ekleksographia wave two

Rousseau said he didn't remember when he learned to read, but that he dated the unbroken consciousness of his own existence from his first books. Whether the stars had anything to do with it, he didn't say. For Dante, it took a shift in the precession of the equinoxes to coordinate the permanence inaugurating his New Life at the age of nine: the glimpse of Beatrice Portinari that eclipsed his infancy with song. No tissue covered engraving in a book, the living sight of her had cosmic implications, woven inextricably into the cosmetics of his poetry. In La Vita Nuova, the account of his secret, anarchic devotion to Beatrice, he offers both a confession of that unbroken consciousness of love and a poetics of the orderly expression appropriate to its nobility. In the Courtly Love tradition as codified (perhaps satirically) by Andreas Capellanus, public revelation of such love would usually prove deadly; Dante's confession, coming after Beatrice's untimely demise, both respects that tradition and eludes its prediction—"so long," as Shakespeare says, "as men can breathe, or eyes can see."

Strange, then, given her ethereal nature, that after she greeted him nine years later, at three in the afternoon, he returned to his room and had a dream vision in which a terrifying figure of love offered her his heart, of which (like John of Patmos, given a book to eat) she ate. "Hope & Fear," said Blake, "are Vision," and Dante's onieromancy takes the form of a sonnet and, somewhat surprisingly, its explication. He wants his reader to understand both the nature of his vision (as blessing, no nightmare) and his Jacobean wrestling with its materials to produce clarity. The angel of love with whom he contends and whom he obeys prefigures his guides in the Commedia, though Dante asks in his poem for help in clarifying his vision, and indeed received responses from his contemporaries, among them Cino da Pistola and Guido Cavalcanti. That they took his vision seriously reflects the readiness of that age to discover the marvelous in the quotidian.

In his new translation of La Vita, Emanuel di Pasquale has captured the commonplace, matter-of-fact spirit with which Dante engages the materials that love and language provide him. For example, after a digression on the ecstatic effect his lady's greeting had upon him, he says " Now let's get back to when my bliss was denied." Just like that: he offers himself as a case study. My experience, he seems to say, has meaning, even if I need help in understanding it, so I will balance the necessarily screened obscurity of my words and deeds concerning my lady with direct, plain speech concerning their implications for understanding myself and my poetry—a version of the "sleek" and "shaggy" Italian he would alternate so skillfully in his verse. The immediacy and fidelity of di Pasquale's translation manages to preserve the character of Dante's respect for his materials as if a carpenter, rather than a curator, handed one a piece of the True Cross for close inspection. For example, in Chapter XXIV, Dante begins a sonnet:

Io mi senti' svegliar dentro a lo core
Un spirito amoroso che dormia:
E poi vidi venir da lungi Amore
Allegro sì, che appena il conoscia,

Which Mark Musa translates as:

I felt a sleeping spirit in my heart
awake to Love. And then from far away
I saw the Lord of love approaching me,
and hardly recognized him through his joy.¹

Di Pasquale renders the lines, not in regular English iambics, but in variable meters that register his surprise more palpably:

I felt a loving, sleeping spirit
stir in my heart;
and then I saw Love, coming from afar,
so full of joy, I hardly recognized it[.]

Here, as in Dante, the sleeping spirit already inherently loves ("Un spirito amoroso"), rather than "awake[s] to Love" as if encountering an external power. Di Pasquale's use of the neuter "it" conveys the poet's initial failure to recognize Love better than the more personal, gendered reference to "his joy" in Musa's version. Further, "hardly recognized him through his joy" emphasizes the possession of joy by the "Lord of love" as what makes love's identity at first opaque to Dante, whereas "so full of joy, I hardly recognized it" reminds us that sadness has so compromised the poet's sense of love that, when he sees its plenitude in the form of love's Lord, he needs to abandon that sadness of his own which had rendered love briefly opaque—even non-human—to him in order to recognize it.

Di Pasquale's choice of a "shaggy," direct rendition of both the poetry and the prose of La Vita Nuova parallels Dante's decision to compose in Italian rather than the "sleek," more conventional Latin favored by his predecessors. He has given us a Dante as fresh to us as Dante to his contemporaries.

Coming to the United States from Ragusa at fourteen with no English, Emanuel di Pasquale quickly embraced the American idiom, 'inspected the lyre,' and became a master of the instrument. His translations from the Italian include Silvio Ramat's Sharing a Trip: Selected Poems (Bordighera Press, 2001), winner of the Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship, and Carlo della Corte's The Journey Ends Here (2000). With Michael Palma, he translated Maura Del Serra's Infinite Present (2001). In 1998 he won the Bordighera Poetry Prize for his translation of Joe Salerno's Song of the Tulip Tree. Author of several collections of his own poetry and a former poetry editor of Chelsea, he teaches English at Middlesex County College in Edison, New Jersey.

¹ Musa, Mark, ed. and trans. The Portable Dante. New York: Penguin, 1995. 625.