This is how the meaning of poetic speech is created. Its route cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not tell how and why we were leaping from junk to junk.2

Poetic speech is a carpet fabric with a multitude of textile warps which differ one from the other only in the coloring of the performance, only in the musical score of the constantly changing directives of the instrumental code of signals.

It is a most durable carpet, woven out of water: a carpet in which the currents of the Ganges (taken as a textile theme) do not mix with the samples of the Nile and the Euphrates, but remain many-hued, in braids, figures, and ornaments—but not in regular patterns, for a pattern is that very paraphrase of which we were speaking. Ornament is good by virtue of the fact that it preserves the traces of its origin as a performed piece of nature—animal, vegetable, steppe, Scythian, Egyptian, what you will, national or barbarian, it is always speaking, seeing, active.

Ornament is stanzaic.

Pattern is a matter of lines.

The poetic hunger of the old Italians is magnificent, their animal, youthful appetite for harmony, their sensual lust after rhyme—il disio.

The mouth works, the smile moves the verse line, the lips are cleverly and merrily crimson, the tongue presses itself trustfully to the roof of the mouth.

The inner image of the verse is inseparable from the numberless changes of expression which flit across the face of the teller of tales as he talks excitedly.

For that is exactly what the act of speech does: it distorts our face, explodes its calm, destroys its mask.

When I began to study Italian and had only just become slightly acquainted with its phonetics and prosody, I suddenly understood that the center of gravity of the speech movements had been shifted closer to the lips, to the external mouth. The tip of the tongue suddenly acquired a place of honor. The sound rushed toward the canal lock of the teeth. Another observation that struck me was the infantile quality of Italian phonetics, its beautiful childlike quality, its closeness to infant babbling, a sort of immemorial Dadaism:3

e, consolando, usava l’idioma

che prima i padri e le madri trastulla:

.   .   .   .   .   .   .

favoleggiava con la sua famiglia

de’ Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma.4

(Paradiso, XV, 122–123, 125–126)

Would you like to become acquainted with the lexicon of Italian rhymes? Take the entire Italian dictionary and leaf through as you please. Here everything rhymes. Every word cries out to enter into concordanza.

There is a marvelous abundance of endings that are wed to each other. The Italian verb gains force as it approaches its end and only in the ending does it live. Every word hastens to burst forth, to fly from the lips, go away, and clear a place for the others.

When it became necessary to trace the circumference of a time for which a millennium was less than the wink of an eyelash, Dante introduced an infantile “transsense”5 language into his astronomical, concertante, deeply public, pulpit lexicon.

The creation of Dante is above all the emergence into the world arena of the Italian language of his day, its emergence as a whole, as a system.

The most Dadaist of all the Romance languages moved into first place internationally.

II.

It is essential to demonstrate some bits and pieces of Dante’s rhythms. This is an unexplored area, but one that must become known. Whoever says, “Dante is sculptural,” is enslaved by beggarly definitions of a magnificent European. Dante’s poetry is characterized by all the forms of energy known to modern science. Unity of light, sound, and matter constitutes its inner nature. The labor of reading Dante is above all endless, and the more we succeed at it the farther we are from our goal. If the first reading results only in shortness of breath and wholesome fatigue, then equip yourself for subsequent readings with a pair of indestructible Swiss boots with hobnails. The question occurs to me—and quite seriously—how many sandals did Alighieri wear out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goat paths of Italy?

The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape.

The step, linked to the breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante understands as the beginning of prosody. In order to indicate walking he uses a multitude of varied and charming turns of phrase.

In Dante philosophy and poetry are forever on the move, forever on their feet. Even standing still is a variety of accumulated motion; making a space for people to stand and talk takes as much trouble as scaling an alp. The metrical foot of his poetry is the inhalation; the exhalation is the step. The step draws a conclusion, invigorates, syllogizes.

A good education is a school of the most rapid associations: you grasp things on the wing, you are sensitive to allusions—this is Dante’s favorite form of praise.

As Dante understands it, the teacher is younger than the pupil, because he “runs faster.”

He [Brunetto Latini] turned aside and seemed to me like one of those who run races through the green meadows in the environs of Verona, and his whole bearing bespoke his belonging to the number of winners, not the vanquished.6

(Inferno, XV, 121–124)

The rejuvenating force of metaphor returns to us the educated old man Brunetto Latini in the guise of a youthful victor in a track race in Verona.

What is Dantean erudition?

Aristotle, like a downy butterfly, is fringed with the Arabian border of Averroës.

Averroìs, che il gran comento feo.7

(Inferno, IV, 144)

In the present case the Arab Averroës accompanies the Greek Aristotle. They are the components of the same drawing. There is room for them on the membrane of one wing.

The end of Canto IV of the Inferno is a genuine orgy of quotations. I find here a pure and unalloyed demonstration of Dante’s keyboard of allusions.

It is a keyboard promenade around the entire mental horizon of antiquity. A kind of Chopin polonaise in which an armed Caesar with the blood-red eyes of a griffin appears alongside Democritus, who took matter apart into atoms.

A quotation is not an excerpt. A quotation is a cicada. It is part of its nature never to quiet down. Once having got hold of the air, it does not release it. Erudition is far from being the same thing as the keyboard of allusions, which is the main essence of an education.

I mean to say that a composition is formed not from heaping up of particulars but in consequence of the fact that one detail after another is torn away from the object, leaves it, flutters out, is hacked away from the system, and goes off into its own functional space or dimension, but each time at a strictly specified moment and provided the general situation is sufficiently mature and unique.

Things themselves we do not know; on the other hand, we are highly sensitive to their location. And so, when we read the cantos of Dante, we receive as it were communiqués from a military field of operations and from them we can very well surmise how the sounds of the symphony of war are struggling with each other, even though each bulletin taken separately brings the news of some slight shift here or there of the flags showing strategic positions or indicates some change or other in the timbre of the cannonade.

Thus, the thing arises as an integral whole as a result of the one differentiating impulse which runs all through it.