Literature for the Planet Author(S): Wai Chee Dimock Source: PMLA, Vol

Literature for the Planet Author(s): Wai Chee Dimock Source: PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1, Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies (Jan., 2001), pp. 173-188 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463649 Accessed: 04-03-2015 17:04 UTC

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Literature for the Planet

WAI CHEE DIMOCK

HEYEAR WAS 1934, A YEARIN WHICHOSIP MANDELSTAM lived in constantterror. Just a few months before, he had commit- ted political suicide by recitinga satiricalpoem on Stalin,featuring "the ten thick worms his fingers" and "the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lips." The poem concludes:

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.1

Mandelstam's arrestcame as expected. On the night of 13 May 1934, about one in the morning, came a knock on the door. Mandelstamwas taken by the secret police to their headquartersin the LubiankaPrison, interrogated,and later sentencedto threeyears of exile in Cherdyn.2 Since the arrestwas not a surprise,Mandelstam at least had the lux- ury of preparingfor it. His preparationswere recordedby NadezhdaMan- delstam (a "pre-Gutenberg"figure, as Seamus Heaney calls her ["Osip" 74], safeguardingher husband'spoems by committingthem to memory):

M. obtained an edition of the Divine in small format and WAI CHEEDIMOCK, professor of English Comedy always had it with him in his in case he at Yale University,is the author of Em- pocket, just was arrestednot at home but in the pire for Liberty:Melville and the Poetics street. You could be arrestedanywhere-sometimes they came for you of Individualism (Princeton UP, 1989) at your place of work, and sometimes you were lured out to anotherplace and ResiduesofJustice: Literature, Law, on a false pretext and no one ever heard of you again. [.. .] When M. went Philosophy(U of CaliforniaP, 1996). Lit- to Samatikha(the place where he was arrestedthe second time), he left his eraturefor the Planet"is her new book pocket Dante in Moscow and took another,rather more bulky edition. I do project,an extension of her 1997 PMLA not know whetherhe managed to keep it until he reached the transitcamp essay, "ATheory of Resonance." at Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, where he died. I somehow doubt it:

? 2001 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 173

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in the campsunder Yezhov and Stalin, nobody says, because space and time are not absolute could give any thoughtto books. givens but operational effects, deriving their (Hope against Hope 228) lengths and widths from the relative motion of the frames in which measurements are taken. In a momentof extreme terror,Mandel- political What is simultaneousin one frame might not be stam-Russian and Jewish-saw fit to immerse simultaneous in another;what registers as now himself in a medieval Christianpoem. The im- in one might not so register elsewhere. Of mersion did not save him. Within four years he course, for Einstein relativity of simultaneityis was dead, on his way to a labor camp in eastern strictly a mathematicalconcept: it is a descrip- Siberia. Still, in spite of this overwhelmingbio- tion of the geometry of space-time.4 I have ar- logical fact, it was not trivial that the medieval gued elsewhere that this concept can also be poem was still around,after hundredsof years, understood nonmathematically, that it can be and in the Soviet Union no less. Its very exis- transposedto describe the temporal effects en- tence gave Mandelstam a different reference genderedby reading. point, dimensions of space and time not re- Transposedin this way, relativity of simul- ducible to the armof the Soviet government.3 taneity highlights the existence of differenttime Mandelstam'slove of Dante-the physical frames in any populationof readers.The appar- presence of the poetry inside his pocket-sug- ent unity of the chronologicaldate gives way to gests that there is much to be said for literature a of nows. These as a continuum.This continuumextends across plurality operative nows are not or slotted; do not space and time, messing up territorial sover- discretely uniformly they all line on the same eignty and numerical chronology. Authors cen- up synchronic plane. They owe their to the of turies and thousandsof miles apartcan turn out shapes irregular compass words: words with different differ- to be inseparable.Their adjacency stems from a antecedents, ent extensions of Nows are different linguistic bond and has little to do with the met- meaning. because habits because the rical structurearticulated by numbers,whether reading are, strength these numberstake the form of latitudesand lon- of linguistic bonds can have a drastic effect on the distance between two of gitudes or whether they take the form of dates. any users words. Two For the remoteness or proximity of linguistic thousandyears and two thousandmiles can events does not lend itself to uniform calibra- sometimes register as near simultaneity; ten tions. It cannotbe expressedas a numericalcon- years and ten miles can sometimes pose an un- stant: as one hundred years or one thousand passable gulf. Thanksto this elasticity, the now miles. Literary space and time are conditional experienced by any readeris idiosyncratic, un- and elastic; theirdistances can vary,can lengthen like anyone else's. It has its particularradii, par- or contract, depending on who is reading and ticular genealogies and coevals. Its relational what is being read. No mileage can tell us how fabric is separately cut, stretching and bulging far one authoris from another;no dates can tell in odd places. It is not synchronized with the us who is close to whom. numericalnow on any standardcalendar. This nonnumerical structureof space and Understood in this sense-as the temporal time might be described by way of a concept disunityamong readers-relativity of simultane- from Einstein: "relativityof simultaneity."Ein- ity suggeststhat the continuumof literatureis an- stein uses this to challenge the notion of a uni- archic: impossible to regulate or police. Where versal present, a now everywhere enforced, a literarybonds are intensifiedby circumstances- temporal plane that synchronizes the entire as happenswith Mandelstamand Dante-space globe, putting it under a unified chronology. and time can undergothe most astonishing con- There is no such synchronized plane, Einstein traction,can turna standardizedmetrical unit into

This content downloaded from 137.190.201.136 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:04:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 116. i Wai Chee Dimock 175 a virtual zero, bringing supposedly remote ob- literaturehandily outlives the finite scope of the jects into directcontact. Space and time, in short, nation. It brings into play a differentset of tem- have no absolutejurisdiction when it comes to the poral and spatial coordinates.It urges on us the bond between texts and readers. Not a preas- entireplanet as a unit of analysis. signed grid, they are molded instead by the ac- This is a minority view. The study of na- tions andpassions of words.They can behavelike tional literatures is currently dominated by a "a kind of fan,"as Mandelstamsays ("Onthe Na- differentpremise-dominated, in fact, by an al- ture"73). This fan can be folded up, puttingItaly most automatic equation between the literary in the immediate vicinity of Russia and making and the territorial.5Nothing better exemplifies strangebedfellows out of the fourteenthand the this premise than the influential work of Bene- twentiethcenturies. The now thus begotten does dict Anderson. For Anderson the advent of mo- not in the least resemblethe now legislatedby the dernityis markedby the rise of the nation-state, Soviet government. Stretching across hundreds a political entity whose "sovereignty is fully, of years and thousandsof miles, it is temporally flatly,and evenly operativeover each squarecen- and spatiallywayward, out of step with any party timetre of a legally demarcatedterritory" (26).6 line, any mechanicalclock of progress. This territorialsovereignty produces cultural ar- Aiding and abetting this population of tifacts likewise territoriallypredicated, likewise nows, all unsynchronized, literaturestands ac- bounded by the geopolitical map. Literatureis cused as the enemy of the state. Its projective one such artifact. Since state sovereignty, ac- and retrospectivehorizons play havoc with terri- cording to Anderson, is no less fully, flatly, and torial sovereignty.To each of its readersit holds evenly operative in this domain, literature be- out a different map, a different time scale, pre- comes a necessary instrumentas well as a nec- dating and outlasting the birth and death of any essary epiphenomenonof the nation.Along with nation. Morphologically speaking, literature the newspaper(from which it turnsout to be in- might turn out to be one of the most robust in- distinguishable),literature enforces the standard- habitants of the planet, a species tougher than ized time of print, a territorialtimetable. This most. We can think of it as an artificial form of territorialtime is "homogeneous, empty time," "life"-not biological like an organismor terri- measured by clock and calendar.It is a regime torial like a nation but vital all the same, and of "simultaneity,"binding all its citizens to the durablefor that reason. Its receding and unfold- same temporalplane (30-31). ing extensions make it a political force in the I arguefor a conceptionof literaturedirectly world. To acknowledge this force, we need to oppositeto Anderson's.Instead of upholdingter- stop assuming a one-to-one correspondencebe- ritorialsovereignty and enforcinga regime of si- tween the geographic origins of a text and its multaneity,literature, in my view, unsettlesboth. evolving radius of literary action. We need to It holds out to its readers dimensions of space stop thinking of national literatures as the lin- and time so far-flungand so deeply recessional guistic equivalents of territorialmaps. For the that they can neverbe made to coincide with the continuumbetween Dante and Mandelstamtells synchronicplane of the geopoliticalmap. This is us (if nothing else) that the nation-state is not a risky proposition,but it can be tested with any all, that when it comes to the extendedlife of lit- number of texts having a prolonged life and a eraryobjects, the inscriptionalpower of the state global following. In what follows I do so, using is not complete,just as its jurisdictionalpower is as my primaryevidence the extension and tele- not absolute.An emergingand globalizing read- scoping of space and time broughtabout by one ership undermines it on both fronts. Theorized literary encounter, betw,en Mandelstam and as the consequences of this global readership, Dante.That extension and telescoping are all the

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more remarkablefor taking place in an extreme wordsare intertwinedwith the ancientphilo- form of the nation-state,one that fits Anderson's sophicalterms of Herder,Leibniz, and Spinoza, descriptionto a fault. The Soviet Union, offering thecapacious syntax of aTalmudist,the artificial, not finishedsentence: it was in itself as the successorto capitalism-the final act always anything the world,but not a neitherRussian on the world stage-had always been a fervent language, norGerman. (O.Mandelstam, Noise 85) exponent of an official chronology, an official schedule of It had tried to rationalize progress. Neither Russian nor German.And for Mandel- time, tried to bind its citizens to a revolutionary stam,one might add,neither English, nor French, timetable: a regime of simultaneity,just as An- nor Italian.To embraceone of these adjectivesis derson That timetable not to suggests. happened to be naturalizedin one national That be Mandelstam's.His love of Dante-his fully tongue. adja- full naturalizationwas neverMandelstam's. A lin- cency to Dante-put him in a continuumof his butmost of own. That continuumextended from fourteenth- guistichybrid-partly by temperament all throughthe habitof reading-he was a "trans- centuryItaly to twentieth-centuryRussia. It put lator by calling, by birth,"a "foreign emissary the two poets side by side, in defianceof chronol- from a non-existentphonetic kingdom" (0. Man- ogy, and in doing so it also denationalizedeach of delstam, "On the Nature"79). Translationwas them, each Italian and not Italian, Rus- making whathe did for a whenhis officialstatus as a sian andnot Russian. living pariahbarred him from all otherjobs. But he also This shared denationalization began with lived off it in a deeper sense, as ClarenceBrown Mandelstam's attempt to learn Italian to read suggests, consigninghimself to it as to "a sort of Dante. He was joined by Anna Akhmatova, an- intellectualSiberia" (Mandelstam 90). other fan. The two would notes, poets compare This intellectual Siberia is not a Soviet ad- testing each other's memory, savoring every dress.Its terrain,like its provenance,cannot be ex- wordfrom thatalien tongue thathad ceased to be clusively localized in one nation.To be sure, the alien. itself is one enormous "Poetry quotation," intellectual Siberiahas to do with the Akhmatovawould laternote.7 Mandelstam something might territorialSiberia, but this territorial have said the same. One would taunt the other: alignment might not be the primaryone and is certainlynot "Do you rememberthis line?" "Did you notice the only one. Two framesof reference,at least, are thatwonderful bit?" Then they would settle down involved here, each playing on and relativizing to read"aloud together, pointing out the passages the other.For the presence of a foreign tongue- they liked best, sharing their finds with each the meaningfulnessof thattongue-already sug- other"(N. Mandelstam,Hope against Hope 223). gests a counterpointto the entitycalled the nation, Spending so much time among these barely do- showingup its limits, its failureto dictatean exact mesticatedwords-so much time away from his match between the linguistic and the territorial. supposedly native tongue-Mandelstam ended Every intellectualSiberia is an affrontto the sov- up reliving the fate of his father:the fate of a lin- ereignty of the state. It points to dimensions of guistic alien, denied citizenship by every lan- space andtime not fully nationalizedbecause not guage, fully at home in none. Such an alien fully rationalized,space andtime not conforming to an official number,not a unified had absolutelyno language;his speech was integratedby metric.Translation turns a into tongue-tieand languagelessness. The Russian foreign language Russian in the same speechof a PolishJew? No. The speech of a Ger- and, measure, unsettles the man Jew? No again. Perhapsa special Cour- native tongue (Benjamin, esp. 73): alienates it, landaccent? I neverheard such. A completely puts it into perspective,throws it into a linguistic abstract,counterfeit language, the ornateand continuummore turbulent and more alive thanthe twistedspeech of an autodidact,where normal inertlines of a geopoliticalmap.

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This linguistic continuumis the basis for a dynamic expanse of a linguistic continuumand limited freedom. It is the freedom of an alien the finite borders of a territorial regime. The life-form: a form of extension and durationnot swaddling clothes of foreign languages high- matching those of the nation and perhaps not light that fact. They highlight what happens to coming to an end with the nation's demise. This official borders and official timetables when alien life-form sustains every author and every texts are born again and again, into different translator, as Mandelstam makes clear in "To countries, different centuries. For literature,as the GermanLanguage": Brodsky says, "speaking both metaphorically and literally [.. .] is translation.The wandering Destroyingmyself, contradicting myself, of a Greekportico into the latitudeof the tundra like themoth flying into the midnightflame, is a translation"(139). suddenlyall thatbinds me to ourlanguage The of temptsme to leaveit. morphology literaturecannot be de- [...... ] scribed by one set of space-time coordinates. An alienlanguage will be my swaddlingclothes. With luck, translationswill disperse a momen- Longbefore I daredto be born tarily assembled group of words, will turnevery I was a letterof the alphabet,a verselike a vine, seemingly bounded text into something far I wasthe book that all see in dreams.8 you more random,scattered by circumstancesacross the centuries and across the entire planet. The Under political the life a repression only poet life of literature depends on such randomiza- can have is Wislawa nonbiological. Szymborska, tions. Not stuck in one national context-and writingin Polandin 1970, made the same point: saying predictablethings in that context-a lit- text becomes a new semantic a Whenin dangerthe sea-cucumberdivides itself erary template, in two new form of the legible, each time it crosses a [ ...... ] nationalborder. Global transitextends, triangu- Weknow how to divideourselves, how true, lates, and transforms its meaning. This fact we too. alone challenges the power of the territorialas a Butonly into a bodyand an interrupted whisper. determiningforce in literature.The space-time Into and body poetry.9 coordinates of any text are not only fluid when they first come into being, poorly captured by The latteralone has a chance for rebirthin a dif- the map of geopolitics, they are also subse- ferent tongue. Of course, that chance depends quently and unforeseeablyrevisable, induced by on events altogetheraccidental: the luck of for- their temporaland spatial displacementsto play eign translators' the the luck adopting poems, new tricks with the static bordersof the nation. of foreign readers' picking them up. Haphazard With every new translationthey punch a hole in as this sequence might seem, many of Mandel- those borders; they create a bump, a slope, an stam's poems were indeed translated, wrapped incline thatrolls outward: in swaddling clothes made in England, France, and the United States, long before they were Theearth is at its roundeston Red Square in the Soviet Union. He is in this published Andits unchainedcurve is hard, sense the obverse of a nationalpoet. "Of course he was a Russian, but not any more so than On RedSquare the earthis at its roundest Andits all the down Giotto was an Italian," says Joseph Brodsky, curve,rolling way to therice fields, who should know a thing or two about that pre- dicament. There is a morphological mismatch Is unexpectedlyexpansive between literature and the nation, between the Whilethere are still anyslaves on the earth.10

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Political repression, its incontestable might in I reflectinwardly on the variouslocations of one locale, forces the mind to think globally. places in the world, and theirrelations to the two and the circle at the I am The earth on Red Square is roundest because, poles equator, convinced,and maintain,that there are for anyone who does not wish to be chained to firmly manyregions and cities morenoble andmore that spot, this bit of earth must be taken as a delightfulthan Tuscany and Florence, where I curve, an arc of a largercircumference. That cir- wasbom andof whichI ama citizen,and many cumference, instead of being a slavish copy of nationsand peoples who speaka moreelegant its is an off-center set of vibrations, origins, andpractical language than do theItalians.13 chaotic and tangential-expanding with the more or less randomaccretion of mo- signifying For Dante the centrifugal force of literature is at various and ments, emerging temporal spatial deeply at odds with the vainglorious talk of fa- removes. understoodas these random Literature, therland.14To yield to this centrifugalforce is to radii a text to an ever more linking dispersed yield to an onslaught of space and time, an on- is extraterritorial in sense. readership, every slaught unavoidablybrutal, centered on no one Russian an poet is, strictlyspeaking, oxymoron. nation and tender to no one nation. Dante, poet Nor is this a only twentieth-centuryphenom- of that centrifugalforce, reckless in his embrace enon. As instanced the between by Dante, quarrel of space and time, is thus interchangeably a literatureand the nationhas the of weight history reader, a writer, and a translator.For if writing behind it. for Mandelstamand Again, Brodsky, must end up being a form of translation(not al- Dante is a world as an poet-claimable ally ways voluntary) from the here and now, it is national he both is and against regimes-because readingthat initiates that process. Reading ush- is not markedas he Florentine,because, indelibly ers in a continuum that mocks the form of any is his native he is not swal- by city, noticeably finite entity. It mocks the bordersof the nation, lowed still the most cel- up by it." Dante,perhaps just as it mocks the life span of the individual. ebratedexile in Western is also the firstto history, As a global process of extension, elaboration, call attentionto an a be- asymmetry, mismatch, and randomization,reading turns literatureinto tween the and the In his let- literary geopolitical. the collective life of the planet.Coextensive nei- ter to della Dante Cangrande Scala, famously ther with the territorialregime of the nation nor describeshimself as "aFlorentine birthbut not by with the biological regime of a single human in character."12And in De his vulgari eloquentia, being, this life derives its morphology instead vigorous defense of the vernacular,he makes a from the motion of words: motion effected of the one is point chiding linguistic patriot, who when bordersare crossed, when a new frame of "so as to think that the of his misguided place reference is mixed with an old, when foreign birth is the most under the sun delightful spot languagesturn a native tongue into a hybrid. also believe that his own lan- [and who] may Motion, indeed, is what Mandelstam cele- mother that is-is guage-his tongue, preemi- brates in his remarkable essay "Conversation nent all others among [...]": about Dante,"written one year before his arrest. "Boththe Infernoand, in particular,the Purgato- To me, however,the whole worldis a home- rio glorify the human gait, the measure and the land,like the sea to fish [...]. Andalthough for of the and its form. my own enjoyment(or ratherfor the satisfac- rhythm walking, footstep [...] In Dante and are con- tion of my own desire),there is no moreagree- philosophy poetry able place on earth than Florence,yet when stantly on the go, perpetuallyon their feet." For I turnthe pages of the volumes of poets and Mandelstamit is a literaryquestion, and a serious otherwriters, by whomthe worldis described one, to ask, "How many shoe soles, how many as a wholeand in its constituentparts, and when oxhide soles, how many sandals did Alighieri

This content downloaded from 137.190.201.136 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:04:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions I 6. I Wai Chee Dimock 179 wear out duringthe course of his poetic work?" a chronological coeval of Mandelstam's, was (254). Mandelstam's Dante is, in fact, a strange clearlynot his coevalin any deep sense:T S. Eliot. figure, often unrecognizable to others (Bethea In his well-known essay Dante (1929), written 52-60; Cavanagh 210-14). I argue that this is three years before Mandelstam'sessay, Eliot of- a Dante denationalized in a particularway-a fers up a poet "universal"to all readers,requiring Dante both Italian and not Italian, Russian and no translation.This universal Dante, Eliot says, not Russian-a figure born into the world at the writesin an Italianthat is an effective Esperanto: same time that a denationalizedMandelstam is. Dante's is not a Dante, it seems, can take on Russian features, universality solely personal matter.The Italian language, and especially the features legible only to this Soviet reader. Ex- Italianlanguage in Dante'sage, gainsmuch by traterritorialityactivates a special register of beingthe immediate product of universalLatin. calls fortha kind of resonance. meaning, special Thereis somethingmuch more local aboutthe Such resonance points to the importanceof languagesin whichShakespeare and Racine had environmental"background noise" as a genera- to expressthemselves. This is not to say,either, tive force in literature. Acting as a stochastic thatEnglish and French are inferior, as vehicles booster, background noise puts an amplifying of poetry,to Italian.But the Italian vernacular of mechanism-a kind of accentual cushion-un- the late middle ages was still very close to hadthe der some words but not others, bringing them Latin[,which] qualityof a highlydevel- and . .] Someof the into relief, pushingthem above a thresholdof de- oped literaryEsperanto. [. characterof thisuniversal language seems to me tectability(Dimock).15 The Soviet Union was an to inherein Dante'sFlorentine speech. (17) environmentrich in noise in just this way. It was an environmentthat altered the hearable frequen- Ignoring the fact that Italian was a vernacular cies of words, the ears of readersto sharpening chosen by Dante as a clear alternativeto Latin, an unbearable acuteness. Such readers could Eliot insists on its linear descent from that uni- not out help singling words, underscoringthem, versal language. This descent gives it a heredi- in them Soviet them hearing echoes, accenting tarypower: the power of centralizedjurisdiction, with thatfeared knock at one in the morn- always the power to bind one word to one meaning. It is not the Divine should ing. surprising Comedy Dante's Italian, so described, is a language ho- resonate in such a context. And it resonates be- mogeneousbecause hegemonic. It will not toler- cause it has been because it has denationalized, ate foreign nuances. It means the same thing to been acted on a by new, overwhelming,but also any readeranywhere in the world. unforeseeable conjunction of circumstances. It Eliot's Dante, in short, is a Dante blessed has become a Russian no partially poem, longer with an absolutesovereignty. That sovereigntyis strictlyItalian yet not grandlyuniversal. Switch- not only wielded by a Latin-likeItalian, it is fur- to a ing different metaphor,we can also say that ther consolidated by one particulargenre, alle- denationalization has randomized the poem by gory, a genre that dictates a unity of response, a turning it into a temporalhybrid, a hybrid acci- single, predictable,and irresistibleflow of visual dentallyborn into the worldthrough the acciden- data."Allegory means clear visual images,"Eliot tal union between fourteenth-centuryItaly and says;it alignsour eyes with the poet's;it "make[s] twentieth-centuryRussia. Such a hybridis singu- us see what he saw."The Divine Comedyis able lar. It resembles none other. It cannot be repro- to bind all its readersto a single regime of mean- duced anywhereelse. ing because "Dante's is a visual imagination." Here it is helpful to contrast Mandelstam's Thatvisual imaginationmakes the poet the unop- Dantewith anotherDante, also hybridizedaround posed ruler of his poem, for "speech varies, but the same time, parentedby a readerwho, though our eyes are all the same"(22-23).

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"Thereis a ster and didactic profile to the smacking,sucking and whistling sounds, and Dante whom Eliot conjuresup," Seamus Heaney also by dental"zz" and "dz" sounds. I out notes. This orthodox Dante tells us something pulled a single threadat random:ca- about the context in which he is read, for what gnazzi-riprezzo-guazzi-mezzo-gravezza. The tweaking,smacking and labial explo- Eliot is looking for (and what he eventually sives do not ceasefor a singlesecond. [.. .] finds) is Christian faith: "salvation conver- by Suddenly,for no apparentreason, a Slavic sion" "Government" Mandelstam's (Heaney, 98). duck begins quacking: Osteric, Tambernic, Dante is very different.Orthodoxy has no appeal cric (theonomatopoeic word for crackling). to this reader,for unlike Eliot he is gleefully a ("Conversation"275-76) lost soul, gleefully unregenerate,not Christian, and not entirely Jewish.16Having had his fill of The quacking of the Slavic duck in the Divine the stern and didactic language perfectedby the Comedy is not surprising. It shows how shaky Soviet government, he has no wish for more. the poem is on the territorialfront, how tenuous Mandelstam'sDante, as Heaney also points out, and indefensible its Italianness. The poem was is a Dante beloved for his imperfect authority, Italianto begin with, but there is nothing to stop his failure to bend his lips to an official shape: it from being heardsubsequently with a Russian "not an allegory-framer up to his old didactic accent, for the ear is a domain in which native tricks in the middle of the journey, but a lyric andforeign soundscan meet, can recombine,can woodcutter singing in the darkwood of the lar- tradeattributes, redrawing phonetic and semantic ynx"(95). This lyricalDante, invoked by a reader maps as they go. No walls can be thick enough here to block off such who knows something about the eyes of Stalin, hybridizing spirals. To a Russianreader acrossthe words is not a visual poet at all. He is decidedly aural. coming Osteric, And he is aural because, for Mandelstam, the Tambernic, and cric (Inferno 32.25-30), the Di- vine can indeed sound Russian. And ear is the most unruly (and therefore the least Comedy even such aural crossovers are inter- tractable) of all our organs. An aural poet, one though who writes with the ear and who is in turnheard mittentrather than systemic, they indicate what happens when a text becomes extra- with the ear, has no supervisorypower, no con- generally territorial,when it is acted on by the literal and trol over the reader, a handicap Mandelstam metaphoric"translations" of a ear.17 translatesinto a gift: foreign Auralityis a dynamic process. Mandelstam It seems to me that Dante made a careful links it in particular to one activity, reading. allows the studyof all speechdefects, listening closely to Reading ear to come into contactwith stutterersand lispers, to nasaltwangs and inar- tongues not spokenin its vicinity,to hearforeign ticulate pronunciation,and that he learned echoes in the midst of native speech. To a prac- muchfrom them. ticed reader the hearable world is nothing less I wouldvery much like to speakabout the au- than the planet as a whole, thick with sounds ditorycoloration of CantoXXXII of theInferno. human beings have made across the width of A peculiarlabial music: "abbo"-"gabbo" the globe and across the length of history. It is -"babbo"-"Tebe"-"plebe"-"zebe"- the habit of reading, then, that makes Dante an "converrebbe." It's as if a nursehad partici- auralpoet: patedin the creationof phonetics.Now the lips protrudein a childishmanner, now theyextend Whatis Danteanerudition? intoa proboscis. Aristotle,like a double-wingedbutterfly, is The labials form some kind of "numbered edgedwith the Arabianborder of Averroes. bass"-basso continuo, namely, the chordal Averrois,che il grancomento feo basis of harmonization.They are joined by (Inferno, IV, 144)

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Here the Arab Averroesaccompanies the the Physics, and the Metaphysics.19Likewise, GreekAristotle. They areboth components of the troubadoursare familiar figures in Dante: the same can bothfind room drawing.They on Bertrande Born, ArnautDaniel, and Girautde the membraneof a singlewing. Borneil are named in De vulgari eloquentia The conclusionof CantoIV of the Infernois (2.2.7-8) and reappeareven more dramatically trulyan orgy of quotations.I findhere a pure in in the form of three tercets and unalloyeddemonstration of Dante'skey- Purgatorio, nearly boardof references. of Provencal spoken by Arnaut.20Finally (and A keyboardstroll around the entirehorizon in keeping with the intellectual ferment of the of Antiquity.Some Chopinpolonaise in which Middle Ages), Arabic scholarship also has an an armedCaesar with a gryphon'seyes dances importantpresence here, showing up in the per- alongsideDemocritus, who hadjust finished son of Averroes, the twelfth-century philoso- matterinto atoms. splitting pher who appearstwice in the Divine Comedy21 ("Conversation"255) and whose influenceon Dante is sometimes said to be comparableto Aristotle's.22 The orgy of quotationsis not only Dante's hall- For Mandelstamthis Islamic presence in a mark,it is Mandelstam'sas well. Quotationsdo Christianpoem sums up the politics of "erudi- not have to be foreign,but they can be. No border tion."The Divine Comedy,according to his often patrol can stop them. This breach of territorial unsharedjudgment, is as shaky on the religious sovereigntyis the startingpoint for a global con- front as it is on the territorial.23Nor is this all. tinuum of words. It is the point where temporal Whatmakes the even shakieris the and spatialdistances break down, where chrono- poem temporal heresy it espouses, the it incites logical jumbles and jurisdictionaljumbles pro- way adjacen- cies, who have no duce weirdoffsprings. Dante speaksRussian, and creatingcouples chronological reason to be seen side side. com- he speaks some fifty other languages.18These by "Having bined the Dante alteredthe struc- translations-all differentand all denationalized, uncombinable, ture of time."What results is a of not governed by any one regime-make up the "synchronism names and traditions severed cen- global phenomenoncalled the Divine Comedy. events, by turies" Mandelstam The globalization of Dante is, in part, the ("Conversation"282). pays work of time in the centuriesafter his death. But tributeto this temporalheresy by writing off the fifteen even from the beginning, from the extraterritor- hundredyears separatingAverroes from ial leaps propellingits "keyboardof references," Aristotle. The two are paired up, both of them the Divine Comedy has always been global, as contemporariesof Dante's in the fourteenthcen- global as a fourteenth-century poem can be. tury.To add to the outrage,he throwsin Chopin, Mandelstam here singles out three foreign lan- not exactly around when Dante was alive but guages crucial to its making: Greek, Provencal, eventually to be born, the supposed Frenchness and Arabic. These languages he identifies by of whose music he traces to Florentine origins. way of four humanfigures, some obvious, others And he does not stop there.For good measurehe not: Aristotle, Democritus, Chopin, and Aver- also throws in Democritus,invoked by Dante in roes. Dante's debts to Aristotle are, of course, Inferno 4.13624 and catapulted now from the large and acknowledged,beginning with the ex- fifth centuryBC to the fourteenthand onwardto travaganttributes in the Convivio (where Aris- the twentiethand beyond. Hereticalis too mild a totle appearsas the masterof humanreason and word for the Divine Comedythus created,a tem- the perfection of ethics [Lansing 162-63; 4.6]) poral monstrosity that, to quote Mandelstam and modulating, in the Divine Comedy, into again, features "[s]ome Chopin polonaise in somewhatmore temperedallusions to the Ethics, which an armed Caesar with a gryphon's eyes

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dances alongside Democritus, who hadjust fin- about the "timelessness"of literature.Mandel- ished splittingmatter into atoms." stam's point is much more interestingthan that. This might seem a bizarre description of a To him the "anachronism"of the Divine Comedy medieval poem, but Mandelstam is trying to ("Conversation"282) comes about not because highlight a giddy voluminousness peculiar to the poem is timeless but because it is timeful. It Dante, innocentof anythingthat might be called is full of time, densely populated,home to each chronological decorum. Balloonlike, Dante's of the centuries bearing signs of human life. metaphorsyoke together terms so disparate,so This is a home not numberedby a metric,not se- perilously strung out, as to leave the poem quenced by a chronological axis. A continuum, hanging by a hair across vast temporaland spa- it grants adjacency to any two points in space tial distances. Something of that giddiness can and time. And since it goes forward as well as be seen in these familiarlines from Paradiso 12: backward, it stretches the life of every finite point to a potentialinfinity. This is why Aristotle As two concentricarcs of equalhue, and Averroesare both here,why latecomerssuch areseen as bend the clouds they through misty as Chopin can be included, and why Democri- whenJuno tells herhandmaid to appear- tus, exponent of an ancient "atomic theory" in theouter from the inner one an echo, the fifth century BC, can be said to have lived like to thelonging voice of herwhom love out his extendedlife throughthe extendedlife of consumedas moring sunconsumes the dew- the poem, with the of the Divine andreassure the people here below surviving help to matterinto atoms in the twenti- thatby the covenantGod made with Noah, Comedy split theyhave no needto fearanother Flood- eth century.27 evenso thosesempiteral roses wreathed An "anachronistic"poem, as Mandelstam twingarlands round us as theouter one uses the term, is one that makes the world both was lovinglyresponding to theinner.5 cumulative and nonsequential. It gathers together all coordinates,all points in the life of the Dante seems to see nothing wrong with mixing planet, paying no attentionto their supposedre- Greek mythology and biblical allusions, men- moteness or proximity. In this way, the human tioning Juno and her handmaid,Iris, goddess of species articulatesitself across space and time, the rainbow,in the same breathas Noah and the its signature coterminous with its habitat. As a Flood. Also in the same breath he mentions form of durationand extension, literatureis thus Echo, consumed by her love for Narcissus as a heresy,an insult and an affrontto the finiteness dew is consumed by the morning sun, until that is the norm of biological organismsand ter- nothing is left of her but her "longing voice." ritorialjurisdictions. This heresy allows human Jupiter's heavens and Jehovah's heavens seem beings to have a collective life, not identical to to have merged into one. The same rainbow the life span of a perishable individual or of a brightensthe horizons of both. And nimble fig- perishablenation. Against the robustcontinuum ures of speech move from one to the other: of the Divine Comedy,either of these life spans Echo is both the name of a nymph and the name might look like "less than a wink of the eyelash" for the mutuality of the blessed revolving in (O. Mandelstam,"Conversation" 254). their concentric circles. Thanks to Dante, cen- Mandelstam, who learned about Einstein turies of readershave swallowed such temporal during his stay in Kharkov (N. Mandelstam, heresies with barely a gulp.26 Hope Abandoned 74; Brown, Mandelstam 97), For Mandelstamsuch temporalheresies are mighthave referredto this continuumas the rela- the largestgifts poetryhas to offer, to readerand tivity of simultaneity.He in fact begins one of his writer alike. This claim is not the familiar one essays, "Onthe Natureof the Word,"with an ex-

This content downloaded from 137.190.201.136 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:04:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions i Wai Chee Dimock i6.1 i I83 plicit tributeto Einstein:"Due to the quantitative loyed presentis takenas a sign introducedto change in the content of events occurringover a wardoff evil. The presenttense, completely given time interval,the concept of a unit of time isolated from both the futureand the past, is has begun to falter,and it is no accidentthat con- conjugatedlike purefear, like danger. temporarymathematical science has advanced ("Conversation"256) the principleof relativity"(73). To anyone living The horrorof the present tense is more under Stalin, relativity of simultaneity is not an perhaps vivid to Mandelstamthan to Dante. Still, even for esotericidea. It is a living fact, a politicalfact, the the latter,hell is hell because its time is overde- only recourse against the absolute tyrannyof an termined,because its tormentshave an iron ne- absolutesynchronic plane. A long past and a long cessity, a here and now from which all doors are futureare signs of hope. And hopelessness, con- closed. What is about Farinata, versely,is to be trappedin a time slot, changeless striking though, is that for him the doors are not closed, at least and dimensionless.Being thus trappedis the con- not the door to the It remains and the dition of hell. But hell, Mandelstamalso insists, past. open, traffic it is constant and is no more than a temporaleffect, the effect of a through uninterrupted. Farinata'slove for Florence is as as ever; now that has everything under its thumb. That lively its familiaraccents stir him even in hell. Indeed, thumb shrinks in size the moment we can bring it soon becomes clear that Farinatais "in" hell to bear on it a differenttime scale, differentverb in the weakest sense. No full tenses. This, for Mandelstam, is the central only possible con- tainmentcomes with that His heart meaning of Inferno 10, a meaning that pits him preposition. and mind are elsewhere, still in the not only againstStalin but also againstDante the caught up a Florentine in which he takes Christianpoet. Against both he readsInferno 10 past, past great and which for him remainsthe eternalref- as a canto driven by contrary "forms of verb pride erence It is from that reference that tenses: the perfective and imperfectivepast, the point. point he asks Dante,"Who were ancestors?"'Chi subjunctivepast, even the presentand the future your fuor li tui?' Here of are all categorically and authoritatively pre- maggior (my trans.; 10.42). all is still the first to find sented" ("Conversation"256). This jumble of places ancestry thing out. The is in- tenses is occasioned by Dante and Vergil's visit question rude, crude, effortlessly to the sixth circle of hell, the circle of the heretics. sulting,because Farinata,great nobleman that he still has the to exact that Among these none is more heretical than Fari- is, right bit of information and in that tone of voice. When he nata, that proud and unregenerate Ghibelline, just told, lifts his a half in and who, hearingthe Florentinespeech from Dante's eyebrows little, recognition half in disdain. And he in both veins: tongue, cannothold his own tongue. persists "Bitter enemies of mine were / and of Dante, already frightened, draws closer to they my ancestorsand of / I had Vergil. Now the present tense enters the scene, my party; to scatterthem not once but twice."28Even in hell what matters in a little cry of annoyance. Vergil has no pa- the most to Farinatais the of thatscatter- tience with Dante's slinking and shrinking,and memory the satisfactionof not once but he is not too ceremoniousin his response:"Turn ing, grim it, twice. That is untouched hell and is around:What are you doing?" 'Volgiti:che fai?' memory by forever (my trans.; 10.31). Most readers would see this untouchable.For Farinatais his memory:a mem- as an offhandrebuke. Mandelstam turns it into a ory priorto hell andexternal to hell andenfolding him capsule summaryof hell, hell as a verb tense: foreverin thatpriority and externality. To Mandelstam the powerful past tense of The horrorof the presenttense is given here, "Chi fuor li maggior tui?" explodes "like a some kind of terror praesentis. Here the unal- mighty tuba."29Hell does not exactly crumble

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with that sound, but it is no longer what it was. Like Farinata,Cavalcante is Florentine,but he is Its eternalpresent has been punctured,shown to almost the opposite of his compatriot.Mandel- be not sovereign, not absolute, not even gov- stam is not the only one to notice the relation erned by a single verb tense. It cannot banish between these two heretics. Erich Auerbach, the echoes of an alien tongue, and it cannot writingMimesis in Istanbulafter his banishment erase the memories of an earthly city, both of from Nazi Germany,is also struck by the pair- which make a mockery of its less than unified ing of Farinataand Cavalcante.32For Auerbach now. Indeed, hell does not even have the power canto 10 is structuredby three abruptinterrup- to inflict the worst suffering on its inmates. tions: first the interruptionof Vergil and Dante When told by Dante that the Ghibellines have by Farinata, then the interruption of Farinata been defeated and sent into exile but, unlike the and Dante by Cavalcante, and finally the re- Guelfs, have not "learnedthe art"of returning, sumptionof Farinata'sspeech, as if Cavalcante Farinatacounters with this lament:"If they have had not spoken. Each of these shifts is so violent badly learned that art, [. . .] it is worse torment that "its connection with what precedes is not to me thanthis bed [. . .]."30Just as he loves Flor- mere juxtaposition but the vital relationship ence the best, so he is pained the most by what of counterpoint."Farinata's firm and weighty he sees as its reverses.Nothing in hell can com- words, the stately balance of his syntax, give pete with that. Farinatawill never be anything way to Cavalcante's "irregularand plaintively other than what he was: a Florentine, a Ghib- thronging questions" (Auerbach 156, 158).33 elline, someone who lived by the sword and The civic and military glories of Florence are reveredonly the sword. No length of sojournin now set aside, leaving a single tie, an affective hell would make him a well-behavedinmate. tie, in the foreground.Cavalcante loves Guido, Surprisingly,the power of the past tense is believes in his genius, and wants him to be still not even unique to Farinata,so haughty,so mag- alive, his eyes bathed in the sweet light of Tus- nificent, and so obviously a heretic. Canto 10 is cany. He wants him to be Dante's honoredcom- not the sole habitat of one individual. Another panionin this tour of hell. But Guido is nowhere Florentine is there. This turns out to be Caval- in sight. Not seeing him and catching Dante's cante, father of Dante's best friend, Guido. Lis- words-"held in scorn" 'ebbe a disdegno'-he tening for some time to the exchange between can only repeat that verb in dumb terror:"What Dante and his neighbor, Cavalcante can finally did you say? He held? Is he not living?" 'Come stand it no longer. Suddenly raising himself up, dicesti: "Egli ebbe"?non viv'elli ancora?' he looks aroundeagerly to see if anyone is with Ebbe, a slip of a word, will travelacross the Dante. Not finding anyone, he cries out: centuries, coming home to Mandelstam as the sound of the "fatedpast perfect."34As in the ex- "Whereis my son?Why is he not withyou?" change with Farinata,the humandrama here re- "I do not comealone," I saidto him, volves around a dramatized verb tense. The "thatone overthere me waiting guides through kinship between the two inmates is all the more here, significant in the light of their obvious differ- the one, perhapsyour Guido held in scorn." ence. For Farinatathe is summoned [...... ] wordfuor with all due for Cavalcante the Instantly,he sprangto his full heightand cried, deliberation; word ebbe falls like a bolt from the "Whatdid you say?He held?Is he not living? sky. Still, TheDay's sweet light no longerstrikes his eyes?" the two are the same: both temporalheretics. In Andwhen he heardthe silenceof my delay his single-mindeddevotion to his son and in his respondingto his question,he collapsed devastation at the (mistaken) news of Guido's intohis tomb,not to be seen again.31 death, Cavalcante turns out not to be a slave to

This content downloaded from 137.190.201.136 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:04:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions i i 6. I Wai Chee Dimock I85 the now of hell, just as Farinata is not a slave. and social organization are universal and perennial. States and nationalismsare not" Cavalcante's reference point too remains ante- (5). 6 For a suggestive critique of Anderson, see Bhabha, rior and exterior. He too will never be anything esp. 157-61. other than what he was: a too 7 weakling, easily The line "No, mozhet byt', poeziia sama - / Odna ve- broken, too easily given to despair,but prior to likolepnaia tsitata"is from Akhmatova'spoem "Ne povto- hell in just that weakness, not a full-time resi- riai - dushatvoia bogata"(Pollak 4). 8 dent of the sixth circle. Brown and Merwin 65. Farinataand Cavalcante,one largerthan life, Ce6a ry6s, ce6e npoTliBopeqa, KaK JIeTITHa oroHeK the othernot, togethergive voice to the heresy of MOJnb nOJIHOqHbIH, MHe xoqeTca 13 Hamefi an unofficial timetable. This infiltrates yRiTH peli heresy 3a Bce, qeM si o6al3aHei 6eccpoqHo. and permeateseven where it does not altogether [...... ] liberate.Bursting through the supposedlyclosed 'Iyxaa peqb MHe6yaeT o060IosIKoi, M1MHOro npeKace, qeM af CMejipoj,lTbCI, doors of hell, it clashes as a tuba" or as "mighty 1 6yKBoii6bIJI, 6bIJI B4HorpajHOi CTpoIKofi, "an oboe or clarinet" (0. Mandelstam, "Conver- A1KHlroii 6biJI,KOTOpaa BaM CHMTCa. sation" 257). Either way, it lets loose the force of ("K HeMeuKoiipe'iM"; MaHaeJbmITaM69-70) 9 the unsynchronized,the relativityof simultaneity. W niebezpieczeistwie strzykwadzieli sie na dwoje Thatforce breaksup the territorialsovereignty of [ ...... ] sie hell. It also breaks anotherkind of territorial Potrafimy dzielic, och prawda,my takze. up Ale tylko na cialo i urwanyszept. sovereignty. The Soviet Union had never been Na cialo i poezje. Mandelstamand Dante made it less so. 10 airtight: . Mandelstam(Greene 68). Ha KpacHoiinjioinaAw Bcero KpyrJieir3eMJi1 1 cKaTee TBepgeeTgo6poBoJIbHbIi. Ha KpacHoiinjioinaMi 3eMJia Bcero KpyrJIei, NOTES 1 CKaTee HeIaaHHHopa3aoJIbHbIfi, OTKH,bIBaScbBHM3 AO pMCOBbIX nojieii,- Ha 3eMJIe l "The Stalin Epigram"(Brown and Merwin 70). roKyga nocjieaHIHimKB HeBOJIbH4K. (MaH,eJIbmITTaM91) Ero TOJICTbIenaJIbubI, KaK qepBs, )KlpHbI 11 [...... ] For the importance of Dante to Brodsky, see Bethea TapaKaHbHcMeioTca ycmima 52-73. [...... ] 12Latham 187; "Florentinusnatione non moribus"(Epi- KaKHnoaKOBbI KyeT 3a yKa3OMyKa3 - stola xviii). B KoMy nax, KOMyB jio6, KOMyB 6poBb,I KOMY B rJIa3. 13Botterill 11, 13; 1.6. "Nam quicunque tam obscene LITOHl Ka3Hb y Hero, - TO MaJIMHa rationis est ut locum sue nationis delitiosissimum credat 1MUlIPOKag rpyAb oceTlHa. (McDuff 130) esse sub sole, hic etiam pre cunctis propriumvulgare licetur, idest maternamlocutionem [...]. Nos autem, cui mundus "The Stalin Epigram,"never written down bt recitedonly est patria velut piscibus equor [...]. Et quamvis ad volup- to a small gatheringof friends, must be read i n conjunctlonF tatem nostram sive nostre sensualitatis quietem in terris with a later poem, an ode apparentlyin praise ameniorlocus quamFlorentia non existat, revolventeset po- the latter,see "Intothe Coetze:e. Brown, Heart"; etarumet aliorum 2 scriptorumvolumina, quibus mundusuni- N. Mandelstam,Hope against Hope 4. F or furtherdoc- versaliter et membratim describitur, ratiocinantesque in umentationsee Maggs; Shentalinsky. nobis situationes varias mundi locorum et eorum habitu- 3 No doubt for this the Divine Cot was also reason, medy dinem ad utrunque polum et circulum equatorem, multas to other Soviet inl Anna important many authors, cluding esse perpendimusfirmiterque censemus et magis nobiles et Akhmatova, and AleksandrS Joseph Brodsky, ;olzhenitsyn. magis delitiosas et regiones et urbes quam Tusciam et Flo- 4 of "Relativity Simultaneity"is the title o*f ch. 9 of Ein- rentiam,unde sumus oriunduset civis, et plerasquenationes stein's The Relativity: Special and the GeneraiI Theory. et gentes delectabilioriatque utiliori sermoneuti quam Lati- 5 For a general critique of this territorialparadigm, see nos" (Botterill 10, 12). Dante then goes on, in 1.15.2, to sin- Gilroy; for a specific critiqueof the "insularity" of new his- gle out for praise the poet Sordello, who, though born in toricism, its "national and monolingual" biass, see Wallace Mantua, abandoned his native tongue and wrote in Pro- xiii-iv. It is useful to recall, as Gellner does, tthat "[c]ulture venqal, when composing not only poetry but any discourse

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21 whatsoever ("qui, tantus eloquentie vir existens, non solum Inferno 4.144: "Averroes, who made the great com- in poetando sed quomodocunqueloquendo patriumvulgare mentary"'Averois, che '1 gran comento feo' (my trans.). In deseruit"[Botterill 34]). Purgatorio 25.63-66 Averroes is referred to indirectly: 14 Bloch sees paternity as a sovereign trope in Dante's "which once made a wiser than thou to err, so that in his model of linguistic derivation (43). While De vulgari elo- teaching he made the possible intellect separate from the quentia does argue for a single "illustriousItalian vernacu- soul, because he did not see an organappropriated by it." lar" 'latium vulgare illustre' (Botterill 46-47; 2.1.1), this che pii savio di te fe gia errante, illustrious offspring is parentedby multiple and decentral- si che per sua dottrinafe disgiunto ized local dialects. In De monarchia,Dante likewise argues dall'animail possibile intelletto, for a world sovereign states government, working against perche da lui non vide organoassunto and the especially against pope (Henry). (Sinclair326-27) 15 The concept of noise is also importantto many scien- In De the of creatable tific disciplines. See Moss and Wiesenfeld;McClintock. monarchia, discussing multiplicity 16 things, Dante says, "Withthis belief Averroesaccords in his In his youth, to sidestep the Jewish quota and gain ad- commentaryon the treatise Concerning the Soul" 'Et huic mission to the University of Saint Petersburg,Mandelstam sententie concordat Averrois in comento super hiis que de had convertedto Christianity.As Brown points out, such an Anima' 13; 1.3). opportunisticmove hardlysignals any deep faith of Mandel- (Henry 22 was known stam's (Mandelstam46). For Mandelstam'scomplicated ne- In the Middle Ages Averroes primarily his on Aristotle. See Walzer 1-37. For gotiations with his Jewishness, see Cavanagh104-45, 193- through commentary 214; Pollak. Dante's "Averroism"see Gilson 126-27, 157-58, 168-71, 17 259-62. Mazzotta discussses 17 and the Vita Translationtheory is a broadfield. See esp. Steiner. Purgatorio 18 nuova in the context of Aquinas's critique of Averroes (12, The Divine Comedy has been translatedinto at least 122-27). these languages:Albanian, Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Azer- 23 For a account that contradicts Mandel- baijani,Basque, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish,Dutch, En- persuasive one that sees the Divine as struc- glish, Esperanto,Finnish, French,Georgian, German, Greek, stam's, Comedy centrally tured an anti-Islam see Menocal. Hebrew,Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latin, by ideology, Latvian,Lithuanian, Low German,Macedonian, Moldavian, 24 "Democritus, who ascribed the world to chance" Norwegian,Pahlavi, Polish, Portuguese,Provenqal, Roman- 'Democrito,che '1 mondo a caso pone' (my trans.). 25 ian, Russian, Sardinian,Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Musa 144-45; 12.10-21. Spanish,Swedish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Welsh, and Yiddish. Come si volgon per teneranube 19In 4.131-32 Aristotle the vir- Inferno appearsamong due archiparalleli e concolori, tuous Furtherreferences to him in pagans. appear Inferno quandoIunone a sua ancella iube, Paradiso 11.79-84, 11.101-05; Purgatorio 3.40-43; nascendo di quel d'entroquel di fori, 24.133-35, 26.37-39. a guisa del parlardi quella vaga 20Araut's Provenqalspeech is perhaps the most obvi- ch'amor consunse come sol vapori; ous instance of multilingualismin the Divine Comedy:"So e fanno qui la gente esser presaga, much does your courteous question please me that I neither per lo patto che Dio con Noe pose, can nor would conceal myself from you. I am Araut, who del mondo che gia mai piu non s'allaga; weep and sing as I go. I see with grief past follies and see, cosi di quelle sempiternerose rejoicing, the day I hope for before me. Now I beg of you, volgiensi circa noi le due ghirlande, by that goodness which guides you to the summit of the e si l'estremaall' intimarispose. stairway,to take thoughtin due time for my pain." (Sinclair 174) 26 Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman, Of course, it is Christiantheology-Christian teleol- Qu'ieu no me puese ni voill a vos cobrire. ogy-that enables Dante to see the entire course of time on Ieu sui Amaut, que plor e vau cantan; the same synchronicplane. In this sense Dante is not hereti- consiros vei la passadafolor, cal at all. 27 e vei jausen lo joi qu'esper,denan. By "atoms"Democritus means small invisibleparticles Ara vos prec, per aquellavalor differing from one anotheronly in size, shape, and motion. vos al som de que guida l'escalina, The moder atomic theory is far more elaborate, assigning sovenha vos a de ma dolor! temps to atoms an internal structurewith neutrons, protons, and (Sinclair342-43; 26.140-47) electrons. For the relation between Dante and Arnaut, see Barolini 28Musa 160; 10.46-48. "Fieramentefuro avversi / a me 112-14. For Bertran de Born, who appears in Inferno 28, e a miei primie a mia parte,/ si che per due fiate li dispersi" see Mazzotta92-95. (Sinclair 134).

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