Precisely the same thing has befallen European Dante criticism, which has nailed him to the landscape of Hell as depicted in the etchings. No one has yet approached Dante with a geologist’s hammer, in order to ascertain the crystalline structure of his rock, in order to study the particles of other minerals in it, to study its smoky color, its garish patterning, to judge it as a mineral crystal which has been subjected to the most varied series of accidents.

Our criticism says: distance the phenomenon from me and I can handle it, I can cope with it. For our criticism, what is “a longish way off” (Lomonosov’s23 expression) and what is knowable are practically the same thing.

In Dante the images depart and say farewell. It is difficult to make one’s way down through the breaks of his verse with its multitude of leave-takings.

We have scarcely managed to free ourselves from that Tuscan peasant admiring the phosphorescent dance of the fireflies nor rid our eyes of the impressionistic dazzling from Elijah’s chariot as it fades away into a little cloud, before the pyre of Eteocles has already been mentioned, Penelope named, the Trojan horse has slipped past, Demosthenes has lent Odysseus his republican eloquence, and the ship of old age is already being fitted out. Old age, in Dante’s understanding of that term, is first of all breadth of mental horizon, heightened capacity, the globe itself as a frame of reference. In the Odyssean canto the world is already round.

It is a canto which deals with the composition of the human blood, which contains within itself the salt of the ocean. The beginning of the voyage is in the system of blood vessels. Blood is planetary, solar, salty . . .

With every fiber of his being Odysseus despises sclerosis just as Farinata despised Hell.

Surely we are not born for security like a cow, it cannot be that we will shrink from devoting the last handful of our fading senses to the bold venture of sailing westward, beyond the Gates of Hercules, there where the world, unpeopled, goes on?24

The metabolism of the planet itself takes place in the blood, and the Atlantic absorbs Odysseus and sucks down his wooden ship.

It is unthinkable to read the cantos of Dante without aiming them in the direction of the present day. They were made for that. They are missiles for capturing the future. They demand commentary in the futurum.

Time, for Dante, is the content of history, understood as a single, synchronic act. And conversely: the content is the joint containing of time with one’s associates, competitors, codiscoverers.

Dante is an antimodernist. His contemporaneity is inexhaustible, measureless, and unending.

That is why the speech of Odysseus, bulging like the lens of a magnifying glass, may be applied to the war of the Greeks and the Persians as well as to the discovery of America by Columbus, the bold experiments of Paracelsus, and the world empire of Charles V.

Canto XXVI, devoted to Odysseus and Diomed, is a splendid introduction to the anatomy of Dante’s eye, so naturally adjusted for one thing only: the revelation of the structure of the future. Dante had the visual accommodation of birds of prey, unsuited to focusing at short range: too large was the field in which he hunted.

To Dante himself may be applied the words of the proud Farinata:

“Noi veggiam, come quei c’ha mala luce.”25

(Inferno, X, 100)

We, that is, the souls of sinners, are capable of seeing and distinguishing only the distant future, for which we have a special gift. The moment the doors into the future are slammed in front of us, we become totally blind. In this regard we are like one who struggles with the twilight and, able to make out distant objects, cannot discern what is near him.

The dance basis is strongly expressed in the rhythms of the terza rima of Canto XXVI. One is struck here by the high lightheartedness of the rhythm. The feet are arranged in the movement of the waltz:

E se già fosse, non sarìa per tempo.

così foss’ ei, da che pur esser dee!

chè più mi graverà, com’più m’attempo.26

(Inferno, XXVI, 10–12)

For us as foreigners it is difficult to penetrate to the ultimate secret of an alien poetry. It is not for us to judge; the last word cannot be ours. But in my opinion it is precisely here that we find that captivating pliability of the Italian language, which only the ear of a native Italian can fully grasp. Here I am quoting Marina Tsvetaeva, who once mentioned “the pliability of Russian speech.”27

If you pay close attention to the mouth movements of a person who recites poetry distinctly, it will seem as if he were giving a lesson to deaf-mutes; that is, he works as if he were counting on being understood even without the sound, articulating each vowel with a pedagogic obviousness. And it is enough to see how Canto XXVI sounds in order to hear it. I should say that in this canto the vowels are agitated, throbbing.

The waltz is essentially a wavy dance. Nothing even faintly resembling it was possible in Hellenic or Egyptian culture, but it could conceivably be found in Chinese culture, and it is absolutely normal in modern European culture. (For this juxtaposition I am indebted to Spengler.) At the basis of the waltz there lies the purely European passion for periodic wavering movements, that same intent listening to the wave which runs through all our theory of light and sound, all our theory of matter, all our poetry and all our music.

VI.

Envy, O Poetry, the science of crystallography, bite your nails in wrath and impotence: for it is recognized that the mathematical combinations needed to describe the process of crystal formation are not derivable from three-dimensional space. You, however, are denied that elementary respect enjoyed by any piece of mineral crystal.

Dante and his contemporaries did not know geological time. The paleontological clock was unknown to them: the clock of coal, the clock of infusorial limestone, granular, gritty, stratified clocks. They whirled around in the calendar, dividing the twenty-four hours into quarters. The Middle Ages, however, did not fit into the Ptolemaic system: they took refuge there.

To biblical genetics they added the physics of Aristotle. The two poorly matched things were reluctant to knit together.