It does not continue looking like itself for the space of a single minute. If a physicist should conceive the desire, after taking apart the nucleus of an atom, to put it back together again, he would be like the partisans of descriptive and explanatory poetry, for whom Dante represents, for all time, a plague and a threat.

If we were to learn to hear Dante, we should hear the ripening of the clarinet and the trombone, we should hear the viola transformed into the violin and the lengthening of the valve of the French horn. And we should see forming around the lute and the theorbo the hazy nucleus of the homophonic three-part orchestra of the future.

Further, if we were to hear Dante, we should be unexpectedly plunged into a power flow which is sometimes, as a whole, called “composition,” sometimes, in particular, “metaphor,” and sometimes, because of its evasive quality, “simile,” and which gives birth to attributes in order that they might return into it, increase it by their melting and, having scarcely achieved the first joy of coming into existence, immediately lose their primogeniture in attaching themselves to the matter that is straining in among the thoughts and washing against them.

The beginning of Canto X of the Inferno. Dante shoves us into the inner blindness of the compositional clot: “We now entered upon a narrow path between the wall of the cliff and those in torment—my teacher and I at his back.” Every effort is directed toward the struggle against the density and gloom of the place. Lighted shapes break through like teeth. Conversation is as necessary here as torches in a cave.

Dante never enters upon single-handed combat with his material unless he has prepared an organ with which to apprehend it, unless he has equipped himself with some measuring instrument for calculating concrete time, dripping or melting. In poetry, where everything is measure and everything proceeds out of measure and turns around it and for its sake, measuring instruments are tools of a special quality, performing a special, active function. Here the trembling hand of the compass not only humors the magnetic storm, but produces it.

And thus we see that the dialogue of Canto X of the Inferno is magnetized by the tense forms of the verbs. The past imperfect and perfect, the past subjunctive, the present itself and the future are, in the tenth canto, given categorically, authoritatively.

The entire canto is built on several verbal thrusts, which leap boldly out of the text. Here the table of conjunctions has an air of fencing about it, and we literally hear how the verbs kill time. First lunge:

La gente che per li sepolcri giace

potrebessi veder? . . .

(Inferno, X, 7–8)

These people, laid in open graves,

may I be permitted to see?

Second lunge: “Volgiti: che fai?”8 [line 31]. This contains the horror of the present tense, a kind of terror praesentis. Here the unalloyed present is taken as a charm to ward off evil. In complete isolation from the future and the past, the present tense is conjugated like pure fear, like danger.

Three nuances of the past tense, washing its hands of any responsibility for what has already taken place, are given in this tercet:

I [had] fixed my gaze upon him

And he drew himself up to his full height

As though [he were] insulting Hell with his immense disdain.9

(Inferno, X, 34–36)

And then, like a powerful tube, the past breaks upon us in the question of Farinata: “Who were your ancestors?” (Chi fur li maggior tui?) [line 42]. How the copula, the little truncated form fur instead of furon, is stretched out here! Was this not the manner in which the French horn was formed, by lengthening the valve?

Later there is a slip of the tongue in the form of the past definite. This slip of the tongue was the final blow to the elder Cavalcanti: he heard Alighieri, one of the contemporaries and comrades of his son, Guido Cavalcanti, the poet, still living at the time, say something—it does not matter what—with the fatal past definite form ebbe.

And how remarkable that it is precisely this slip which opens the way for the main stream of the dialogue. Cavalcanti fades out like an oboe or clarinet that had played its part, and Farinata, like a deliberate chess player, continues the interrupted move and renews the attack:

e sè continuando al primo detto,

“s’elli han quell’arte,” diesse “male appresa,

ciò mi tormenta più che questo letto.”10

(Inferno, X, 76–78)

The dialogue in the tenth canto of the Inferno is an unexpected clarifier of the situation. It flows all by itself from the space between the two rivers of speech.

All useful information of an encyclopedic nature turns out to have been already furnished in the opening lines. The amplitude of the conversation slowly, steadily grows wider; mass scenes and throng images are introduced obliquely.

When Farinata stands up in his contempt for Hell like a great nobleman who has landed in prison, the pendulum of the conversation is already measuring the full diameter of the gloomy plain, broken by flames.

The notion of scandal in literature is much older than Dostoevsky, but in the thirteenth century and in Dante’s work it was far more powerful.

Dante runs up against Farinata, collides with him, in an undesired and dangerous encounter exactly as the rogues in Dostoevsky are always blundering into their tormentors in the most inopportune places. From the opposite direction comes a voice—whose it is, is so far not known. It becomes harder and harder for the reader to conduct the expanding canto. This voice—the first theme of Farinata—is the minor Dantean arioso of the suppliant type, extremely typical of the Inferno.

O Tuscan who travels alive through this city of fire and speaks so eloquently, do not refuse my request to stop for a moment. By your speech I recognize in you a citizen of that noble region to which I—alas!—was too great a burden.11

Dante is a poor man. Dante is an internal raznochinets [an intellectual, not of noble birth]12 of an ancient Roman line. Not courtesy but something completely opposite is characteristic of him. One has to be a blind mole not to notice that throughout the Divina Commedia Dante does not know how to behave, he does not know how to act, what to say, how to make a bow. This is not something I have imagined; I take it from the many admissions which Alighieri himself has strewn about in the Divina Commedia. The inner anxiety and the heavy, troubled awkwardness which attend every step of the unself-confident man, the man whose upbringing is inadequate, who does not know what application to make of his inner experience or how to objectify it in etiquette, the tortured and outcast man—it is these qualities which give the poem all its charm, all its drama, and they create its background, its psychological ground.

If Dante were to be sent out alone, without his dolce padre, without Vergil, a scandal would inevitably erupt in the very beginning, and we should not have a journey among torments and remarkable sights but the most grotesque buffoonery.

The gaucheries averted by Vergil systematically correct and straighten the course of the poem. The Divina Commedia takes us into the inner laboratory of Dante’s spiritual qualities. What for us are an unimpeachable capuche and a so-called aquiline profile were, from the inside, an awkwardness overcome with torturous difficulty, a purely Pushkinian, Kammerjunker struggle13 for the social dignity and social position of the poet.