante, ma rivelerebbe anche – cosa ancor più importante – che Beatrice non era morta a Firenze nel 1290, come risulta agli atti, ma che era vissuta altrove ancora per molti anni.

Siccome la lettera è stata rinvenuta in una custodia in cui si direbbe non sia stata disturbata da nessuno fin dal tempo in cui fu scritta, sono convinto che sia autentica. Tuttavia, mi rendo conto che questo ritrovamento potrebbe suscitare non poco scetticismo, e ho pertanto consultato esperti estranei al mio ramo di studi per farmi aiutare a determinare l’autenticità del documento.

Gli storici della lingua che ho consultato sono giunti alla conclusione che la lettera debba essere stata composta da un mercante veneziano in un idioma franco-italico che all’epoca veniva usato come lingua franca per gli scambi epistolari tra diverse parti d’Europa. Era più facile che fossero i mercanti come i Polo di Venezia a saper leggere e scrivere piuttosto che i nobili, spesso costretti a farsi leggere e scrivere la corrispondenza dagli scrivani. Secondo gli storici, la quantità di errori grammaticali e stranezze lessicali presente in questa lettera sarebbe stata molto più contenuta se a scriverla fosse stato uno scrivano, il quale avrebbe anche evitato le numerose espressioni idiomatiche veneziane che qui punteggiano la lingua franco-italica comunemente impiegata in epistole simili; tutto questo avvalora la possibilità che la lettera sia veramente stata scritta da Beatrice/ Luce.

Con l’aiuto di alcuni archivisti veneziani, ho trovato traccia documentale di un matrimonio combinato nel 1295 tra Luce Brexian, di cui è riportato l’anno di nascita, il 1265, ma non il luogo di nascita né i riferimenti alla famiglia di provenienza, anche se il cognome parrebbe suggerire come luogo d’origine Brescia (che è plausibile fosse stato scelto dalla nostra presunta Beatrice per confondere le tracce del suo legame con Firenze) e Andrea Polo (1252- 1327), cugino di Marco Polo, che aveva vissuto a Sudak, l’antica Soldaia, situata nella penisola di Crimea sulla sponda settentrionale del Mar Nero, al tempo in cui era uno dei remoti centri di scambio della famiglia Polo. I dati d’archivio riportano anche che la prima moglie di Andrea, Caterina, era morta di parto nel 1293 a Sudak, e che, una volta vedovo, Andrea aveva chiesto ai parenti a Venezia di trovargli una nuova moglie da sposare per procura e di organizzare il viaggio della novella sposa fino a Sudak. Dai documenti in archivio si evince che Andrea Polo e Luce si erano sposati e avevano vissuto a Sudak fino al 1327, l’anno della morte di Andrea. Cinque anni dopo la morte del marito si trova traccia di Luce in alcuni atti notarili da cui si deduce che era tornata a Venezia con una figlia, Donata, che, stando agli atti di matrimonio, nello stesso anno risulta essere andata in sposa a Bartolomeo da Canal – un matrimonio probabilmente combinato prima del rientro da Sudak.

Questi dati d’archivio non sono una prova inoppugnabile che Luce Brexian in Polo fosse la fu Beatrice Portinari, né che fosse l’autrice della lettera, ma forniscono una fonte documentale circostanziata molto interessante a supporto di quella possibilità, sufficientemente credibile da spingermi a pubblicarla.

Mathieu Toussaint, Avignone, Francia

Nota aggiunta

Chi volesse contattare il Professor Mathieu Toussaint per chiedergli maggiori informazioni sul suo straordinario ritrovamento dovrà prima di tutto invertire il suo nome in omaggio a St. Mathieu, e cercarlo poi non solo ad Avignone ma tra il corpo docente emerito del dipartimento di francese ed italiano di un’università del Midwest che ha la peculiarità di avere lo stesso nome di una città che non si trova in quello stato, nonché di trovarsi in una città che ha lo stesso nome di una celebre sede universitaria inglese. Traduzione italiana di Maria Silvia Riccio.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter, and Keep Hope Alive!

On Mis/Translating the Most Famous Verse of the Divine Comedy

Sante Matteo

HORS D’OEUVRE

But before ye enter into this essay, let’s start things off with a pop quiz—just two questions: a little antipasto before the main course!

First, a language question:

Choose the correct English translation of this sentence: Finite ogni fagiolo voi che mangiate qui.

A. Finish each bean, you who are eating here!

B. Those of you who regularly eat here, make sure you finish every bean!

C. You who routinely eat here always finish every bean.

D. Those of you who are eating here are finishing all the beans.

E. Those of you who usually eat here are now finishing every bean.

F. You who are eating here always finish all the beans.

G. All of the above.

The correct answer is G: all the proposed translations are correct approximations. In form, both finite and mangiate can be either imperative or indicative. In this particular sentence, however, mangiate can only be indicative—You (you all, plural) eat/are eating—and only finite can be both imperative—Finish (all of you)! or indicative: You finish/are finishing. In the indicative mood, both finite and mangiate can be either the simple present—you finish . . . eat (regularly, all the time)--or the progressive present—you are (in the process of) finishing . . . eating (now). For the second person plural (voi), Italian uses the same verb ending for the imperative, the indicative simple present, and the indicative progressive present.[1]

--[1] A grammar primer for those who have not studied Italian or those who could use a refresher:

In English, as in Italian, the indicative and the imperative have the same form of the verb: eat, but the indicative, in English, is always accompanied by the subject pronoun: you eat, because the same form of the verb, with the same ending, is used for five of the six persons (subject categories) of the verb: first person singular and plural: I/We eat; second person singular and plural: You/You eat; and third person plural: They eat. The only distinct form is for the third person singular: He/She/It eats. So, in the indicative mood, just using eat by itself doesn’t tell us who the subject is.

The imperative, on the other hand, both in English and in Italian, can only be in the second person, addressed directly to the person or persons who are listening, which in English is you in both cases, with the verb in the same form. The first person, I/We, and the third person, He-She-It/They, cannot be the subject of an imperative verb, and so the subject pronoun is unnecessary. Therefore, eat, by itself, is necessarily an imperative, and you eat is the only way to express the indicative.

In Italian, on the other hand, the subject pronoun is not used with verbs in the indicative mood because each person of the verb has a distinct ending that tells us who or what the subject is. Let’s take mangiare (to eat): mangio (I eat), mangi (you, sing, eat), mangia (he/she/it eats), mangiamo (we eat), mangiate (you, plural, eat), mangiano (they eat).

As for the imperative mood, unlike English, in which the only possible subject for the imperative is you, which is both singular and plural, Italian has different forms for the second person singular, tu (thou), and for the plural, voi (you all). In Italian, therefore, it’s possible to tell if an imperative is addressed to an individual or to a group, even though the subject pronoun is not used: Finisci (Finish) addresses an individual (tu); Finite (Finish) addresses a group (voi).

Keep that polyvalence in mind as ye proceed—if ye proceed.

Now, a question on literature:

Which is a famous line from Italian literature in English translation?

A. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

B. Where are the snows of yesteryear?

C. Abandon all hope, you who enter!

D. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

E. A tisket, a tasket, a brown and yellow basket.

F. I think, therefore, I am.

G. All of the above.

The correct answer is C: probably the most quoted verse from Dante’s Divine Comedy. (If ye cheated and got a hint by looking back at the title of this essay, deduct 10 points from your score; or on second thought, add 10 points.)

Even if this had been an open-answer question, without the prompts provided by the multiple choices suggested (7 possibilities, because that’s the number that represents completion or fullness in Biblical, medieval Christian, and Dantean numerology), that line would likely be the one to come to mind for educated English speakers, just as Italian speakers would likely cite the same line in the original: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate” (Inferno, canto III, verse 9).

For many people, whether they’ve read the poem or not, this sentence has thus come to constitute a summation of the whole poem, its essential message. (And, since I’ve now referred to it as a “sentence,” let us note—parenthetically at least—that English has serendipitously acquired two meanings for the word “sentence”: one, grammatical: a statement constituted by a string of words; and the other, juridical: a condemnation to punishment for the commission of a crime. For Anglophones, therefore, the “sentence” that, in the first sense, serves as a thematic summation also happens to be a “sentence,” in the second sense, to eternal, hopeless imprisonment.)

The wording of various English translations might differ: e.g. Abandon/Leave behind/Give up/Forsake/Surrender . . . all/every/any/each/whatsoever . . . hope/aspiration/wish . . . . The meaning remains the same: You are doomed to be punished in Hell for eternity with no possibility of pardon or parole, ever. So, leave all hope at the door! You won’t be needing it from now on.

WHAT’S DONE IS DONE

That commonly accepted meaning, however, relies on a very problematic and deficient translation of the verb “lasciate”; deficient, not in the sense that it’s incorrect but that it’s not fully adequate. Despite the different words, none of the English translations allow for all the possible meanings, connotations, or implications of the Italian original.

Recall the polyvalence in the first part of the quiz sprung on ye upon entering and notice that “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” is similar in structure and tense to the quiz sentence. The verb lasciate can have analogous significations and translations to the verb finite in that sentence. That is, it can be either in the indicative or imperative mood and can express either the simple or progressive present tense, which means that this sentence, too, at least when standing by itself, can be translated in different ways, as was the quiz sentence. With lasciate as an indicative, the line could be read as: Those of you who enter in this place (are the ones who) leave all hope behind; or in the progressive tense: Those of you who are entering are (the ones who are) giving up any hope--as well as the other permutations presented for the quiz sentence, with the simple present and the progressive present alternating.

So, why is it always and only translated as an imperative? And what is lost in translation when the other possible meanings are jettisoned or ignored?

Insofar as this verse has commonly come to serve as a sort of short-hand synopsis for the whole text in the minds of many people, its translation fundamentally determines and alters how the Commedia is understood by the speakers of the language into which it is translated. As crucial as an accurate translation of this important verse is, however, I’m not aware of commentators who discuss its multiplicity of meanings and the difficulty of conveying those possible meanings and implications in English (and presumably, in other target languages).

Before plodding ahead, I should confess to being only an occasional visitor to the vast realm of Dante Studies—a dense, immense forest where I am likely to get lost, not having read widely or deeply in the field. In that sense, I am like Dante the pilgrim at the gate of Dis, cautioned, if the verb is read as an imperative, to give up any hope of emerging from the mess into which I am nevertheless blundering with this exploration, or if read in the indicative, reminded that I have already lost any such hope.

On the other hand, I did benefit from studying with the pre-eminent Dante scholar Charles Singleton in graduate school and from having another excellent dantista as a colleague for several years, Madison Sowell (whose illuminating canto-by-canto study questions I continued to use whenever I taught the Divine Comedy). Mostly, I learned by discussing the poem with many students over the years (usually using Allen Mandelbaum’s bilingual edition, with the vast majority of the students reading his English verse translation and the fewer Italian majors in each class reading the original Italian—with an extra class hour of discussion in Italian each week).

VOICES FROM THE PAST

This present excursion into the forbidding forest of Dante Studies, however, is taking place in retirement, without the students to help me get out if I get lost. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how the rest of this essay goes—while roaming through the Dartmouth Dante Project (https://dante.dartmouth.edu/), I came across two literary guides who have encouraged me to stumble ignorantly ahead: Jacopo della Lana (1278-1348) and Johannis de Serravalle (1350-1445), two early commentators of the Commedia.

Jacopo della Lana was Dante’s contemporary and compiled his commentary in Italian between 1324 and 1328, only a few years after Dante’s death in 1321. In his paraphrase of the verse, he apparently reads the verb lasciate as an indicative, based on the fact that he places its clause at the end of the sentence: “voi ch'entrate in questa cittade lassate ogni speranza” (You who enter into this city leave every hope). The fact that he was reading and writing at the time of the poem’s production and initial circulation would seem to imply that reading the verb as an indicative might have been the default or preferred way of reading the line. (I say that della Lana “apparently” reads it as an indicative because what I claim to be a possible double reading of Dante’s verse could conceivably also apply to della Lana’s reiteration of it. In form and out of context, his lassate could be either indicative or imperative. By a very long stretch of the imagination, the verb lassate could be read as an imperative, despite its positioning at the end of the sentence, albeit not very credibly. I doubt that any Italian speaker today could process it as an imperative. Still, the way language is used and understood does change over time, which is one of the points that I’m trying to make. Plus, it would be hypocritical of me to deny or downplay the importance of syntactic context in Dante’s verse and then affirm it as essential in Jacopo’s reiteration of it.  I’m assuming that the use of the exclamation point to signal the imperative is a relatively modern convention not generally in use in Dante’s time.)

In his explication of the passage, Johannis de Serravalle, who produced his commentary in Latin a century later, 1416-17, quotes the verse and supplies a Latin translation: “Lasciate omne speranza, voi che entrate: idest, perditis omnem spem vos qui intratis, nunquam hinc exituri.”  The Latin verb he uses for lasciate is perditis, the present indicative, second-person plural (vos) of the Latin verb perdo, perdere (to lose, destroy, ruin, waste, corrupt). The imperative form would be perdite. Since the imperative and indicative have different forms in Latin, there can be no doubt that Johannis reads the verb as an indicative and the verse as a declaration: You lose/are losing all hope, rather than as a command: Give up all hope!

So, with gratias to Jacopo and Johannis and following their lead from seven and six centuries ago, I blunder ahead on the path least taken since then and by now completely covered over.

ABANDON WHAT EXACTLY?

Current Dante scholars I’ve consulted support the imperative as the reading that makes the most sense. Some cite the explanation supplied by Vergil in the tercets that immediately follow this passage, as well as Charon’s words to the souls he is about to ferry across the River Acheron later in the same canto. Those passages, however, seem to me to compound the problem rather than resolve it. But ye, the jury, be the judge!

After reading the inscription above the gate, Dante turns to Vergil and exclaims: “Maestro, il senso lor m’è duro” (v. 12: Master, their sense for me is hard: my literal translation), which is usually taken to mean that Dante finds the meaning difficult, hard to understand—as in Mandelbaum’s translation: “Master, their meaning is difficult for me”—but according to several commentators, “duro” (hard) could also mean: hard on me: what that sign says is hard (threatening, dangerous, accusatory) for me.

In his reply, Vergil also uses the word lasciare, which could serve as a gloss on how to interpret the lasciate of the earlier tercet: “qui si convien lasciare ogne sospetto” (v. 13: “Here one must leave behind all hesitation”; trans. Mandelbaum). The verbal construction, “si convien lasciare,” is not in the imperative mood, and the subject is not voi, the second person plural, but the impersonal third-person si (one). Nevertheless, it does state something that must be done, and it does therefore convey an imperative meaning indirectly. That’s the case, however, only if convenire is taken to imply obligation, which is one of its meanings but not the only one. It can also mean: to be in agreement; to come to a common accord; to be useful or to one’s advantage. But lest we get even more deeply lost in translation, let’s grant that the meaning here is the indirect imperative: one must put aside.

What is it, according to Vergil, that one must put aside? It’s ogne sospetto, which Mandelbaum translates as “all hesitation,” but which could also be: fear, doubt, suspicion, concern, uncertainty. All of these terms, however, are the opposite of hope. In essence, Vergil, in his explanation of the inscription, tells Dante that he—or more accurately: one, which is to say anyone or everyone—must abandon all doubt and hesitation, which means that he/one must keep his/one’s hope alive, not abandon it. It sounds to me like a flat-out contradiction of the divine command posted on the gate, if a command is what it is.

Commentators, including colleagues who have reflected on my hypothesis, however, explain that Vergil is not paraphrasing the saying on the gate but is telling Dante not to worry about it, to ignore the injunction because it doesn’t apply to him, because, thanks to the intervention of Beatrice, he is exempted from the rule. There is no reason for Dante to fear because he is not doomed to Hell, only passing through. But if Vergil is not answering Dante’s question by paraphrasing or explaining the line, why would he re-use the verb lasciare as if he is reiterating and clarifying the sentence that worries Dante? And if he is telling Dante that he, as an individual with special dispensation, can ignore what the inscription says, why does he use the impersonal si (everyone, anyone) rather than tu (you, singular)? The impersonal construction implies that his explanation applies generally to everyone, not particularly to Dante.

Vergil’s admonition would make more sense—without initially appearing to be contradictory—if the inscription’s last line was not a command to abandon hope but a declaration that it’s by losing hope that people get to that point. In other words, Vergil, himself, seems to read lasciate as an indicative, which would also suggest that Dante the author also meant it to be understood that way: Those who abandon hope are the ones who get trapped and can’t get out. So, make sure that you do not abandon hope but keep up your courage! That’s what Vergil not only reiterates but emphasizes by repeating the same admonition in the next verse: “ogne viltà convien che qui sia morta” (v. 14: “here every cowardice must meet its death”; Mandelbaum). This, too, is couched in the third-person, impersonal form, making it generally applicable to everyone or anyone, not directed specifically at Dante. And it, too, would seem to contradict what is written over the gate if lasciate is taken to be an imperative. If Vergil reads lasciate as an indicative, doesn’t it suggest that Dante wrote it as an indicative?

A parallel admonition, near the end of the canto is expressed by Charon, the mythological ferryman who transports dead souls across the Acheron to the Underworld: “non isperate mai veder lo Cielo” (v. 85: “Forget your hope of ever seeing Heaven”; Mandelbaum; more literally, “Don’t hope ever to see the Sky/Heaven!”). Here, too, the verb isperate is taken to be an imperative by commentators and translators. And that is undoubtedly a “correct” reading and translation. Nevertheless, at least in terms of grammatical morphology, this verb, too, could also be read as an indicative: You, anime prave (v. 84: corrupted souls), are the ones who can never hope to see the sky. Without rehearsing all the possibilities again, let’s just say that it fails to serve as convincing supporting evidence that lasciate ogni speranza is perforce an imperative and can only be read as such.

LOST IN THE FOREST OF LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION

To recapitulate, here’s what makes this a textbook case of the traduttore = traditore comparison (translator = traitor; to translate is necessarily to betray the original text): In Italian, lasciate can be read as either an imperative or as an indicative verb. In English, it has to be one or the other (see footnote on first page), and all translators, to my knowledge, have opted for the imperative. All English readers have thus read the verse only as a command: Abandon all hope! What gets lost in translation when the possibility of reading the verb as an indicative is abandoned?

In the Divine Comedy course, taught in English, I would point out that lasciate could be an indicative, which would change the verse to a declaration: "Those of you who go through these gates are the ones who choose or have chosen to abandon hope." Rather than a command issued by a superior force over which we have no control; this description ascribes choices and consequences more directly to us. It thus becomes a description of a psychological state or condition in life instead of an imagined otherworldly punishment. By extension, it describes any addiction to which we are prone as sentient human beings: a condition created by us that we experience in life, not after death.

For supplementary reading in the course, I normally asked students to read a daily newspaper or weekly news magazine. They were to make note of a story in recent news that resonated with the reading assignment in the poem. To their surprise, they had little trouble finding characters and events that were analogous to those depicted in the Commedia. They could thus perceive that Dante was not only writing about cosmology, history, philosophy, and religious doctrine, but also about the everyday life of his Florentine and Italian neighbors, and, even more importantly, also about us, our world, and our neighbors. Reading lasciate as an indicative reinforces the poem’s relevance to other times and places. It defines Hell as a state of our own making, and one that we keep making in each generation. It says: This is what you allow yourselves to become when you lose hope. Dante’s journey becomes the reader’s journey.

Oscar Wilde makes an illuminating distinction in De Profundis, that I think is relevant: “while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.” “Wrongness” is not inherent in individual actions but in becoming addicted to certain behaviors and reaching a state when there is no longer a possibility of changing. And that is Hell: permanent hopelessness created by our own choices (leaving aside considerations of biological, genetic, social, economic, and other material determinants).

A similar insight came at a party when a fellow graduate student introduced me to her date, Willy, whom I had often seen in the gym, where he was usually working with weights. I said: “Oh, nice to meet you finally. You’re the weightlifter I see at the gym, aren’t you?” He smiled and nodded but corrected me: “Well, I lift weights, yes, but I’m not a weightlifter.” He was echoing Oscar Wilde: What he did was not what he had become, not what he was.

The distinction made by Wilde and by Willy can also help us understand Dante’s notion of contrapasso, the form of punishment meted out in Inferno. As John Freccero (also Singleton’s student, two decades before me) pointed out in his brilliant essay, “Infernal Irony: The Gates of Hell” (MLN, 1984), the punishments witnessed by Dante the pilgrim (and invented by Dante the poet) do not correspond to a generalized, pre-established hierarchy nor to a gradation of suffering based on the intensity of physical pain. Dante’s Hell is not just fire and brimstone, and the punishments do not become more severe as Dante and Vergil descend lower. Rather, each form of punishment is custom-made to “fit” the sin being punished. The punishment is actually an extension and reification of the sin, itself. As Wilde might have put it, it’s the condition created when the sinner has become the sin.

Addiction to certain behaviors has brought these people to a state from which they can no longer extricate themselves. Their condition, along with their character, has become static and permanent, and that immobility is their damnation. They have become slaves of the addiction and have lost their capacity for agency and with it, any real hope of change.

Sins and crimes presumably start out with a desire to obtain something that is denied or difficult to attain. Hope of success fuels that desire, bolsters the determination to pursue it, and drives the efforts to make it come true. If the goal is met and the desire is satisfied, success produces pleasure, a sense of empowerment, and the impulse to do it again. And then again, and again, until desire has become a need, a compulsion that no longer allows for choice: an addiction that now controls the addicted, whether it be to drugs or medication, to patterns of behavior, to a rigid set of beliefs, or to ideological convictions.

Hope and desire presuppose and require will, agency, mobility, achievement, change: all of which have been lost through addiction. Through initial desire and hope, addicts have become the hopeless reified victims of their desire. They have produced their own Hell from which they cannot escape. Their self-induced condition resembles Dante’s notion of contrapasso, which can be understood as a version of the jocular warning to “be careful what you pray for because you might get it.” The lesson of Inferno’s contrapasso, as anticipated in the inscription on the entrance gate, could be: Be careful what you hope for; you might get it and be stuck with it.

In this case, too, an essential element of what defines Hell in the Commedia, the contrapasso, seems to make more sense, at least to me, if lasciate is read as a description of what has brought the sinners to that condition rather than as a command of what to do from this point on. In Wilde’s distinction, these are people who are no longer able to “do” anything; they have “become” something. They no longer have the capacity to make a choice and act on it; can no longer anticipate, choose, or determine their future; no longer have the mobility or flexibility to bring about change in themselves or in their circumstances. Commanding them to give up hope is pointless. At best, it’s only rhetorical, to point out the obvious. At worst, it’s a cruel taunt to remind them of what they’ve already given up.

On the other hand, the reading I’m now proposing that focuses on the past, rather than on the future, seems to be just as pessimistic, if not more so. What’s worse, it seems to be an account that “blames the victims,” attributing their condition exclusively to their choices and actions, without allowing for other determinants that might have been outside their control. And yet, paradoxically perhaps, focusing on the sinners’ past experiences allows readers to review causes and consequences more critically than if those experiences were simply occluded, with questions of choice and responsibility removed from sight and consideration. By taking us back to the past, the indicative also allows us to envision possible different futures than the one that has taken us to the gate of Hell. The imperative, precisely because it can be enacted only in the future and thus occludes the past, keeps those other potential futures off the screen, away from the reader’s perception and evaluation.

In pointing out the alternative meaning of lasciate to students, however, my aim was not to contradict or deny the meaning implied by the imperative, but to argue that reading the verb as an indicative can make the passage even more relevant and forceful by switching the cause/effect relationship, thus assigning greater agency to individuals, including the readers—especially the readers. The imperative says: You have sinned and, as a result, you are now commanded to give up hope. The sins come first, and the loss of hope follows as a consequence. The injunction applies only to  characters inside the narrative. The indicative says: You have given up hope and thereby you have created a condition for yourself out of which you cannot exit (Sartre's Huis clos). The loss of hope is not the consequence but the cause—the original sin, in a sense—that leads to the condition of no escape. This explanation, unlike an interdiction, applies both to the fictional characters inside the narrative and to the flesh-and-blood readers outside.

JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSYCHE

When I was a graduate student, I heard an enlightening talk by Franco Ferrucci at a summer semiotics seminar I was attending in Urbino. He made a convincing case that Freud's notions of the Id, Ego, and Superego were essentially a reformulation of Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, and that modern notions of psychology were anticipated by and already embedded in Dante's poem. We could learn as much about the human psyche by reading Dante as by reading Freud.

Scholars with whom I’ve discussed his analogy have generally found the Id-Inferno and Ego-Purgatorio comparisons convincing but objected to likening the Superego to Paradiso. Dante’s paradisal vision, they say, is not of a restrictive, punitive conscience that dictates behavior, thwarts dangerous appetites, curbs desires, and creates a sense of guilt, but a state of grace and joy, far removed from what Freud conceived as the nature and function of the Superego.

We have commonly come to regard Freud’s notion of the Superego (uber-ich) as a policing, forbidding conscience that induces guilt, but his own definition also attributed a more positive manifestation to it, as the ego-ideal, or ideal self, characterized by aspirational goals rather than punitive threats: what in popular parlance we sometimes term the “better angels” that guide us to a sense of wellbeing and fulfillment, if not ecstasy and joy.

Dante's Paradiso does indeed depict a state of grace and joy, but represents it as available only to the “saved” and only in an afterlife, not in this life—which is to say, not in life but in death. The joy of Paradiso is hypothetical, a possibility only for those who believe in an afterlife and the existence of a soul and a deity. Dante’s Paradiso and Freud’s Superego, in other words, are both products of the imagination. They conceptualize ideal aspirations created by the mind. Freud's tripartite concoction is just as much a mental, linguistic, conceptual creation as Dante's vision —and thus also a product of poiesis, which  explains why the French novelist Romain Rolland nominated Freud for the Nobel Prize in 1937 not for science but for literature.

If the Commedia is to be read as an exploration of our human experience and condition and an investigation of our psyche, it has to remain relevant within different socio-historical contexts, regardless of the inevitable diversity of philosophical, religious, or psychological beliefs to be found in different times and places. Readers need to be able to transpose Dante's language and beliefs—what Umberto Eco called an author’s or a reader’s “dictionary” and “encyclopedia”—into their own conceptual paradigms.

As readers, we have to figure out how texts, whether Dante’s poem or Freud’s treatises, pertain to us individually and collectively. To do that, it’s useful, perhaps even necessary, to be “religious,” but not necessarily in the same way that Dante was, nor in the sense of common usage, which defines religion as believing in and worshiping a supernatural deity. Rather, I mean “religious” in the etymological sense of the word, which derives from Latin religo, religare = to tie things back together; or according to another derivation, cited by Cicero: relego, relegere = to read again, review and reconsider, to gather together. While both etymologies allow for the common meaning of  religion as a belief in divinity and an attempt to remain attached to it, they also allow for other possible meanings, for other categories to tie together, other bonds that need to be created and maintained. The essential thing is to establish ties with something beyond ourselves.

Both Latin verbs define the main purpose and function of culture: to recall, assemble, reflect (in two senses: 1, to examine and ponder; and 2, to project back, as in a mirror), establish connections, and tie things together: individuals to society; past events and ideas to present and future ones; facts to ideas; existence to essence; experience to meaning; immanence to transcendence. “Transcendence,” like “religion,” has also come to refer primarily to a supernatural, divine realm, but it doesn’t have to be deistic or mystical. We “transcend” to another realm whenever something takes us out of our individual physical, animal existence and binds us (ligare) to something beyond our biological experiences to a conceptual realm of meaning, be it familial, social, philosophical, political, psychological, theological, magical, or scientific.

Evolution has left us with an organ that produces thoughts, whether we want it to or not, and those thoughts create meanings, forcing us to navigate constantly between bodily existence and mental constructs: in other words, to be “religious” in the sense of tying together immanent experience and transcendent conceptualization. It’s curious that the prefix re- in religare or relegere, and hence in religion, conveys the idea of repetition or retrieval, of tying back to something that existed before but whose bond has somehow been sundered. It suggests that the need to recuperate something that has been lost is already posited as a premise at the outset of thinking: an illusion of loss and reacquisition prepackaged into the term itself. To be in life—with a brain—is to want to transcend it, to “return” to the Garden of creation before and beyond natural life. That little prefix re- immediately transports our quest for significance into the past and to a supernatural realm, beyond the contingency and corruption of biological existence. The fact that we want to go “back” to the Garden before “creation” hides the fact that it’s a fiction we created to have something to look ”forward” to: “salvation.”

The Commedia, as I read it, tells us how to perform that “religious” act of bridging and binding together our immanent (meaningless) reality with a transcendent (meaningful) realm: 1, Avoid the static, hopeless, addictive suffering of Hell; 2, Aim for the pleasure and happiness of Heaven (both of these, mental constructs created by our meaning-making machine, analogous to Freud’s Id and Superego); 3, Laboriously make our way through Purgatory (also a mental or conceptual construct or allegory, but closer to reflecting our physical, biological life).

TRANSCENDENCE READ BACKWARDS

In the classroom and in his writings, Professor Singleton brilliantly and convincingly made a case that Beatrice should be read as a figura Christi (both a symbol and a representative of Christ, a “standing in” in His stead). His allegorical reading is enlightening within a Christian context, especially within the medieval European scriptural and epistemological context he uncovered and evoked and within which he situated Dante’s mental encyclopedia, reconstituting what Dante would have read and learned, the ideas and knowledge to which he would have responded, using the language, information, and beliefs of his time. But does his interpretation also shed light on the possible meanings of the text outside the Christian semantic field?

Singleton’s explication of the poem as a “journey to Beatrice” and, because she is a figura Christi, also as a journey to Christ and to salvation, presumes that Dante, himself, intended such to be the signification to be uncovered by his readers. But, to me at least, Dante’s own intentions are of secondary importance. I don’t think we read literature primarily to find out what a particular person thought about a particular issue at a particular time in a particular place. What we have available to us is the poem, with all the accretions it has accumulated over seven centuries of comments and interpretations. The least fruitful question for me is: What did the author want to say? More interesting and useful questions are: What information does the text convey about the concerns, beliefs, institutions, and customs of the society within which and for which it was produced? How do these cultural traits relate to those of previous times and how did they evolve afterwards, down to our own time? Even more instructive and valuable are questions such as: What do readers find in the work that keeps it vital and seminal over many generations and across the world? How does it help me understand myself, even though I live in a different time and world? What does it disclose to me about other people, so that I can better understand how others influence my life, and I, theirs? As an artifact of cultural production and widespread and long-lived consumption, what does it reveal about the function and value of communication, art, and other cultural products? How do they serve to permit us to make sense of life and to share ideas, to learn from those who came before us and instruct those who come after? How can a work of literature or other form of art help me understand and possibly improve myself, my relationships, my life, the lives of others?

Similar concerns and expectations are echoed in a novel I’m currently reading, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. One of the characters has spent years trying to translate an ancient Greek manuscript by finding the perfectly correct words and syntax. He finally learns from his young students, with whom he is trying to stage the text as a play, that such perfect, “faithful” translation is not only impossible but undesirable, because it would be counterproductive, hindering the forward flow of cultural production, which relies on change and renewal. He realizes from his students’ reactions, that stories continue to live and help us make sense of life by remaining relevant and adapting to the lives and worlds of new readers. It’s not the original intention of authors that matters and needs to be disinterred and preserved, nor the original language that needs to be reproduced slavishly. If a text doesn’t speak to the needs and interests of current readers and re-tellers of the tale in their own terms, it's a dead letter.

I don’t mean to dismiss my revered professor’s thesis as being valid only for Christian readers. His studies illuminated the text for all readers, be they of other religions, agnostic, or atheists, by showing other facets of the poem that had been hidden, or not polished enough to be as visible as he made them. Each time a new facet of the Commedia is shown, the poem becomes more brilliant. If nothing else, new interpretations, if convincing in their own terms, reveal to all readers that there are many dimensions and many paths within the journey Dante depicts; many directions to pursue. The poem has become a canonical masterwork because it has so many brilliant facets and accommodates many expository itineraries through it, but as importantly, in my view, because it reveals how the process of signification works and why signifying is essential, indeed inevitable, for humans with a brain and with language.

Partly thanks to Singleton’s guidance, albeit followed obliquely, I started to read allegorical and metaphorical equations backwards, to see if there were hidden implications hiding on one side or the other. The direction in which we process equations matters. Two plus two always equals four. But reading it in the other direction, if the starting point is 4, it can equal 2 + 2 or 3 + 1. If Beatrice is a figura Christi, is Christ a figura Beatrice? And would it mean the same thing?

Even back in Singleton’s classroom, it struck me that, from a materialist perspective, a divine entity seems a more likely candidate to be a figura than a person, since it’s not a physical or biological object but an imagined ideal, hence a figura by definition. Dante and his fellow poets present the women who are the love objects in their poetry as exemplars of the donna angelicata (woman made angel, angelified), instruments for the distribution of God's grace that, through love, will lead us to salvation, away from this world of woe to a realm of pure, eternal joy: a state that does not exist in the physical universe. Read backwards, however, it’s the metaphysical notions of divine grace and salvation that appear to be the instruments or vehicles that lead us back to life and the world in order to make sense of existence, of people, of our human condition—not merely to understand, in the sense of “standing under” something already made, but to make sense, conceived as something that is created and constructed.

This bi-directional view of the relation between the human and the divine is expressed poignantly in the Commedia, itself, by St. Bernard's prayer to the Virgin Mary at the beginning of Paradiso canto 33: “Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio, /  umile e alta più che creatura . . . //  tu se' colei che l'umana natura /  nobilitasti sì, che 'l suo fattore /  non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura.” (vv.1-2,4-6: “Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son, /   Humble and high beyond all other creatures . . . // Thou art the one who such nobility /   To human nature gave, that its Creator /   Did not disdain to make himself its creature”; Mandelbaum). All the paradoxes invite a double perspective: both a virgin and a mother; the daughter of her son; the maker of her Maker, in that the “Creator” was also her “creature.” The paradoxes express a mystery, and it’s likely that Dante’s intention was to express this mystery as a miracle: the divine making itself manifest in our earthly realm; transcendence descending to immanence. But read in the other direction, it also reveals obfuscation achieved through a sort of linguistic and mental prestidigitation: self-contradictory affirmations that simultaneously suggest and hide the fact that we imagine a Creator so that we can believe that we were created by an eternal supernatural force to be special "creatures" who are put on Earth for a purpose and who will never die after we’re freed from our bodies.

Ultimately, and even more fundamentally, Beatrice is also a figura hominis, or more accurately, figura hominum: a symbol and representative of all people: living people with bodies, not just disembodied souls. In representing or symbolizing Christ, she also stands for other human beings: the people we encounter in our daily lives, our neighbors. It’s them we must love and by them be loved. Beatrice, as a figura Christi, is the human made divine. Christ, on the other hand, is the divine made human. By loving Christ, a human, we also love God, and by loving Christ, a God, we also love human beings.

Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have a well-known saint, or one of the Apostles, or a Church Father to serve as a guide through Paradiso? Better yet, why not the Virgin Mary? Having Beatrice, a Florentine neighbor who is not known outside Florence, as both the guide and the goal of Dante the pilgrim’s journey serves to humanize divinity, to “popularize” it, that is, to locate and embody divinity in the populace around us. Beatitude comes from and resides in our relations with other people. Even if we believe in the afterlife of the soul and in eternal salvation or damnation, it is a Beatrice who takes us there: a person we meet in life, a neighbor, a fellow human being.

Beatrice, a woman Dante knew, reveals to us that the sufferings of Hell and the joys of Heaven, which we project onto an afterlife, are also reflections of this life. Her function is not only to take Dante to God in the Empyrean but to bring him back to Florence: to this world and this life. Singleton used to quote St. Paul’s metaphorical aphorism that in this life “we see in a mirror, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), whereas after we’re dead, we will see everything clearly. Reversing the direction of the mirror analogy allows another meaning to emerge: that perfect clarity is a metaphysical ideal that exists outside the boundaries of our natural lives, and the only thing we can do in life, in this world, is to perceive things imperfectly, darkly. At the same time that it’s a call to have faith in a divine, ultramundane realm, it reveals that such a realm is in fact ideal, a product of the mind, of ideas spawned by imagination, desire, and the fear of death and finitude. Read in reverse, the metaphor doesn’t tell us that the imperfect vision of this life is something to dread, despise, and shun, but a condition to accept as natural, as the way things should be in life: acceptance, not abhorrence, of our limits as mortals.

One doesn't have to believe that there is a real Hell underground or a real Empyrean beyond the stars reachable after death to take part in Dante's vision and learn from it. One just has to translate his allegorical framework into one's own allegorical landscape.

TO DO OR TO BE?

And so, back to the quest of how to interpret and translate: Lasciate ogni speranza.

When read as a declarative sentence, Hell can be understood as a condition that we create for ourselves when we "become" our obsession, when we have already "abandoned all hope." The loss of hope has happened before getting to the gate. It's what has brought us there, not what is imposed on us from that point on. We are thus granted greater agency, as well as more responsibility, in determining our own fate, choosing how to act and what to become.

But wait, do not abandon the imperative!

Do not leave with the idea that reading and translating lasciate as an imperative is incorrect! It can and should be read as an imperative. As a command, it conveys a meaning that would, in its turn, be lost if the verb were to be translated always and only as an indicative. The imperative at this point is rhetorically and dramatically more effective and forceful. It engages the reader more directly: the reader inside the text who reads the inscription and also the reader outside the text who reads the poem. For both sets of readers, a command is a speech act that elicits an affective reaction as well as an intellectual perception and is thus more engaging and compelling than a declaration or explication. Narratively and dialogically, it’s not surprising that the imperative has come to be preferred and eventually perceived as the only possible reading in this context.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that both sets of meanings, borne by the same verb performing double duty as imperative and indicative, are not only possible and credible in themselves, when considered independently, but they are also complementary to each other and mutually supportive. One way of reading the verb reinforces the other. The performative force of the imperative serves as a catalyst to process the implications of the explication provided by the indicative, while the explanation offered by the indicative justifies the emotional impact induced by the command.

The verb lasciare is used over a hundred times in the poem (106, by my count). In all but one other case, it is used in a different form, with a different subject or in a different tense or mood. None of the other forms found in the poem present a possible confusion as to whether the verb is an imperative or an indicative, not even the one other use of lasciate.

Can ye guess, dear reader, where lasciate shows up again? Wouldn’t ye know that the only other time it’s used again is in front of another gate: the entrance to Purgatory proper. Dante and Vergil reach it after making their way through Ante-Purgatory, following an itinerary similar to the one in Hell, where they traversed Ante-Hell before reaching the gate of Hell proper.

This time Dante the character does not hear or read the verb used directly but hears it used in Vergil’s account of how they reached the entrance. After Dante had fallen asleep down in the Valley of the Rulers, St. Lucy had arrived and said: “'I' son Lucia; /  lasciatemi pigliar costui che dorme; /  sì l'agevolerò per la sua via.'” (“’I am Lucia; / let me take hold of him who is asleep, / that I may help to speed him on his way.” Mandelbaum, Purgatorio 9.55-57).

In this case, the verb lasciate can only be an imperative because of the pronoun mi attached to it. In the indicative, the pronoun would precede and be separate from the verb: mi lasciate. Since in this case lasciate is clearly an imperative and seems to echo its use in the previous cantica when our heroes encountered a similar situation, can its use here serve as supporting evidence for the argument that the lasciate of Hell was also an imperative?

Perhaps it does since it does seem to be an echo of the previous usage. But if it is repetition, it’s repetition with several significant differences. First, it is not written but spoken orally, or more accurately, quoted, and so spoken twice. Moreover, it is not addressed to Dante, nor generally to the souls making their way through Purgatory. Lucia was addressing Vergil and the souls of Sordello, Nino, and Currado, who were present when Dante fell asleep. Hence, the imperative verb was not originally uttered at the gate, nor meant for the souls about to enter through that gate. Furthermore, it’s not a warning or a prohibition, as the lasciate at the gate of Hell is taken to be. It’s not a demand not to do something but a polite request to be permitted to do something: allow me to take him.

Given these differences, it could be argued just as persuasively that the repetition of the verb here, now used in such a way that it can only be read as an imperative, could also serve to point out that the lasciate of Hell is, in fact, used differently and should not be read the same way, but as an indicative.

But lest ye give up hope of ever getting out of this discussion, shall we try to retrace our steps and see if we can find a way to sneak out?

The indicative leads us to the individual psyche and the process of self-determination: What can, should, will I make of myself?

The imperative, on the other hand, puts us in the realm of communal responsibility and accountably, making us focus on our social behavior to question how we fulfill our collective roles in relation to others: What is my place in a community? What has society given me? How has it shaped me? What do I owe to others in the community and to the community as a whole?

Is it enough to conform to what my community’s dictates and expectations or is it more fruitful to translate and possibly transform the received culture to help the community adapt and evolve to changing conditions?  

By presenting the situation of those who dwell in Hell as a punishment for the violation of a law sanctioned by a higher authority—God in this case, as mediated by Scriptures, the Church, the community of believers—the passage alludes to the importance of adhering to the laws, customs, beliefs, and expectations of the groups to which we belong: demographic, geographic, political, economic, religious, vocational: any affiliation that grants recognition and privileges and makes demands on us, influences our behavior to some extent, and contributes to giving us a sense of identity. If we adhere to a community, we must also adhere to its rules. If not, we will be expelled—either by force, against our will, or by choice and of our own volition: expulsion, in either case. And that’s what Hell is: exclusion more than confinement.

Reading the inscription only in one sense or the other leaves the text and its readers bereft of what has been lost in translation, which, as I hope to have demonstrated, happens to be quite a bit.

So, dear readers and fellow travelers, if ye held on tight to that polyvalence that I told ye to keep on hand, ye can now see that it’s the key that allows entrance through many gates of the “divine” poem, including some that are still hidden. In the meantime, ye can use it to find your way out of this diabolical disquisition and go back to your own meaningful explorations.

But before ye go, do abandon all hope of ever obtaining complete and unique knowledge and do keep hoping to find a little more understanding whenever and wherever ye seek it!

WHAT EVERY FOOL KNOWS

After reading a draft of this essay, my former colleague and stellar Dante scholar, Madison Sowell, who happened to be in Rome planning for the publication of his book on ballet photography (he, too, in retirement, pursuing paths less travelled), asked an Italian friend whether lasciate was indicative or imperative, without giving the context. The friend answered, “Ogni sciocco sa che è tutti e due, indicativo e imperativo” (Every fool knows that it’s both, indicative and imperative). When given the context, the friend’s answer was: “Ogni sciocco sa che è imperativo” (Every fool knows that it’s imperative).

In just a few words, those two statements succinctly restate the argument of this verbose essay; that lasciate can be read either as a command or as a declaration, that the choice depends on the context, and that, in this case, the verb has universally come to be read only as an imperative. Faced with such certainty—available to any sciocco (fool)—my attempt to show that in this very context lasciate can also be read as an indicative seems indeed to be a fool’s errand, a Quixotic quest at best (to mix literary allusions, if not metaphors). But if fools and Don Quixote do rush in where angels and wiser folk fear to tread, to paraphrase Alexander Pope (and jumble literary allusions further), at least fools manage to do some treading.

The responses are also intriguing because of the colorful use of the colloquial formula "Ogni sciocco sa . . .” (Every/Any fool knows), which, unwittingly perhaps, couples knowing with foolishness. While meaning that “everyone knows this, even fools,” the expression also seems to say that “those who know this are foolish.” That implication, I think, is both telling and important in what it suggests about language and knowledge: that ultimately it is foolish to think that one knows something with certainty, without allowing for any doubt.

If language is a mirror through which we attempt to reflect reality, it can only reflect it “darkly” (in the Pauline sense) because it necessarily distorts and hides some facets while revealing others. The word sciocco (fool; probably from Latin ex-sucus, without juice, sap, and by extension, without vigor, force, energy) could be considered a collective Freudian slip, in that while used to affirm certain knowledge, over which there can no longer be any doubt, it also equates such certainty to foolishness; somewhat like Pirandello's Così è se vi pare (That’s the way it is if that’s the way it seems to you), which implies that reality is, after all, a matter of perception. Even though the quip that “perception is reality” has become a cliché in popular psychology, we nevertheless realize that it’s true only up to a point. Perception is what we see, but it can fool us. The reality we think we perceive may not be the full or real reality. It’s “foolish” to believe in our perceptions and to believe that we can grasp and know reality fully.

Translation is a mirror of a mirror. It adds more distortions and hides more facets while uncovering or emphasizing others. But in doing so, it also reveals the arbitrary nature of language and the meanings that we construct and convey with language and then try to replicate in different languages. If language is a deficient medium to convey reality, to create knowledge and meaning, and to express and share our ideas, then translation is doubly so: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che traducete! Abandon all hope, you who translate!

But that, too, can be read otherwise, with lasciate as an indicative: You translators are the ones who give up hope; but giving up hope in a good sense: giving up the expectation of achieving perfection, as in that which is finished and complete; accepting the imperfections that language and life contain and impose; and striving to keep communicating and tying stories, poems, ideas, and people together (religare), across geographical and chronological boundaries, with each other in the present and with the acquired wisdom and beauty (relegere) of other times and cultures, so that we can pass them on to those who come after us.

Language, writing, translation are all makeshift instruments of transmission on which we rely (another term and concept that stem from the Latin root religare, to bind, to tie, and therefore another necessary act of “religion”).

As serendipity would have it (perhaps a more forceful and resourceful guide for our cognitive journeys than tried and true experts who take us down tried and tired paths rather than into new, unexplored territory), while pondering the relationship between foolishness and knowledge, I happened to come on this passage in Doerr’s marvelous novel Cloud Cuckoo Land: “What’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”

Isn’t that how culture is created, maintained, and passed on: with fools, sciocchi, never giving up, never abandoning hope?

MORE TRIPTIKS THROUGH DANTE’S TRIPTYCH

Just in case ye want to continue your wanderings through Dante’s Hell, here are some other questions for ye to consider (ye, not me, because I’m retired and already exhausted by this Hell-bound pilgrimage):

Why are lasciate and entrate in the plural voi, rather than in the singular tu, in the first place?

Charon’s harangue in the plural voi makes sense because he is addressing a group of people and is doing so out loud. And Vergil’s use of the impersonal si also makes sense if he’s talking about everyone and anyone who passes that way. But for the inscription, wouldn’t the singular tu make more sense since it’s a written text that has to be read by each individual? Shouldn’t it therefore be addressed to each sinner individually? (And why, ye might well ask, have I addressed my dear reader—particularly dear if still here—as ye rather than as thou/thee, or why not just stick to our more convenient, dedifferentiated, post-Elizabethan “you”? The devil must have made me do it.)

What’s more, now that reading and writing have come up, why is it an inscription that adorns the gate? Why is it written? Why in Italian? Do only Italians go to Hell? Are there different gates for different languages? Or does the inscription switch to a different language for each sinner? What if the sinner can’t read (which would be the case for just about everybody at that time and a vast majority of folks at most other times)? Or, are only the literate expected to be going to Hell (in which case, be afrid, reader, be very afraid!)? And why would God write in terza rima, using exactly the same rhyme scheme and verse and stanza form that Dante invented specifically for his poem? Or is Dante telling us that that’s how he came up with the prosody of the Commedia, by seeing it on the gate and imitating it for his poem? (Freccero addresses the terza rima question in the above-mentioned essay,”Infernal Irony: The Gates of Hell,” making it the basis of the “irony” he attributes to the gate.)

(Oh, oh, I feel that familiar itch of a hypothesis coming on: could this be a self-referential fractal component in the text: a repetition on a micro-scale of the Commedia, itself, as a written text; it, too, crafted to convey universal truths to an uncertain and varied audience while simultaneously displaying all its localized, material limitations: a way for the text both to justify and to question itself? Written language, or rather, language tout court, regardless of how it’s manifested, even if just thought without any kind of utterance or expression, is necessarily inadequate to contain and convey lived experience and the full material complexity of the world and the universe; but it’s all we have. [Note to self: You’re retired. Abandon any intention of pursuing this!])

But before getting lost in other byways, let’s get back to voi vs. tu. Is the plural voi on the inscription used in order to imply collectivity of some kind; to suggest that sinning, committing a crime, or doing something “wrong” always involves doing it within a group or cohort? If misery loves company, as the saying goes, does the use of the collective voi accommodate that very company that misery loves by involving others in our choices and actions?

Is it significant that, if the subject of the verbs lasciare and entrare had been the singular tu, there would be no possible confusion between the imperative and the indicative, because for verbs of the first conjugation, whose infinitive ends in -are, the second personal singular (tu) endings are different in the two moods: lasci, indicative; lascia, imperative? Is voi used precisely in order to create the confusion, so that lasciate can be read as either or both an indicative and an imperative?

Frankly, my dears, I don’t know whether to give a damn or not because I don’t know if these issues have been addressed in commentaries and critical studies. I suspect, however, that, even if they have been, they open up paths for further investigation. So if ye want to extend your stay and undertake more excursions in Dante’s Hell, these are some possible triptiks to consider. (If ye don’t know what triptiks are--or were?—good! It helps make the point that life, knowledge, and language all go with the wind: not gone, though, just translated, which means moved and adapted elsewhere.)

Abandon all hesitation! Go to Hell! Meander through its circles with abandon! Buon viaggio!

A HEAVENLY DESSERT

         But what about those of ye—if there still be any—who prefer to be Heaven-bound and to roam in the realm that is much less frequented, whether it be by souls—many being called but few chosen, as another S. Matteo (St. Matthew, in English) once pointed out—or by readers, as well as by translators, given that there are many more translations of Inferno than of the entire poem or of the other canticles—and even by me in this little excursion? Well, if ye want to be among the select few who make it to and through Paradise, do not abandon hope!

         Actually, I had no intention of steering my “piccioletta barca” (little, teeny-weeny boat) in that direction, myself, until a possible direction for that leg of the journey was just pointed out to me by one of the generous scholars who took the time and trouble to persevere through this meandering excursion (which doesn’t seem to want to reach its end, no matter how hard I try to say “goodbye” and go home). Claiming to play the “devil’s advocate,” he posed this simple-enough-sounding question: “Doesn’t everything you suggest about the nature of Hell—its immobility, permanence, changelessness, even hopelessness—also apply to Paradise? Aren’t those souls also without hope, in that there is nothing beyond their present and eternal state for them to desire and strive to achieve? Couldn’t the sign at the gate of Hell just as convincingly be placed at the entrance to Paradise to address the souls who enter there? And couldn’t the verse, even in that setting, be read as either an imperative: “Leave all hope behind; you won’t need to bother with it anymore”; or as an indicative: “Congratulations! You are now leaving all hopes behind you because you have already achieved anything you could ever hope for.”

         The devil’s advocate does seem to make a valid point. Leaving it for more skilled and better-resourced investigators and advocates to ponder and debate that question fully, I nonetheless do now wonder why this thought didn’t occur to me and why I avoided Paradiso altogether in my explorations—other than because I was merely following Dante’s advice to stick to my own safe shores if my boat was too small to follow him into that deep, unfamiliar, unchartered realm (Paradiso II.1-6; Mandelbaum translation):

O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,

desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti

dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,

tornate a riveder li vostri liti:

non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse

perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.

O you who are within your little bark,

eager to listen, following behind

my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas,

turn back to see your shores again: do not

attempt to sail the seas I sail; you may,

by losing sight of me, be left astray.

         But since my correspondent and devil’s advocate (who happens to share a name with the Magus after whom the sin punished in Inferno XIX is named, but who is instead a good Magus, who is also able to fly, but with his mind, not his body) has now taken me there, let’s take a closer look at these new, less-explored surroundings and especially at those verses just cited.

Unlike Hell and Purgatory, this realm does not have a gate. Nor is the verb “lasciate” written or uttered anywhere by anyone. But here, too, we are entering into another realm, and here, too, we are met with an admonition at the threshold. This time the entreaty is extra-diegetic. It’s Dante the poet, not a character or a written sign inside the narrative, who provides the warning, which is addressed directly to the reader of the poem, not to any character within the story.

But a warning it is, and its language does echo that of the inscription at the gate of Hell, even though it’s not a dictum on how to proceed forward, but an admonition to turn back—unless it’s actually a devious rhetorical use of reverse psychology, which, by pretending to dissuade readers from undertaking something too challenging for them, actually impels them to proceed into those deep seas more eagerly and with greater resolve: “Hey, whose barca are you calling piccioletta! Let me at those deep seas of yours! I’ll show you how big my barca is!”

         Let’s take a closer look at the two active verbs of the poet’s admonition: tornate and non vi mettete. Wouldn’t you know it? They just happen to be second person, plural form of tornare and mettersi (subject: voi, you plural).

And what does that mean, class? That’s right: it means that they can be either imperative or indicative, just like lasciate and entrate.

         Mandelbaum translates them as imperatives, along with every other translator, and that’s how every Italian reader is likely to read them as well. Read as indicative verbs, the sense would be something like: Those of you in a little boat are the ones who turn back to your own shores and don’t venture into the vast ocean for fear of losing me and remaining lost: not a command or recommendation to turn back, but a chastisement for doing so.

I confess that I, too, find it difficult to read these verbs as indicatives. But that just means that I now need to remind myself, too, along with others, that language changes. Seven centuries have passed since those words were written, when the Italian language had not yet taken shape (Dante was, in fact, in the process of giving birth to it). Let’s remember that Jacopo della Lana and Johannis de Serravalle, not casual readers but leading and authoritative experts in the interpretation of the Commedia, saw the indicative where readers of the past six centuries saw only the imperative.

A DIGESTIVO?

And what if those lines are neither a command nor a dismissal, nor even a dare, but simply a statement of fact that Purgatory is where we belong, because that’s where life happens? If Hell and Paradise are reverse mirror images of each other: eternal, permanent, unchanging, doesn’t it mean that they are also lifeless (even if the term we use is “afterlife”)? Living requires change, growth, evolution, trying, doing, failing, learning, stumbling along , and dying—which does not mean returning to nothingness, but rearranging our cells, molecules, and atoms into other living forms. There is no such thing as “nothingness” in the Universe. Every segment of space-time contains particles or energy traversing through it at any moment. “Nothingness” is a product of our imagination. We do not come from it. We do not return to it. We only imagine it, along with deities, ideals, philosophical constructs, laws, customs, beliefs, poetry.

Anything that purportedly exists before, after, or beyond the confines of our observable, physical universe can only be imagined, not known. Hell and Paradise both fit into all three of those categories. They exist only in our thoughts, where they serve as imaginary poles within which to chart our mental journeys toward the construction of meaning to give sense to our biological existence. They serve as conceptual embankments to try to contain, restrict, and control the constant flow of life, to give it the semblance of having a purpose and a direction: of having meaning. In other words, they are like Inferno and Paradiso bracketing Purgatorio: on one side, the barrier of fears, prohibitions, taboos, evils to avoid; on the other side, the virtues, bliss, sense of fulfillment to seek: a negative and a positive pole to fuel our mental and cultural activity.

Purgatory is the only one of the three realms that is not fixed and permanent. Souls there suffer, reflect, come to understand the causes and effects of their actions, repent, are purged, move on, climb up the mountain, if not toward salvation in a mystical sense, then toward an acceptance of the human need to navigate in the turbulent, exhilarating, meaningless flux of life by riding on a notional vessel—a piccioletta barca, if you will—made of the forms, regulations, and systems we construct and superimpose on that vital flow. As my brilliant friend and devil’s advocate put it, Purgatory is the temporal hinge around which the two conceptual eternities, infernal and paradisiacal, revolve. As eternal states, both inclinations invite or beguile us to “become” rather than to “do.” Purgation means cleansing. When we wash off the grime we’ve accumulated, is it to remain pure and unblemished forever thereafter or to resume our way up the mountain and get dirty again, over and over, following the path toward life, not death?

But wait! Something is still not right in the picture I’ve just sketched, in which Purgatory is presented as real, based on and reflective of our lived reality, while Hell and Paradise are purely conceptual, imaginary, existing only in our minds. In the fiction of the poem, on the other hand, the picture is different. Hell and Purgatory are physically part of the Earth. Hell is a cavernous abyss under the ground, created when God plunged Lucifer to the bottom of the Universe (which would have been the center of the Earth). Purgatory is a mountain on the opposite side of the globe, created by the material expelled from the hole of Hell. They have a physical, geological location and material earthly substance. Paradise, on the other hand is the realm that is outside of this world, and its last stage, the Empyrean, is completely outside the physical universe: a non-place where God is both a single point and all-encompassing: the center and the all-embracing periphery.

So, given their geological placement, are Hell and Purgatory more real? Let’s try a test. Take a shovel and go digging around the planet! Did you find the entrance to Hell? Probably not. Go around the globe with binoculars! Did you locate Mount Purgatory? Nope. Now, go outside on any clear night and look up! With or without a telescope, you will definitely see Dante’s Paradise, or most of it: all but the Empyrean. The astral bodies he visits are all really there, even if their configuration and positions are now understood differently. In that sense, it’s Paradise that is the most “real” realm of the three, the one that corresponds to what we can actually observe and experience outside the fiction of the text.

And yet, as my students discovered, it’s Hell that seems to correspond more closely to the world we see depicted in our newspapers and other media. The human behavior recounted in that canticle seems most to reflect the behavior we encounter in “real life.” In that sense, Inferno seems more realistically descriptive or our social world, whereas Purgatorio and Paradiso seem to be corrective and aspirational, existing more in the realm of possibility than actuality. Put another way: Hell is the diagnosed illness; Purgatory, the prescribed treatment; Paradise, the prognosis of eventual results, if the treatment is followed and if the cure works.

So, we have three contenders claiming to be the most “real.”  Will the real “most real” now please stand! Is it: A, Inferno; B, Purgatorio; or C, Paradiso?

Oh, no! They all stand up and claim to be the “most real real.”

Could they all be telling the truth? Indeed, that is what the journey of the Commedia has revealed: that there are many dimensions and facets of reality, each perceptible through a different cognitive lens and from a particular existential perspective. Dante, himself, provided four possible lenses to adopt to understand his poem: literal, allegorical, moral, anagogic.  But there are more. Many interpretative schemata have been fashioned and deployed by subsequent critics and theorists. And I suspect that many others remain buried in the Commedia, itself, to emerge when new hermeneutic resources are devised and perfected.

No other text I’ve encountered is as multi-dimensional or reveals as many facets of life and reality—not Homer, not Virgil, not Milton. The Divine Comedy is most apparently about religion, ethics, and history, but also about politics, economics, physics, geology, cosmology, art, philosophy (natural and conceptual), mythology, and even about fields not yet invented or discovered in Dante’s time: psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology. All those disciplines, and more, provide lenses with which the text can be read and interpreted. Given its all-encompassing complexity, seems likely continue to generate new readings and interpretations if it continues to resonate, the poem and the journey it describes will likely remain a productive mine of meaning and inspiration.

We have already considered how Freud’s conception of the psyche resonates with the poem’s tripartite structure. A similar claim could be made about another tripartite model of nature that started to circulate around the same time, promoted by scientists and philosophers, such as Russian-Ukrainian bio-geo-chemist Vladimir Vernadsky, French Jesuit priest and philosopher-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and American engineer-inventor-designer-etc. Richard Buckminster Fuller. In that model, our world consists of three layers: the geosphere, the region of inanimate materials; the biosphere, the region of living beings that lies above the geosphere; and the noosphere, the region of mind, thought, and knowledge that lies above both. This model, too, could be super-imposed on the regions described by Dante.

To test that hypothesis, let’s try out a pseudo-anthropological/archaeological reading of the poem. (I don’t know if such a reading has actually been proposed before. I’m just making it up as I go along.) We can start by noting that the poem’s very structure reflects the evolution of human existence. We notice this merely by looking at the poem’s “architecture” from the outside, how it’s put together.

First comes Hell, a cavity inside the Earth. It recalls the dwellings of early humans, troglodytes who found shelter in empty, covered, secluded spaces. Such “found” natural caverns were eventually followed by the fashioning of tools to create “negative architecture,” shelters excavated from the terrain where none were found ready-made by nature. The concept of creating and enclosing an empty space might also have led to the invention and creation of pottery and basketry (analogous to the circles and pouches of Inferno: smaller, specialized containers within the larger container of Hell). The manufacture of enclosed empty space (vases, pots, baskets, and other vessels) allowed things to be collected, separated, individuated, contained, preserved, which is also the structure and function of Hell: an articulated cavity, or excavated negative architecture, that represents humans’ first cognitive leap into thinking, reasoning, imagining.

Mount Purgatory, then, suggests the next archaeological development: positive or protruding architecture: construction, reshaping, adding new structures to the natural environment: walls, roofs, stairs, poles, as well as sculpture and statuary. Such manufactured structures erected on the surface of the world, rather than carved into the earth, represented the second cognitive leap in the human mental landscape: design, engineering, manufacturing, social collaboration, a material cultural legacy that would be passed on to subsequent generations. The sense of passing on to others also contained the idea of progress, change, improvement, which are also the characteristics and the purpose of Purgatory (purgation as cleansing of set and harmful behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs in order to advance to a better state).

Paradise, finally, represents the third major cognitive phase: the passage into the “noosphere,” outside the confines of matter, in other words, the development of civilization, the transition from pre-history into history, which occurs once events, ideas, tabulations, and designs can be recorded and transmitted, with such tools as language, numeracy, art, and other means of representation that express and promote symbolic thinking and ritualization, which in turn spawned traditions, customs, taboos, laws, beliefs, music, theater, narration, poetry, painting: all of which are means of superimposing meaning on experience and on objects.

It is telling that Dante’s Paradiso is presented as a multi-staged theater or a multi-screen movieplex with 3-D projection. The souls that Dante encounters in the various planetary and astral spheres of the physical universe aren’t really there. Dante is told (Paradosp IV) that the real souls reside in the Empyrean. What he sees are virtual projections that have momentarily appeared in the celestial spheres specifically for this occasion.  This proto-television (vision at a distance, tele), takes place so that Dante, still in his body, can perceive them with his corporeal senses and converse with them in his own language: a grand celestial command performance for just one lost individual trying to find his way—but, of course, also for the many readers who have accompanied him on his journey and the many who will continue to do so.

So, which are more “real”: the figures Dante sees and hears with his senses or the souls in the Empyrean of whom the images are ephemeral representations? Within the fiction of the poem, the projected manifestations are unreal, figments of the “real” beings who cannot be seen. Outside the fiction of the poem, however, it’s the Empyrean that has no basis in physical reality. Unlike the planetary spheres, it does not exist in the material universe but beyond the reaches of bodily perception. The Empyrean where the souls dwell permanently is the product of imagination, not observation. The poem is thus using what it defines as false apparitions to stand for, justify, and bolster the greater fiction that the reality they represent is in a metaphysical realm, inaccessible to the body and its senses.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW AND BACK

The paradox echoes a similar one that arises in St. Paul’s claim that, in life, “we see through a glass, darkly,” whereas in Heaven, we will see clearly and fully. This, too, suggests that the world we see and the existence we experience in life are unreal, or deceptive, hence somehow “fictitious,” whereas the invisible, imperceptible spiritual realm that exists after life, beyond the confines of physical existence, is true and real. The essence of Pauline transcendence is to deny the veracity of the physical world and to use that very denial as negative proof of the existence of a metaphysical world that is more pure, more permanent, more “real.”

A similar perplexity also emerges from Plato’s “allegory of the cave.” Socrates describes what we see in the world as shadows of the “real” objects behind our backs, invisible to us, which are being moved in front of a fire so that their shadows are projected on the cave wall in front of us. The enlightened philosopher is able to escape the shackles of bodily existence and sensual perception and ascend out of the darkness of the life of the body into the light of the life of the mind and thus to perceive the universal truths and ideals of which physical objects are imperfect approximations.

In these views of the faculty of vision, seeing with our eyes is a form of blindness and whatever we perceive bodily, with all our senses, is unreal, or less real than what we can conceive with our imagination.

The Wizard of Oz repeats that same scenario, but then demystifies it by unveiling the conceptual prestidigitation that makes it possible. While Dorothy and her three fellow travelers are following Plato’s and St. Paul’s script and looking upward at the image of the great magical wizard, her little dog, Toto, keeps his eyes and nose to the ground and eventually discovers the real-life person behind the illusion: a little old man, lost in this land, who has created the illusion of a mystical super being to protect or empower himself, only to be obscured and engulfed by the illusion he created. The illusion, once accepted by the dwellers of Oz, becomes much more powerful than he, its creator, is. When the dog pulls back the curtain, the “wizard” desperately tries to keep up the illusion, but in doing so also reveals that it is a trick. He can be seen speaking into the microphone while the voice booms out thunderously from the superhuman image of the Great Wizard overhead: “Don’t pay any attention to that little man behind the curtain!”: a plea that seems to echo the injunctions of Socrates and Paul, while simultaneously revealing their mendacity. Dorothy’s and her companion’s eyes have been brought back down to earth, and they now see how the magic trick works. (But don’t worry, kids, there are still the Witches in Oz; and their magic must be real, no?)

By tracing the trajectory of transcendence backwards, as suggested earlier, we can also detect the return path that will take us back from the realm of imaginary speculation to the natural world of sensation. The poles of reality and unreality are thus switched back, aligning reality with what can be observed rather than with what can only be imagined. (Perhaps like the north-south magnetic polarity of the Earth, the immanent-transcendent gnostic poles also switch roles periodically.)

Does this mean that those who don’t share Christian Pauline convictions or a belief in Platonic universal ideals should dismiss notions of transcendence as mere delusions that stem from a fear of death, impermanence, and uncertainty, or as futile wishful thinking for secure, permanent, ubiquitous, and unquestionable guideposts to give direction and meaning to our existence? Are ideological products of the imagination, in fact, less “real” than the physical objects that we construct: buildings, vehicles, tools, weapons?

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were also products of human imagination and design, given a solid form by human and machine labor. And so were the airplanes that flew into the skyscrapers. Which were more real: these very solid material objects, which were destroyed and annihilated, or the ideas and convictions that drove the terrorists to destroy them? Unlike the living organisms of the “biosphere” and the material elements and constructions of the “geosphere,” the unphysical ideas and convictions of the “noosphere” were not destroyed; they live on. If not materially real, they are historically, psychologically, and experientially very real.

Regardless of whether such religious, political, ideological beliefs are seen as fanatical delusions or as inspired revelations, they become no less “real” as human constructs than the physical objects we build and leave behind. Once created, they persist and spread through the world and are passed on from generation to generation and end up shaping and transforming the purportedly more “real” physical, material objects of our world. Once an idea or belief takes root and propagates in the “noosphere” (to borrow mixed metaphors of roots and spores from the “biosphere”), it becomes just as real and determinant in the human landscape as elements found in the “biosphere” and “geosphere.”

That, too, is what the Divine Comedy tells us: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise and what they represent are all real. Furthermore, not only does each canticle represent reality, but paradoxical as it may seem and is, each canticle represents reality more fully and more accurately than the other two canticles, the “most real real,” because each looks at different facets of reality and from different points of view. For, as ye know, dear and tired readers, reality, like something else named Legion, has many facets and guises that can and do possess us.

ARE YE STUFFED YET?

But, dear reader, enough with the “furthermores,” “what ifs,” “but waits,” and “and yets”! Now it really is time for a post-prandial pisolino (nap).

What I’ve served up is just a pell-mell, potluck smorgasbord, nowhere near the culinary standards of Dante’s Convivio (Banquet). But my meager and less nutritious offerings go all the way from hors d’œuvres to a heavenly dessert, and even include a digestif to aid digestion, unlike Dante’s Convivio, which advertised fifteen courses but delivered only four before the chef decided to get out of the hot kitchen and got lost in a dark wood instead. Maybe he realized that it was better to leave readers hungry for the really big dish he was planning to cook up next.

I, too, hope to have left my banqueteers not too sated with answers but stuffed with questions to take home with them: a copious cud on which to ruminate.

But first, that needed and overdue pisolino. Sweet dreams!

***

Acknowledgments: Even though I did not cite them directly, I am grateful to many colleagues and friends whose responses to my queries on this topic and early drafts of this essay helped me better to formulate and articulate my thoughts, albeit often in disagreement with their generously offered reflections and well-founded conclusions. Any lingering idiocy that I refused to abandon, despite their sage arguments, is stubbornly my own. Grazie to: Susan Bennett, Ted Cachey, Phil Cass, Alison Cornish, Judith de Luce, Simone Dubrovic, Wiley Feinstein, Lloyd Howard, Chris Kleinhenz, Richard Lansing, Dennis Looney, Lara Mancinelli, Barbara Newman, Peter Pedroni, Alessandro Scafi, Paul Sandro, Madison U. Sowell, John Took, Paolo Valesio, Rebecca West.

[1] A grammar primer for those who have not studied Italian or those who could use a refresher:

In English, as in Italian, the indicative and the imperative have the same form of the verb: eat, but the indicative, in English, is always accompanied by the subject pronoun: you eat, because the same form of the verb, with the same ending, is used for five of the six persons (subject categories) of the verb: first person singular and plural: I/We eat; second person singular and plural: You/You eat; and third person plural: They eat. The only distinct form is for the third person singular: He/She/It eats. So, in the indicative mood, just using eat by itself doesn’t tell us who the subject is.

The imperative, on the other hand, both in English and in Italian, can only be in the second person, addressed directly to the person or persons who are listening, which in English is you in both cases, with the verb in the same form. The first person, I/We, and the third person, He-She-It/They, cannot be the subject of an imperative verb, and so the subject pronoun is unnecessary. Therefore, eat, by itself, is necessarily an imperative, and you eat is the only way to express the indicative.

In Italian, on the other hand, the subject pronoun is not used with verbs in the indicative mood because each person of the verb has a distinct ending that tells us who or what the subject is. Let’s take mangiare (to eat): mangio (I eat), mangi (you, sing, eat), mangia (he/she/it eats), mangiamo (we eat), mangiate (you, plural, eat), mangiano (they eat).

As for the imperative mood, unlike English, in which the only possible subject for the imperative is you, which is both singular and plural, Italian has different forms for the second person singular, tu (thou), and for the plural, voi (you all). In Italian, therefore, it’s possible to tell if an imperative is addressed to an individual or to a group, even though the subject pronoun is not used: Finisci (Finish) addresses an individual (tu); Finite (Finish) addresses a group (voi).

Birds of Passage

Sante Matteo

I’m floating over my town again, looking down at the clusters of attached stone houses in rows snaking along the contours of the hillside, surrounded by an irregular patchwork of fields along the steep slopes meandering down to the Biferno River valley. In the wheat fields only stubble remains, where it hasn’t been burned to charred brown residuum. Newly erected haystacks dot the landscape. Olive trees glint silvery green in the sunlight. Under the almond, hazelnut, and walnut trees the ground is carpeted with fallen nuts, many still in their green husks. Apples and pears, some bored by worms, and late-season figs, some pecked by birds, hang heavily from sagging branches or have fallen to the ground. Vineyards are laden with red and green grapes ready to be plucked.

I soar slowly over ochre-colored tiled roofs overlaying barren walls of hand-hewn granite blocks. Plumes of smoke waft from the chimneys, as they do year-round, because all the cooking is done in fireplaces. But now, in September, fires in the hearth are also needed for warmth; nights and mornings grow chilly.

I glide over the town’s only carriageable street, the via nova, the new road. There are rarely any motor vehicles on it: a bus in the early morning, heading toward Campobasso, the provincial capital, and another in the late afternoon going in the other direction. The children always know when the afternoon bus is coming because a quarter of an hour before it’s due, our mothers lean out their windows and shout at us to get off the street, if we don’t want to be run over. Most of the traffic on the road usually consists of the contadini, tillers of the land, going out to work in the fields outside of town in the morning and coming back into town in the evening, some with goats and sheep, some with a donkey. Sometimes there are horse-drawn carts, and once in a while even an ox-drawn wagon. But most of the time the road is just filled with us children playing: young ones playing hop-scotch or hide-and-seek, and older ones, those closer to my age, playing soccer with a ball made of rolled up rags tied with string; or p’zzill, played with a short stick sharpened at both ends with a pocket knife, and a longer stick used first to hit the short stick on a pointed end, to make it pop up into the air, and then to strike it as far as possible while it’s still up in the air. The street and alleys are our playgounds, until our mothers call us in for meals, or for the little ones to take a nap, or for the bigger ones to run errands, often to fetch water at the public fountain.

I swoop over the town’s main piazza, which serves as a border between the old and new sections of town. On one hillside, to the north, the old medieval quarter clusters around the ancient church, whose campanile can be seen rising above the rooftops, and whose bells can be heard from the fields all around the town, and when the wind is right, even from neighboring towns. On the other side, where the terrain is flatter, extends the “new” section of the town, built outside the old medieval walls and gates. Here, where my own house is located, the alleys between the rows of houses are wider and more sunlit, the homes more spacious, but built of granite stones as old as those in the oldest houses in the medieval quarter and in the ancient church itself, though not as big. From my vantage point up in the sky I can make out the difference between the old town, with weathered walls, and the new town, where the walls are less dark and sooty. The brightest walls are those of newest houses on the outskirts of the new quarter, whose freshly chiseled stones of pink-veined granite seem to glisten in the sunlight.

Some of those new houses were built by my grandfather and my father, assisted by their apprentices. They’re stonemasons—as I too will be someday, following in the footsteps of generations. I look down on those houses in the old quarter that have stood for hundreds of years, maybe more than a thousand, and the newer ones that will stand just as long, for centuries to come, and am filled with a sense of pride to belong to a family of builders. They sometimes take me along as their “helper,” and I’ve come to know many phases of their work: extracting stone from quarries outside the town; shaping and chiseling the rocks by hand on the ground floor of our house during the winter months, when it’s too cold to work outside; and then in the warm months constructing those rock-solid houses that stand for centuries; designing and building them from bottom to top, erecting walls, sculpting entries, lintels, fireplaces, mantles, cisterns. Like them, I too will become a muratore: quarryman, architect, engineer, sculptor, and mason all in one; and people will someday call me Mastro.

But will there be houses for me to build when it’s my turn to take up the family trade? So many families are emigrating, leaving empty houses behind. Will they be coming back? There are some schoolmates and play friends that have been gone so long, I can’t even remember them anymore.

I hover over my own house on the via nova—named Corso Vittorio Emanuele II after the first King of Italy, as I’ve learned in school—and watch the swallows emerge from their nests under the eaves of the roofs. The swallows, according to Nonno, my grandfather, are getting ready to return to Africa for the winter. They will all be gone in a month and won’t be back until April next year, eight long months away: a long, cold winter without their frenetic flitting and chirping filling the sky and supplying the background noise of summer days. There are more of them now than those who arrived in the spring. Their babies were born under those eaves, and it’s the young ones, Nonno says, that fly away first, all the way back to Africa across the Mediterranean Sea. They somehow know where to go even though they’ve never been there before. Nonno says that they even pause to rest in the same places where their parents stopped in their migration north to Italy and to our town. After a week or so of flying they’ll reach their destination: the same location from where the parent swallows departed and where they, the parents, will themselves return later. I don’t know how Nonno knows all this, but I believe everything he says. He doesn’t try to fool me like Papà or some of my uncles. I never know when they’re kidding, but Nonno doesn’t kid.

Nowadays, Nonno points out with sorrow in his voice, the swallows are not the only ones going away. Many of the town’s young men are also leaving, heading for faraway places that the townsfolk call “America,” by which they mean any foreign land where there is work to be found. Argentina, Venezuela, Australia, Germany, Belgium, the UK: they’re all “America.” A few of the men who left returned after a while, but most haven’t. Instead their wives and children have gone to join them in those faraway lands, in those Americas where people speak different languages than ours. Many of them, Nonno predicts, will not be coming back as the swallows always do, not next spring, not ever.

In the view of the old men who sit on the bench in front of the house with Nonno on sunny afterrnoons, the war, which brought a lot of destruction to the land, also destroyed our way of life. Many men were killed, or wounded, or detained for years as prisoners of war. The poorest families in the town, hard as life had always been for them, now face ongoing hunger, with no prospects for a change in the future, making them desperate to find some way to feed their children, even if it means leaving their homes to go into the unknown. The old men lament that long-established customs and age-old traditions are disappearing. Nevertheless, some of the younger townspeople, my father among them, argue that these changing conditions also present new opportunities for those willing to risk starting over in a foreign land, facing and adapting to strange ways and conditions and an incomprehensible language.

It is a sorrowful subject in our family, because my own father recently became one of those who left. He got a work contract in what the townspeople call Nuova York, or the “Good America,” although Nonno says that the country is actually called Stati Uniti, United States, and that New York, Nuova York, is the name of a city, not of the whole country; and he should know, because he went there several times himself, as a seasonal migrant when he was just a young man at the beginning of the century. He says that they were called “birds of passage,” those who, like him, went back and forth, following the work seasons. They were like the swallows that come to our town each spring and leave in the fall. I’m sure my Papá will be coming back, just like the swallows. Almost sure.

The swallows have emerged from their roof-top nests under the eaves and dart and chirrup all around me, zigging and zagging in their jerky way. They’re scolding me, I think, for all the stones I’ve shot at them over the summer with my slingshot—my own hand-crafted masterpiece, made with a perfect y-shaped twig and the elastic band from the underpants that my mother sewed. Soon, I realize with some apprehension that after the swallows have all left and it gets colder, I will have to change from my cotton summer underwear to woolen winter underwear, and I will have to come up with an explanation for what happened to the missing elastic: “I don’t know, it just fell out. . . . The Gypsies took it. . . . Those bullies from ‘ngopp a chies, the old part of town near the church, beat me up and stole it. . . . A witch came through the wall one night and just ripped it off.”

And then suddenly, over the chorus of the swallows’ shrill chirping, I hear a much more plaintive birdsong: “kyoo, kyoo.” I look around, puzzled and alarmed. The Kyoo owl only sings at night. Its call is out of place here and now: up in the sky, in the daylight.

And then I’m suddenly falling from the sky, gasping, my arms flailing wildly trying to regain my lift. Just before hitting the ground I wake up, thrashing in my bed

My relief that it has all been a dream doesn’t last long. Now that I’m awake I still hear the mournful cry of the bird of death: “kyooo . . . kyooo . . . kyooo.” It was what called me out of my dream. What’s worse, to my increasing dread, it’s very close to our house: just outside.

Is it looking at my window? To announce my impending death? That’s what the Kyoo owl does: It perches outside the house and looks right at the window of someone who is going to die that night.

Did I say all my prayers and recite all the necessary incantantions before going to sleep? There are so many and they take so long that I sometimes fall asleep before completing the whole lot. I also have to cross my arms and legs to ward off the array of witches, ghosts, werewolves, and other horrid creatures that lurk through the town at night. But it’s hard to keep arms and legs crossed when I’m asleep. I must have uncrossed them when I was flying. Now, awake, I quickly cross them again and start anxiously to repeat the prayers and magic incantantions as fast as I can. For good measure I also cross my fingers.

Of all the frightening nocturnal creatures that populate my world, the one I fear the most is the Kyoo owl, because its doleful call can actually be heard at night; it is not just imagined. I’ve heard it many nights, sometimes far away, sometimes close by. But not this close! It sounds as if the deadly bird is perched in the big red-fig tree in our back orchard. Or it could be in the walnut tree in the neighbor’s orchard to the left, or the apple tree in the other neighbor’s yard.

After what seems like a very long time the kyooing finally stops, and I’m relieved to realize that I am still alive. I slowly relax, trying nevertheless to stay awake and keep my legs, arms, and fingers resolutely crossed. But it’s no use. Here I am flying up in the air again, with arms and fingers spread wide and legs extended, having forgotten all about the deadly birdcall. Now I’m circling under the rafters inside the ancient town church, where I’ve recently started to serve as an altar boy. Below, behind the marble altar, the recently arrived young priest, Don Benedetto, is saying mass to a sparse congregation of parishioners, mostly old women dressed in black. Once they reach a certain age, they’re always in mourning for someone, and it’s easier just to wear black all the time.

Don Benedetto arrived in town only a few months ago, and he enlisted me and the other altar boys to help him go through the archives to learn about the church’s and the town’s history. With our help, and to our fascination and that of the whole town, he has discovered that our austere, unadorned church is actually an “architectural jewel” that was built many centuries ago by the Templars, who were knights who fought in the Crusades, and that it is really a remarkable example of what he calls “Romanesque” architecture that should be studied and evaluated by art scholars and historians. Some people think he’s crazy; some think he’s given our town new prestige.

To tell the truth, I’ve never heard of Romanesque architecture or of the Templars. But I have heard of knights and of the Crusades, both in school and at home. On winter evenings, sitting around the hearth, my grandfather tells us many stories: memories of his youth and of family life, fables and folktales, ghost stories, Bible stories, and tales of knights and Crusaders. So, now as I float near the church’s ceiling I look at the austere, naked-stone walls and the two unevern rows of massive columns topped with strangely carved capitals with a new sense of reverence and admiration, seeing our imposing, unembellished church as something fabulous, built by legendary crusading knights.

And now I’m out of the church, out in the open air again, soaring over the town’s only school, which people call new, even though it was built before the war, years before I was even born, in the time of il Duce, Mussolini. Looking at it from above, I can see how different it is from the other buildings in the town. It’s made of bricks, not stones, and has two tall marble pilasters framing the entrance, in the form of two long fasces, symbols of the Fascist Party.

As I look down at the children filing in like ants—the black-smocked boys going in one side of the entrance and the girls, with white smocks, going in the other side—I hear my mother shout up to me: “Sendu’, scign’, get down here . . .!” I tumble from the sky again, startled awake, and hear the rest of her urgent command: “. . . iusht mo, right now! You’re going to be late for school!”

So, it’s morning. I’m alive. I listen anxiously. There is no more kyooing outside the window. I’ve survived through another night. And so has my mother.

I throw on my clothes, rush down to the kitchen on the second floor, and hurriedly gulp down chunks of crusty bread dunked in hot milk—taken just a few minutes earlier from a neighbor’s cow. My mother helps me put on my school smock and buttons it in the back and makes sure that my pen and pencil and homework are in my cartella, and I set off for school, a short walk from my house . . . or from any other house in town.

As soon as I step outside I see and hear the swallows streak through the sky as usual, wishing me and the world good-morning with their shrill twittering. But there is also something unusual in the air this morning: another sound that shouldn’t be there. After a moment I realize what it is: the goats are bleating next door. Strange! They shouldn’t be there at this time. Usually Zi’ Iuccio has taken the herd out of town to pasture well before now, at sunrise. I’m tempted to push the neighbors’ door open and peek in to investigate.

I like looking in on these neighbors, especially in the evening, when the goats have been herded back home from the countryside, because Teresina, the goatherd’s young daughter, often gives me a ladle of warm whey, or better yet, a clump of fresh cheese that she scoops up from the cauldron with a strainer and squeezes in her hand, forming what she calls a little bird, uccelluccio, because it really does look like a white, featherless, naked baby bird still in its nest. And it even squeaks when my teeth bite into it.

But no, I don’t want to be late for school right at the beginning of the school year. My third-grade teacher, the same teacher I had in the first and second grade, waits by the door with his ruler ever at the ready to swat the hands of miscreant boys. I have never been swatted with the ruler yet—but I was slapped once, even though I had done nothing wrong; it was my deskmate who had made the noise, not me, but he wouldn’t own up to it, and we both got slapped in the face; and I almost peed in my pants because of the shock of the blow and the injustice of the punishment and my deep humiliation in front of my classmates. I don’t want to risk being punished now, and especially don’t want to get on Signor Leonardo’s bad side.

The punishment I dread the most, meted out to those boys who do get on the teacher’s bad side, is to be made to kneel on the ground, with a handful of hard, raw ceci, chick peas, placed under each bare knee, with those sharp little protruding nebs that bite into the flesh and leave marks on the knees. I love to eat ceci: whether still green, right off the bush; or dried and hard; or boiled and used in soup, or with t’bett, short elbow maccaroni; or just by themselves, after they’ve been boiled and cooled, with a little oil and salt; or best of all, toasted in the fireplace until they are browned and crunchy. To turn our beloved ceci into instruments of torture seems particularly cruel and menacing, since the boys so tortured are reminded of the punishment every time we eat them, which is pretty often.

What is even more frightening is that it is certain to be a double jeopardy, because if I were to go home with all those red, inflamed dimples dotting my knees, my mother would be sure to recognize them for what they were: evidence of my crime and punishment in school. She would then punish me all over again.

Worse still, she would then tell the whole extended family about it at the communal Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ house: “Guess what one of our own did at school this week?” And I would be shamed in front of all my relatives. It’s triple humiliation that is at stake! So, no dallying! I rush off to school and forget about the neglected and complaining goats, and so manage to avoid humiliation and torture for that day: no slaps, no swats, no kneeling on ceci.

When I get out of school in the early afternoon, the swallows seem to be gathered in groups on the rooftops, as if taking a rest from their frenzied flying. Or perhaps they’re pondering their upcoming departure across the sea. Maybe they’ve eaten all the insects in town, and there is nothing left for them to eat. Or maybe it’s getting to be too cold for the insects, and they have migrated too, or burrowed somewhere and gone to sleep.

Summer, a stegion’ bon’, the “good season,” as folks here call it, is coming to an end. Days are getting shorter, nights longer. But the grape harvest and wine-making are coming up, and they’re a lot of fun for young and old: summer’s last festive offering. Winter is not here quite yet.

As I approach my house I’m surprised to see a throng of people gathered in front. As I get closer I see that they are actually converged next door, outside Zi’ Iuccio’s house. They all look somber. Some seem to be weeping. I see my mother among them and make my way to her. She pulls me to her and tells me in a subdued voice that Zi’ Iuccio is dead. Tears come to her eyes again, and to mine too. The neighbors’ goats are noisy and smelly, but the old man was a kind and generous neighbor, always happy to let me drink some whey and taste the fresh cheese he was making, from when I was able to toddle into the ground floor of their next-door house. He even let me try my hand at milking the goats a few times, chuckling and praising me warmly if I managed to squeeze a few white drops into the bucket.

All the men in Zi’ Iuccio’s family are now gone. His two sons were both killed in the war. Only his widow Filomena and the daughter are left. What will happen to the goats? Will Teresina and her mother be able to tend to them and to cultivate their fields without menfolk to do the heavy work? Or will they too have to go away, like the swallows, but maybe never come back? No more warm whey, no more hand-squeezed “little birds.”

Later, inside, I ask my mother if she heard the Kyoo owl calling last night. Yes, she did. She too was afraid that it might be looking at our house, but it must have been looking instead at the window next door, into the bedroom of poor old Zi’ Iuccio, good soul! She shivers and makes the sign of the cross three times, and nods to me and my little sister to do the same, and we do.

Today more swallows have flown away, and tomorrow more will follow. Tonight the Kyoo owl will cry again.

Sante Matteo was born and spent his childhood in a small agricultural town in southern Italy. He is a retired Professor Emeritus of Italian Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Recent creative writing has appeared in Dime Show Review, Bark, The Chaffin Journal, and The New Southern Fugitives.

Hold That Tail!

It was the year of the pig with no name.  When nonno brought home a baby pig from the livestock market in Campobasso in the early Spring, he cautioned me not to name it.  In previous years, including just a couple of months prior, I ended up squealing too when my Pudgy or Pinky was slaughtered at the end of the year.  My grandfather now reminded me to keep in mind that it wasn't a pet; it was meat for the family.  Next year, if all went right, it was going to be sausage and spr'sciat (salame) and pr'sutt (prosciutto) and ciquul' (rinds).  So, that piglet didn't become Snorty or Hammy or Choppy; just “the pig.”

It was again my job to feed it scraps from the table to fatten it up as much as possible before Christmas.  It was a very easy or a very hard job, depending on how you looked at it: easy because there weren't many scraps to deliver; and hard for the same reason: how could I fatten him up with such few scraps?  Leftovers were out of the question because there were none at the end of our meals.  We had to finish everything on our plates: no choice, no argument.  The only scraps came from preparing meals, not consuming them: stalks, peels, seeds, rotten fragments.  And there weren't many of those either.  Whatever could be made edible by pounding, spicing, and cooking for a long time went into the pot and into our bellies.  Fortunately, the pig didn't make much of a fuss.  He liked even those things that couldn't be made edible enough to force on us.  So, in addition to his daily gruel, I chucked any available scraps into his pen and watched “the pig” grow fat month after month, fighting the temptation to give him a name.

When winter approached I reminded my grandfather that I was now seven years old and begged him to let me take part in the slaughter and the butchering with the other “men” of the family.  Nonno looked me up and down appraisingly, at first frowning and shaking his head slowly, but then he finally nodded: va buon', very well.

On Christmas day our whole extended family dined together and ate what was left of that year's cured meat.  The next day, St. Stephen's, we prepared the meat that would last us through the following year.  It had to take place during the coldest part of the year, when the sausages and hams could be hung up to dry without spoiling.  It was a day of bustling but festive activity from early in the morning to late into the dark of the evening.  The men caught and killed the pig, quartered and cleaned it, and hung it up to bleed out.  The women scalded the skin and shaved it, gathered, cooked, and preserved the blood (to turn into a syrupy sweetener--sang'doce, sweet blood--used as filling for pastries), cut up and seasoned the meat for various modes of preservation: hams, bacon, sausages of different kinds, lard, rinds.

This was my big moment, an important milestone toward manhood.  Nervous but putting on a brave front, I accompanied the menfolk into the stall at the bottom of the house. The oldest uncle and the one in charge of the proceedings assigned roles and explained the sequence of events and what each person had to do.  He then turned to me and, with the other menfolk looking on and nodding in appproval, he informed me emphatically that mine was the most important job of all: to hold on to the pig's tail with both hands and to keep it straight the whole time.  If I let go, and the tail curled up, the meat would spoil and we would all go hungry.  No matter how much the pig squealed or lunged, or how much blood or anything else came out, I had to hold on to that tail!  Was I up to it?  I faltered a bit but muttered, scin', yes.

It wasn't the blood that made me nervous.  My cousins and I had helped memmell', our grandmother, kill plenty of chickens over the years.  We were used to seeing blood spurting out of the neck—even though I still marveled at how the body continued to flail around the courtyard even after the head had been chopped off.  We all knew where our meat came from and how it got to the table.

What didn't occur to me was to question what that “anything else” might be that would be coming out of the pig.  I knew nothing of sphincter muscles.  Neither did my relatives, for that matter, but they did know from experience what happened when the pig lost control of its organs and what that “anything else” was that would be emerging from it, and from where.

There was much more blood than I was used to from my experiences with the chickens, but at least it came out at the other end of the carcass from where I was stationed, and there were a couple of uncles interposed between me and the pig's neck to obstruct my view—even though they couldn't obstruct the amazingly human-like, high-pitched squealing that sounded so desperate and pathetic and made me shiver.  What I was not at all expecting was what came out the other end of the pig, the end to which the tail was attached, the tail around which my hands were wrapped and that I had to keep gripping no matter what.

But I had a job to do.  A crucial job!  So I shut my eyes, clenched my teeth, tried to ignore the squealing, the squirming, and the stench, and tightened my grip on that tail, and held on fiercely until the squealing stopped and the twitching finally subsided.  The men looked at me, smiled, chuckled, and told me I could let go now.  They all lavished jocular praise on my skill and tenacity. Had any of them ever seen better tail holding?  No, no one could remember any tail held better!  Because of my good work, there would be meat for us next year.

That evening, tired but still in a festive spirit, we celebrated St. Stephen's feast by frying and eating the bits of pork left over from the day's butchering and processing.  The menfolk recounted and embellished my pig-tail-holding heroics to all the family members around the tables set up in my grandparents' spacious kitchen, warmed by the day's cooking and glowing with the dancing light from the roaring flames in the hearth.  The listeners ooh-ed and ah-ed and heaped on the praise.  As we ate and conversed merrily, all exclaimed how good the pork was: maybe the best they had ever tasted, and all thanks to me, because I had valiantly held on to that tail and kept it from curling up.  I blushed and smiled bashfully, trying to look modest, as my mother always insisted we be, but feeling proud and important: manly.

And that next year's meat was good and did not spoil.

THE ABSTRACT ELEPHANT MAGAZINE

UNDERSTANDING THE ISSUES OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

https://abstractelephant.com/2021/03/15/quantum-entanglement-between-doppelgangers-sante-matteo/

Quantum Entanglement Between Doppelgangers

By Sante Matteo March 15, 2021

This recounted moment of personal history, which induced the author to reflect on the many times he’s been told that he looks just like someone else, started out as a holiday greeting to colleagues and friends a few years ago. Using analogies to quantum physics and to the distinction between particles and waves, it addresses how we are all connected to each other and mutually entangled, to make it resonate (albeit subtly) with some of the pressing issues of our day: e.g., isolation, identity politics, polarization, silo culture, and whose lives matter.

Well, how about that? For once, I actually submitted my final grades before the 1PM deadline, with whole minutes to spare! It’s barely past noon: 12:12PM, to be exact.

And look at that: today is December 12! So, it’s the twelfth minute of the twelfth hour of the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of the century: 12:12 12/12/12!

That combination won’t happen again until a century from now, in 2112.

It’s curious that this long string of similar numbers represents a unique centennial event. It’s a manifestation of opposite concepts: alikeness and uniqueness, repetition and rarity. It makes me wonder if other events or phenomena embody an analogous paradox, simultaneously expressing similarity and difference.

The first thing that pops into my mind is that maybe I do: that I’m like one of those 12s in the chain.

This morning, a friend posted a picture of the Dos Equis man next to my name on Facebook, followed by the assertion: “L’uomo più interessante del mondo :)” (“The most interesting man in the world”: the tag line for the Dos Equis man). The implication was that he looks just like me.

It made me smile because, unbeknownst to my friend, one of my students had recently pointed out the same resemblance in class: “You know, professor, you look a lot like the Dos Equis man. Do you do some acting on the side?” After he said it, the rest of the class agreed vociferously: “Oh, wow! It’s true; just like him!” Someone then declaimed: “Hey, stay thirsty, my friends!”

I had no idea who this Dos Equis person was, nor that he was dubbed “the most interesting man in the world.” In fact, I did not know what Dos Equis was, nor what the expression meant. I actually didn’t know what words they were saying, as if they were speaking a different language — and, as it turned out, they were. “It’s a Mexican beer,” they informed me (only an occasional and indifferent beer drinker). “You know, XX, double X, dos equis in Spanish.”

Once that was cleared up, I still had to look up the Dos Equis ads on YouTube to see the man whose double I supposedly was. The similarity didn’t seem particularly striking to me. So, I was ready to shrug it off. But then, as if to confirm my students’ claims, my friend posted his very picture on my timeline, implying that it could be a picture of me, and people couldn’t tell the difference.

You be the judge, dear reader! Can you tell the XX beer imbiber from the YY wine sipper?

See Carousel Image 1 below: Left: Dos Equis man (used in accordance with fair use policy) | Right: Sante Matteo

This got me thinking, however, that, rather than the most interesting man in the world (or one of two such), I may well be the most commonplace man in the world, because this is only the latest of a long series of sightings of a host of doppelgangers of mine.

Earlier in the semester, students came across a picture of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Hero of Two Worlds, who fought for independence and liberty in South America and in Italy, and a Founding Father of Italy as unified nation (1861). “He looks just like you!” they noted and asked if I had posed for the picture, or if I was his direct descendant.

A few pages later in the textbook, there was a picture of the opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was also instrumental (pun not initially intended, but accepted gleefully when noted) in unifying Italians culturally, if not politically, by creating music that could be shared throughout the peninsula and among all classes: “our” music. My students again exclaimed: “Wow! You look just like him, too!”

 See Carousel Image 2 below: Left: Giuseppe Garibaldi | Center: Giuseppe Verdi | Right: Sante Matteo

“Do all you Italians look alike?” a student wondered.

“Only the famous, heroic, brilliant, handsome ones with beards,” I explained.

But my doubles are not just Italians. Members of my doppel-gang apparently roam far and wide.

Many people, both those who know me personally and those who happened to see a picture of me on Facebook or elsewhere, declare that I am Ernest Hemingway reincarnated. I was a big hit when traveling in Cuba. People would stop in their tracks, point at me, and exclaim: “Papa Ernesto!” and insist on taking a picture with me. There must be dozens of pictures hanging on Cuban walls of me standing or sitting alongside people who claim to be with Hemingway, or with his revenant.

See Carousel Image 3 below: Left: Ernest Hemingway | Right: Sante Matteo

Is reincarnation possible, considering that Papa Hemingway was still alive when I was born? Boh! — as we eloquently say in Italian for: I have no idea!; Haven’t the foggiest!; No clue!; Who knows? It could be that the reincarnation took place not with my birth but with the birth of my beard. Boh!

People have also wondered if I’m a descendant of the guy on the $50 bill.

See Carousel Image 4 below: Left: Ulysses S. Grant | Right: Sante Matteo

Does that middle initial of his, S (which he started using for no apparent reason), actually stand for a mysterious family name of unknown origin, which eventually was passed down to me as a first name? Could that connection also explain why I talk and write so much about the figure of Ulysses in my classes and in my articles and books (e.g., Il secondo occhio di Ulisse, The Second Eye of Ulysses)?

The possibility that I, born and raised in Italy, with ancestors who, as far as I know, all came from there, could be related to General U. S. Grant seems rather remote. But who knows? Grant did travel to Italy after his presidency. While there, he might have enjoyed a dalliance with my great-great-grandmother. He still would have been young enough for amorous dallying, only in his mid-fifties. But his wife, Julia, was with him, greatly reducing the chances of such dallying and consequent potential contributions to my ancestral gene pool. Still, maybe DNA testing is in order.

My very own son insists that I look just like the guy on the left:

See Carousel Image 5 below: Left: Sean Connery (used in accordance with fair use policy) | Right: Sante Matteo

If he — my son, not Bond, James Bond; oops, I mean: Connery, Sean Connery — should read this, here’s a hint: different eye color: his, brown; mine, blue (visibly so, when not squinting against the sun). And, okay, perhaps also a slight difference in physique. I never got around to competing for Mr. Universe.

Over the years, I’ve lost count of the number of times people have sworn that I look just like a cousin, uncle, friend, colleague, or neighbor of theirs.

I don’t mind. It’s not a bad part to play, since it’s usually someone they like or miss, and they tend to transfer that sympathy and affection to me. All I have to do is just add a smile or two to those pre-existing feelings of friendship and fondness, stir in a little conversation, and voilà: instant bonhomie and benevolence.

Well, dear reader, if you’re still there, you must be wondering, as am I, what could possibly have brought about this concatenation of thoughts and images roaming through my mind. In part, it must be due to the sense of liberation after submitting the final grades and putting to rest another semester. Freed from having to concentrate on the material taught in my courses, my thoughts can finally roam around more freely.

On the other hand, although released from their curricular duties, those newly liberated thoughts embarked on a direction imposed by the very topics addressed in essays I had been reading. Free to wander but led by the nose: another contradiction.

For the course “Italy: Matrix of Civilization,” one of the questions was whether there is such a thing as an Italian identity. Some students argued that there is, as represented by a common cultural patrimony: literature, painting, opera, religion, and soccer — especially soccer!; and common historical figures and heroes: Marco Polo, Dante, Michelangelo, Galileo, Garibaldi, and Pirlo. Others, on the other hand, claimed that there are only local identities: Venetian, Neapolitan, Florentine; Sicilian, Lombard, Piedmontese. They recalled and deployed the term campanilismo to indicate an allegiance to the church steeple of one’s hometown. Each region, indeed each city or town, they point out, has its own history, language (often incomprehensible in other parts of the country), customs, cuisine, folklore. And, last but not least, there were also a few students who argued for a combined identity: a unified national identity superimposed on diverse local identities, making Italians similar to and distinct from other Italians.

One student used food to make the case. When traveling in Italy, she never encountered what might be termed a national dish, only local dishes. Even common enough items, such as pasta and pizza, were prepared in ways unique to the location. But when she traveled outside of Italy, and especially when she came back to the States, there were so-called Italian restaurants that served so-called Italian food. Italian cuisine, she opined, existed only outside of Italy. How one perceives identity depends on whether one is looking from inside or from outside.

It’s too bad that I’m the only one to read these essays at the end of the course. Students would learn much from reading and discussing each others’ opinions and conclusions. There was a physics major in the class, who might have shed light on this other paradox: the need to be positioned both inside and outside, by pointing out that this is what quantum superposition and entanglement are all about: particles being distinct, far away from each other, and yet entangled, part of the same wave.

I once read that we, human beings, are waves. If so, if I am a wave, am I too superposed and entangled with other human beings, even those who are not in my proximity — what Einstein dubbed: “spooky action at a distance”?

Waves are a force that is propagated through matter, or through particles. Ocean waves are not a conglomeration of water molecules that travel great distances, but rather a force that is transmitted from molecule to molecule. The water is a medium. When traversed by waves, it is agitated up and down and all around, side to side, forward and backward, but remains more or less where it was before the wave passed through it. It’s not the water that travels; it’s the wave that travels through it.

The cells in our bodies are also a medium for the transmission of something that travels through them. Our cells are not permanent. They renew and mutate constantly. Except for some brain cells and ova in women, which apparently do remain intact, no cell in our body is the same as what was there, say a decade ago. Every few years, we have a body made up of new cells. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the non-human cells that constitute 90% or so of all the cells in our body: the bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms of our microbiomes, all of which also replicate and mutate continuously.

All our cells change, and yet our physical features remain the same: skin, hair, and eye color, height, bone structure, moles, scars, etc. At the cellular level, we are almost totally new and different (although not always improved, alas!) at different points in time. Yet, we somehow remain the same at the level of the whole body.

And something analogous happens at the mental level. Our memories and our knowledge constantly change and grow. New memories are added with each experience. Old ones are altered. And they all get mixed up and rearranged, and yet remain more or less intact and continuous throughout our lives, giving us the illusion of being one and the same person through the years.

All of these accumulating paradoxes circle back to the original conundrum of how something can be both unique and commonplace. None of these tangential reflections help to resolve the conundrum, only to accentuate it. But perhaps they do suggest that a “both/and” approach might be more fruitful than an “either/or” paradigm. If particles partake of both the properties of matter and of waves, as quantum physicists hypothesize, perhaps people do, too. As individuals, we uniquely occupy a specific time and space, but as members of communities — family, state, organizations, church, clubs, workforce, circle of friends, and so on — we are caught up in the waves that traverse those socio-cultural spaces (e.g., traditions, rules, laws, guidelines, beliefs, expectations — forces that entangle us all with others in the cohort).

But, dear reader, if you’re puzzled and perhaps disconcerted, as am I, as to how and why I have trespassed into the forbidding, if not forbidden, territory of quantum physics, let’s beat a retreat to a more familiar field in which I have toiled: the study of language.

With lexical spade in hand, let’s dig up some etymological roots for the word that here seems to be in question: “identity.” First of all, we should notice that even in the way we use it today — in its above-ground branches — the term is ambiguous. We carry an “identity” card to prove that we are exclusively the individual we claim to be: a token of our uniqueness. And yet, the root of the word is idem, Latin for “same,” the opposite of “unique” or “distinct,” and, true to that root, the adjective “identical” doesn’t mean “pertaining to one particular identity (ascertained by the ID card),” but “exactly like something else, a duplicate”; hence, “identity” means “resemblance” and “commonality,” antonyms of uniqueness.

So, even staying within the boundaries of my own oft-tilled field, I run into an analogous paradox. Our identity, what our ID card represents, consists of seemingly contrary properties: our commonality, our sameness with each other, as well as our difference from everyone else, our singularity.

Conclusion? No, probably not; there is no conclusion. Rather, another starting point: continuation through mutation — riding the wave across different patches of the sea of history (or seas of histories). We are all part of the same family, each person with different and unique contributions to make to the whole family, and all benefiting from what each has to offer. Or, if permitted to trespass one last time to another realm — this time just across the Alps, and just across the hall from my university office (in the Department of French and Italian), to the adjacent field of French literature, in which I have occasionally toiled — let me plagiarize the Musketeers, who put it more succinctly, forcefully, and memorably: “All for one and one for all!”

But, enough of this post-grading rapture and rudderless cerebral rambling! After all, 12:12 12/12/12 has already passed and won’t come around again for a hundred years. So, who cares about those 12s? I’d better get back to the calendar to count how many shopping days are left before the holidays.

But, lo and behold, on that December calendar, what do I see? Someone else who looks just like me! At this wintry time of year many people, especially children, have often noted a striking resemblance between me and this seasonal worker, with whom I share not only a white beard and a comparable girth, but also a similar first name, and on occasion — when my grading is done — a similar proclivity for jollity and mirth:

See Carousel Image 6 below: Left: Santa Claus | Right: Sante Claus

So, I’d better not cry and I’d better not pout because Sante Clones are all around town. They’re too many to list, let alone to check twice. So, I’d better be good, get some gifts, and be nice, and bid all: Merry Holidays, Happy New Year, and don’t slip on the ice!

Sante Matteo was born and raised in a small agricultural town in southern Italy, emigrating to the United States with his family when he was almost ten. He had the good fortune to maintain and strengthen his ties to Italy by becoming a professor of Italian Studies. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, where he resides, reminisces, and writes. Recent stories and poetry have appeared in THE CHAFFIN JOURNAL, DIME SHOW REVIEW, RIVER RIVER, SNAPDRAGON, THE NEW SOUTHERN FUGITIVES, OVUNQUE SIAMO, SHOWBEAR FAMILY CIRCUS, KAIROS.

Ambles with Zoe

A 20/20 Vision: Wednesday evening, 20 May 2020

Zoe noses the wet shrubs. Rain brings out fresh scents.

A light flashes to my left. I turn, see nothing.

Shooting star? No, the clouds hang low and dense.

Another flash; same direction: southward, over the road.

This year’s first lightning bug. Already? Too soon.

Out of season, too early to fly out of the pupa stage.

Out of place, too: hovering over the road, away from trees.

Flanking me, keeping pace; is it lured by my penlight,

Looking for a response, a welcome, an invitation?

Sorry, little bug, we're not what you're looking for.

A lone wavering speck twinkling alone on a chilly night:

Glowing off and on; now here, now there; on ... off ... on ... off.

Beaming eagerly, hopefully? Or desperately, uselessly?

A dance to an unheard melody? A code for an arcane message?

Beckoning beacon to a mate? Warning threat to a rival?

Or a solitary, futile quest in a world and a time not yet ready?

It flickers on, now there, now gone. But, no, not gone:

Still there, unseen in the dark, hiding and seeking, expecting.

Small as a sunflower seed, one five-millionth of my weight,

yet grand: an effulgent creator of light that pierces the darkness.

It flutters about on its new wings, seemingly haphazardly,

yet resolutely, unwaveringly toward some impellent end:

To locate and attract a mate, to engender and propagate life.

Another vagrant and resolute propagator lurks in this year's air:

Imperceptible to sight—two billion times smaller than my body,

smaller in relation to the firefly than the firefly is to me,

than I am to the Earth: a novel virus, minuscule and tremendous:

bearer of a planet-spanning scourge that infects, multiplies, kills:

Infinitesimal, immense agent of reproduction and destruction:

Myriad invisible invaders that hijack life and bestow death.

(Like another species that creates and exterminates life,

cultivates and destroys nature: builders and wreckers: us.)

And yet, and yet . . . . Here we are and here we go,

all of us, homebound in the same home world:

people, fireflies, viruses, and a dog called Zoe: life.

Homebound: contained, confined in our earthly home:

insulated in bodies, mired in senses, tethered to genes.

Homebound: homeless, on the road, traveling homeward:

bound for elsewhere, away from here and now.

Bound: tied up, anchored in biological bondage.

Bound: directed to roam, to seek and reach home.

Is home what holds us or what draws us away?

A place to seek or a place in which to hide?

Doubly life-bound: locked in life, impelled toward life.

Live in the moment, bound to sensual desires!

Obey the body, the urge for immediate pleasures!

Live for the future, bound toward procreation!

Spawn a progeny, a cascade of replacements,

all temporary: a cycle of annihilation and continuation:

all bound to be divergently homebound in life:

trapped within the fleeting bounds of biological being,

floating over and beyond the horizons of existence.

Looking for home while lost in the labyrinth of home,

we play hide-and-seek with meaning and insignificance.

Zoe trots on, pauses to snuzzle and sniff her world amiably.

Leaves have sprouted. Flowers are blooming. Chicks hatch.

Mulberries will soon fill branches and fall to the ground.

In the backyard, a new generation of squirrels for Zoe to chase.

The spasmodic glow of fireflies will fill the summer nights;

myriad companions for tonight's lone stranger if it hangs on.

The chase continues, life continues, Zoe strolls on.

 A Cicada Coda: One Year Later, mid-May 2021

At my "NO!" Zoe stops foraging for the strange new bugs:

Cicadas, now dormant after chirping stridently all day long.

A novelty for her, these bug-eyed, ear-piercing screechers;

their husks strewn about, stuck to tree trunks, on walls.

The previous brood rose from underground two dogs ago:

An alien invasion that was new to me, as well as to Mysti,

who, curious, sniffed, nibbled, liked, gobbled, and gorged,

then disgorged the emergent feast, re-emerged undigested:

So now, my "NO!" stops Zoe from learning from experience.

Still sparse, the few cicadas that have emerged in mid-May.

Advance scouts come to lead the way or impatient fugitives

Buried for seventeen years and avid for resurgence?

Up into the air, into sunlight, out to the open green earth,

to climb, fly, sing, click wings, mate! Ah, ecstasy at last!

And then? Plunge into death; the sun and moon barely glimpsed.

Long years of inert waiting, inhumed in airless darkness,

for a mere twinkling of winged, sonorous, sunlit vitality

when finally freed in the realm of light, noise, movement.

(Like our own lives: years of inertia, moments of momentum;

like history: long spans of stasis, sporadic change and progress;

like the universe: boundless emptiness dotted with galaxies,

speckled with countless stars, minuscule in the cosmic immensity.)

Or is that a distorted view, seen through an anthropomorphic lens?

Perhaps the nymphs cherish the sheltered existence underground,

abide contentedly in reclusion and wail in protest when expelled,

enraged by their sudden emergence into the open and the unknown.

But is this image as distorted, also seen through a human lens

that filters perceptions through our experiences and concerns

and leads us to wonder if the din is for joy or pain, dread or desire?

Or is it a blind biological response to nature's call to procreate:

birth, survival, growth, transition: flux, cycles: life, death, life?

Seed the world with new life and be gone! You're done!

Words, ideas, crafts, art: are these our mating calls and rituals,

our version of the screeching of cicadas and the glow of fireflies?

Our convoluted process of procreation, both physical and mental:

The intercourse of bodies for progeny and of minds for culture:

The coupling of bodies to arouse pleasure and beget children;

the engagement of minds to create meaning, ideals, illusions:

Our two-tiered response to the calls of the body and the mind:

Simultaneously an affirmation and a refutation of our bodies

as essential vessels and engines of life, to be protected, nurtured,

but also shunned and refuted as bearers of mortality and extinction?

Physical and mental constructions that help our species survive:

Fabrications that serve to camouflage life and hide its finality,

to mask and deny the meaningless randomness of existence?

Unlike our insect neighbors, we screech and glow incessantly.

After mating and procreating, we refuse to be gone, to be done.

Last year's intruders, the coronavirus, have lingered and spread,

compelled to reproduce, occupy new hosts, spawn variants,

in the march of life: adaptation, survival; continuation, change.

Will the newcomer viruses infect the newborn cicadas,

go underground, re-emerge in seventeen years and disseminate?

The cicadas won't know or care. Neither will the viruses.

Nor will the fireflies, nor any of the dogs that come after Zoe.

Will I, if still here, or others of my species that I leave behind?

Beam, Gleam, Repeat! Three weeks later, 6 June 2021

Zoe and I encounter this season's first firefly; on time this year,

and flying about in the shrubs: where and when it should be.

Companions will show up soon, tonight or tomorrow night:

A constellation of dancing sparkles will dot the nightscape.

Zoe ignores it for the immobile cicadas near the ground.

She sneaks a nibble while I'm looking for the fitful glow.

Caught munching by the penlight when I look down,

she looks up guiltily, then away, her head and tail down;

not for long; soon the tail wags again tentatively, hopefully.

I pretend to look for more lightning bugs to hide my smile,

not wanting to send mixed signals. But are there any other kind,

if moods and thoughts flit about like butterflies and bees,

alighting occasionally for a sip of nectar and a pinch of pollen,

living and spreading life by a script with rhyme but no reason?

Fireflies make light before the dawn.

Cicadas make noise before the night.

Dogs make bonds of devotion day and night.

We make words and thoughts, laws and art,

wars and feasts, hope and fear, hate and love.

Life makes us all. We all make life.

Glow on, glow worms! Sing along, cicadas!

Come on, Zoe, let's amble along!

"Ambles with Zoe" was published in volume I of the international anthology OUR CHANGING EARTH, sponsored by THE POET magazine, edited by poet Robin Barratt in the UK; Winter 2022, vol, 1, pp. 179-83. The anthology consists of two volumes containing 198 contributions from 193 poets in 46 countries. ISBN: 9798374310610. 

I’s Rise 

Sante Matteo 

Sunset, moonrise; 

stars in the skies. 

Shadows arise, 

darken, disguise. 

Gloom terrifies. 

Fears agonize. 

Tears come to eyes. 

Fearful child cries. 

“There, there! Oh my!”s 

soothe, tranquilize. 

Soft lullabies 

turn sobs to sighs. 

Warm, caring eyes 

to calm give rise. 

Cooings reprise. 

Love pacifies. 

Starset, sunrise; 

sunshiny skies. 

Light clarifies. 

Fearfulness dies. 

Open your eyes! 

Wake up! Arise! 

Eager mind flies, 

risks, dares, defies. 

New “why”s arise, 

spur, energize. 

Strive! Improvise! 

Explore! Revise! 

Greet each surprise 

with gleeful cries! 

Learn! Memorize! 

Try! Realize! 

“Wow!”s, “Yay!”s, “Good try!”s 

serve as a prize, 

lead to more tries, 

forge trustful ties. 

Welcome the “Why?”s! 

Help verbalize! 

Give kind replies, 

simple and wise! 

Childhood, childrise: 

Bonds crystalize. 

Hearts harmonize. 

Thoughts organize, 

try out a guise, 

make an “I” rise. 

Life’s precious prize 

love magnifies. 

In Midsummer’s Eve, no. 12, pp. 30-31, a volume of poetry published by Wingless Dreamer, 11 August 2022: https://winglessdreamer.com/winner-announcement-for-the-midsummers-eve-poetry-contest-2022/  

Queste poesie, compilate e mandate a mia madre per il suo compleanno nel 1976--per caso, anche l'anno in cui finalmente presi la cittadinanza americana, dopo quasi vent'anni di residenza negli Stati Uniti--le scrissi per cercare di ricuperare l'italiano che avevo perso (poco che fosse quello che ero riuscito a imparare fino alla quarta elementare) e per conservare alcuni dei ricordi della mia infanzia che si diluivano dopo la mia seconda emigrazione, questa volta allontanandomi dalla mia famiglia e dalla comunita` dei petrellesi di Cleveland, prima per ragioni di studio (per la laurea, 1967-71), poi per il servizio militare (1971-73), seguito dai corsi per il Dottorato di Ricerca, Ph.D. (1973-76), e infine per il lavoro accademico  in diversi atenei in diversi luoghi.  Nei ricordi, predomina la figura di mia madre perche' mio padre si trovava in America per parecchi di quegli anni, fra il 1954 e il 1958, quando l'abbiamo raggiunto a Quincy, nel Massachusetts. Non ho mai pensato di pubblicarle, e le "pubblico" qui sperando che possano divertire e piacere ai miei amici, parenti, e coetanei petrellesi che hanno avuto simili esperienze e che fanno tesoro di simili ricordi.

Paesaggi con figura di madre

È inverno.

Tutto è spoglio,

freddo,

grigio.

Dalla nebbia

mi arrivano suoni

fiochi,

lugubri;

non una voce umana.

Suoni grigi e freddi d'inverno

in una cittá

pur troppo americana.

Ed io cerco di riempire

il vuoto freddo

e il grigiore

del mio presente invernale

col calore

e coi colori

del passato.

Ricordi di altri tempi

e di altri luoghi

riscaldano il mio gelido cuore.

Tanti ricordi!

Passano davanti ai miei occhi chiusi

come tanti quadri.

La memoria è una galleria di ricordi.

È il museo dei miei ieri:

facce conosciute

e facce non più riconosciute,

momenti sereni

e momenti agitati,

scene di allegria

e scene di dolore.

E le immagini più belle di tutte

sono i paesaggi con

figura di madre.

Via di Lucito

Un sentiero sassoso di campagna

fiancheggia campi variopinti.

Laghetti d'oro macchiati di rosso:

papaveri ridenti sotto il sole meridiano

sparsi fra gialle spighe di grano

che chinano il capo stancamente

sotto la tiepida carezza di una brezza estiva.

Verdi vigne filate,

radi alberi di frutta:

fichi, ciliegi, mandorli, noci,

e da ogni lato il pacato grigio-verde degli ulivi

coi tronchi contorti che suggeriscono

chissà quante sofferenze patite

attraverso secoli e secoli.

Lontano lontano, sullo sfondo,

un paese sonnolento

sdraiato su una collina.

Le case allineate,

marmoree

sotto tetti di coppi marrone,

sotto l'azzurro abbagliante

del cielo sereno,

sembrano un branco di pecore assopite.

Il campanile dell'antica chiesa

si erge

in mezzo a loro

come il buon pastore

che veglia sul suo gregge.

Nelle distanze più remote,

il verde delle colline

si fa quasi bluastro.

All'orizzonte si scorgono

le montagne,

con le vette

bianche di neve.

In primo piano,

vicino alla strada sassosa,

una masseria,

bassa,

ombreggiata da un vecchio ciliegio,

un po' nascosta

dietro un antico fico.

Da qui, due figure si avviano

sul sentiero pietroso

per ritornare al paese:

un fanciullo,

coi pantaloncini corti,

e sua madre.

Il bambino galoppa davanti,

cavalcando una lunga canna.

Ogni tanto schiocca la lingua

per esortare l’esile palafreno.

La mamma lo segue

e lo guarda

con un lieve sorriso.

Poi, seria, volge il suo sguardo

al distante orizzonte,

oltre le montagne.

Forse pensa a qualcuno lontano,

a qualcuno che avrebbe sorriso con lei.

La pennichella

Gli occhi socchiusi,

il bambino se ne sta supino

sul gran letto,

nel semi-buio della camera.

Se la mamma entra,

lui subito chiude gli occhi,

approfondisce il respiro,

ogni tanto dà un sospiro più lungo

e si sposta un po'

come chi sta sognando.

Prova un vago piacere

nella finzione

e sorride fra di sé

nel sentirla uscire dalla camera

a punti di piedi

e socchiudere la porta piano piano

per non risvegliarlo.

E se ne sta lá quieto quieto

e ascolta i suoni pomeridiani

del suo mondo:

Un sussurrio di mosche

intorno alla polverosa striscia di luce

che entra per le persiane socchiuse.

Ogni tanto un soffio di vento porta

dai vicini campi,

qualche tonfo di zappa

che suona cupo,

stanco, ostinato,

fra l'allegro cinguettio degli uccelli,

fra il canto insistente delle cicale,

fra il chiocciare delle galline

giù nell'orto.

Un remoto raglio di asino,

esasperato dalle mosche

che gli ronzano attorno,

che si lamenta inutilmente

dei suoi patiti tormenti.

Dalla strada,

vivaci voci di bambini:

strilli, risate, cantilene.

Staranno giocando a palla-cucca!

E, in armonia con questa sinfonia di vita,

i suoni della mamma

in un'altra parte della casa.

Canterella dolcemente mentre cuce

alla luce della finestra,

accompagnata dal ritmico rumore della Singer:

da-da-petà … da-da-petá … da-da-petà …

Da lontano,

dai quattro tubi,

un lungo,

ansioso suono di clacson:

Il pullman delle due e mezzo avverte

il suo arrivo.

Le madri, affacciate alle finestre

gridano ai fanciulli

di levarsi dalla via nova.

La pennichella sta per finire.

Rincasare

Il paese è immerso nel crepuscolo.

Il sole è tramontato,

ma in alto,

il cielo è ancora pieno

di una chiara luce tenue

e di rondini che svolazzano,

frenetiche, di qua e di là

e si sgridano clamorosamente.

Nelle strade, i contadini

ritornano dalla campagna a passi lenti,

la zappa sulla spalla,

e di tanto in tanto,

uno schiocco della lingua

per incitare, forse per ringraziare

i loro asinelli stremati.

Saluti scambiati con voce pacata.

Si dicono in quale campo sono stati oggi,

cosa sono riusciti a fare.

Scambiano pareri sul tempo che farà domani.

Rifiutano ritualmente i dovuti inviti a favorire,

a prendere qualcosa:

“Meh! indr', ia’, che t' fie nu b'cchier'.

Iamm'!  na tazz' d' chefè n'da vuo' fà?”

“Grazie, grazie, c'mmà, n'atre vot'.

M’espett’n’ na cas’.

Buon appetit’ e buona ser’!”

Procedono verso casa.

I loro passi e quelli dell'asino

echeggiano nei vicoli

che si fanno più scuri,

man mano più vuoti.

Dalle finestre aperte scola

una luce giallastra

carica di sapori:

cipolla fritta,

aglio ed olio,

peperoni fritti,

fagioli lessi,

sugo di pomodoro,

minestra, cicoria.

Dalle finestre aperte si diffonde

un concerto di rumori casalinghi:

il tintinnio di rozze posate

e vecchie stoviglie,

il gorgoglio di vino

versato in bicchieri di varia foggia,

voci rauche e stanche,

voci vivaci e penetranti,

risate, gridi, lamenti, bestemmie,

il pianto dei cit’l’ in culla,

la sigla musicale del giornale radio

e le notizie, sommesse, distanti:

Una dolce sinfonia serale.

Il paese mangia.

Una donna giovane e forte

cammina per la strada.

Porta una bambina in braccio.

Un ragazzino le cammina accanto,

fischiettando, le mani ficcate

nelle tasche dei suoi calzoncini corti.

Vuol far finta d'essere un piccolo uomo,

come il suo papà che non c'è.

Ma ogni tanto si dimentica

e incomincia a dare a calci

con qualche pietruzza

o a salterellare

come un bambino.

Una vicina di casa, giocosa,

s'affaccia alla sua finestra

e saluta la giovane madre

seria e dignitosa

ma pronta al sorriso;

finge di sgridare e minacciare

la fanciulla, incerta

se piangere o ridere:

Perché si fa ancora portare

in braccio dalla mamma

adesso che è cosí grande?

“Meh, nu sié che si’ gross', mamm' e sè?

Mamm't' ngià fa e p’rtar’t’.

Scign' de ngoll e mamm't', iusct mo,

s’nno’ mo’ vieng’ yi’ e t’ facc’ v’de’!”

Minaccia anche il bambino,

dicendogli che scenderà

per fargli il solletico,

che lui non può resistere.

Lui ride e si contorce;

se lo sente già addosso

quel solletico,

e si nasconde

dietro la gonna della mamma.

La piccola famiglia rincasa.

I bambini sono stanchi.

Ritornano dalla casa della nonna,

sul Calvario, un po' fuori del paese.

Tutto il giorno hanno giocato coi cugini,

rincorrendo lucertole e farfalle

intorno alle tre croci,

giocando a bocce con le pietre

nel campo sportivo,

nascondendosi nei pagliai,

facendo capriole per i prati,

rotolandosi nell’erba fresca.

Adesso è sera.

Sono stanchi.

Rincasano.

Fra poco,

dietro le case,

dai campi oscuri,

si sentirà

il primo

“chiuuu”.

Pane fresco

La mamma si è alzata presto

per fare il pane.

Ritorna dal forno con grandi pani

tondi, caldi, fragranti.

Ne taglia uno,

appoggiandoselo contro il petto.

La crosta dorata scrocca.

La mollica bianca, bucata,

è ancora calda, umida.

La mamma taglia una lunga fetta,

la bagna con olio d'uliva,

la cosparge leggermente di zucchero,

me la tende.

La prendo con tutt'e due le mani.

Chiudo gli occhi

per goder meglio l'odore

e il gusto del primo morso.

Addento voluttuosomanete.

Mastico lentamente.

Pian piano scendo le scale,

reggendo la fetta con due mani

come un’ostia.

Esco. Mi siedo sulla panca assolata

accanto al portone.

Le mosche si riuniscono

sussurrandosi la grande scoperta.

Le sventolo via

col soffio e una mano,

e mangio beatamente

il mio pane

fresco fresco,

unto e dolce,

ancora caldo.

Il ritorno dal pellegrinaggio

“Ecc'u vi’ u capp'llon'!  Mo err'vam'!”

Annuncia la voce felice della mamma.

Il fanciullo si tira avanti nel sedile

per poter veder meglio dal finestrino.

Stanno per arrivare al paese.

Il pullman si riempie d'un mormorio eccitato.

Il ragazzino è un po' ansioso.

Gli sembra tanto tempo fa

che erano partiti

per il pellegrinaggio.

Sarà lo stesso il paese?

Forse tutto è cambiato.

Forse papà è tornato dall’America.

E i suoi compagni?

Sono riusciti a giocare

senza di lui?

Avrà tanto da raccontare:

quell'antico albero di San Francesco d'Assisi,

sorretto con grandi anelli di ferro

intorno al vecchio tronco.

Che cosa aveva detto il monaco?

Che invece di foglie,

Francesco aveva visto facce,

o forse anime,

e che dimostravano qualcosa:

che “molti sono chiamati,

ma pochi sono eletti.”

O era vice versa?

Ma che significava? Boh!

Non avevo capito molto.

Ma era un albero sacro

ed era importante,

e lui, piccolo devoto--

quando è buono, la gente dice:

“Sand’ z’ chiam’ e sand’ ‘è”

e lui se ne compiace--

aveva ascoltato tutto

con aria grave, solenne, pia.

E quell'enorme cavallo

davanti alla basilica di Sant'Antonio

a Padova,

dove s'erano persi

lui e la mamma,

ed era stato proprio lui

a rintracciare la strada giusta

al dormitorio (un convento?)

dove tutti i pellegrini

dormivano insieme in una grande camerata

(e il gabinetto gli faceva schifo);

e nel dormiveglia lui sentiva,

come da molto lontano,

squarci di conversazioni,

pacate e misteriose,

voci di vecchie donne

che raccontavano miracoli;

e ripensava ai lunghi viaggi in pullman

con le vecchie vestite di nero,

con le facce rugate e riverenti,

che con voci acute inneggiavano:

“A’A’veee....A’A’vee....Aave Mmmari’iaaaa....”

Ecco i quattro tubi!

Siamo arrivati al paese!

Si vede già la casa della nonna:

“Ell'i vi’!  I vid', ma?”

Davanti alla porta dei nonni

aspetta un gruppo di figure immobili.

Stanno raccolte lí

come in una fotografia.

In piedi in mezzo al gruppo,

c'è la nonna,

vestita di nero, coi capelli neri

raccolti sotto il fazzoletto nero.

Tiene per mano la bambina più piccola,

magra magra,

tutt'abbronzata dal sole molisano,

i folti capelli scuri della frangetta in fronte.

Il piccolo viso raggrinzato

e gli occhi socchiusi

contro la luce intensa del pomeriggio.

La fanciuletta guarda i finestrini del pullman

dove le sta indicando la nonna.

Ma il viso della sorellina resta serio,

quasi disinteressato.

Non riesce a vedere niente.

Non vede la sua mamma e il fratello

che la salutano, gioiosi di rivederla,

colpevoli d'averla lasciata.

“Ell'a vi a z'ngherell' e me!

Oh Gesù! m' par' pruoprie na z'ngherell'!”

esclama la mamma, commossa di vedersela

cosí piccola,

cosí fragile,

cosí annerita dal sole,

con quell'aria di creatura abbandonata

che dubita di mai essere ritrovata.

Il pullman si ferma.

Il pellegrinaggio è finito.

Il focolare

Due ombre,

una grande, l'altra piccola,

ballano sulle pareti della cucina.

Due figure,

una grande, l'altra piccola,

stanno sedute davanti al focolare.

La donna,

seduta su una sedia di paglia,

fa la maglia.

Il bambino,

seduto su una sedia di paglia,

fissa il fuoco,

affascinato dalla danza frenetica delle fiamme

e il volo caotico delle scintille.

La cucina palpita

al ritmo spasmodico delle fiamme.

Fuori, silenzio.

È quasi inverno.

Pochi giorni fa,

il bambino ha dovuto indossare

la maglietta di lana,

e ancora gli dà prurito.

Ci vorranno ancora alcuni giorni per abituarsi.

Infastidito, ogni tanto si gratta.

Dalla radio nell'angolo,

una blanda voce annuncia

il terzo mistero doloroso,

e poi riprende a recitare,

con tono monotono e stanco:

“Ave Maria ...”

Risponde un mormorio indistinto

di voci pacate: “Santa Maria ...”

Sopra le voci della radio,

si sente la voce viva

della madre.

Anche il ragazzo partecipa,

recita con voce fioca.

Cerca di restare sveglio,

di finire il rosario,

per non essere mandato a letto.

Gli piace stare davanti al fuoco del camino,

sentire il calore sulle ginocchia e sul viso,

sentire il freddo e il buio alle sue spalle,

seduto accanto alla mamma,

sentire la sua voce serena e dolce,

sicura e rassicurante.

Non vuole andare a letto.

A letto ha paura.

C'è il buio.

Ci sono streghe e spiriti in giro.

Lui dorme con le braccia e i piedi incrociati

per allontanarli.

Prima di addormentarsi,

recita mezz'ora di preghiere di protezione.

La mattina è sorpreso

di svegliarsi sano e salvo.

Perciò rimane accanto al focolare,

recita il rosario,

tenta di restare sveglio.

Ma le ciglia pesano.

Si assopisce.

Sussurra qualche parola

delle “Ave Maria”.

Pian piano, la testa si china sul petto.

La madre scuote il capo e sorride:

“Guegliò, mè nu vid' ch’ mo t' muor' d' sonn'?

P'cchè nd' viè e dr'mmí?”

Lui fa di no con la testa,

che poi si richina lentamente.

La voce della radio,

anch’essa stanca,

annuncia il quinto mistero doloroso,

ma lui non la sente più.

Alla fontana

“Chi è a lut'm'?”

chiede la donna

al gruppo intorno alla fontana.

“Song' i, Giuseppi’”

La mamma indica al bambino

la donna che le ha risposto:

“A víd’ e’ quell'e femm'n'?

Quann' tocc’ e’ ess' d' mett' l'acqu',

tu ann'm' e chiemà!

I chepit', scin' o non'?”

Il bambino fa di sí con la testa.

La mamma capovolge

l'anfora di ramo, a t’nucc’,

e la posa per terra.

Il bambino ci si siede sopra

per aspettare il turno

e poi correre a casa per avvertirla.

Prima di partire,

la mamma nota che il viso del figlio

è un po’ sporco:

“Meh temié com' tie’ vrett' sa facc'.

Z' può chepí’ dov' t' s'i’ 'ngr'tat' ecqu'sci’?”