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Introduction Mastery and Method in Poetry: Osip Mandel'shtam's “Conversation about Dante”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Julia Vaingurt
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Abstract

One of the greatest controversies in Dante scholarship concerns the authenticity of the epistle to Cangrande della Scala, in which the poet (if it is indeed him) provides his patron with exegetical and epistemological strategies to be applied in approaching Paradiso,the third part of his Divine Comedy.Accompanying this section as a gift to della Scala, the epistle in itself would not have appeared in any sense out of the ordinary had it not followed its requisite dedication with an extensive commentary on the poem. It is hardly surprising, then, that scholars heatedly debate the authorship of this letter, which purports no less than to prescribe how the Paradisoshould be read, claiming authority of and over the text. Most significantly, the epistle contends that, just like scripture, the Divine Comedyis “polysemous, that is, having many meanings,” requiring a manifold approach; specifically, the author of the letter cites the availability of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical readings.

Type
OSIP Mandel'Shtam
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 73 , Issue 3 , Fall 2014 , pp. 457 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2014 

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References

1. See Jay, Rudd, Critical Companion to Dante: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work(New York, 2008), 293.Google Scholar

2. Quoted in Gilbert, Allan H., ed., Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden(Detroit, 1962), 202.Google Scholar

3. This fourfold system of interpretation goes back to (among others) Augustine, who derived it in turn from the method of Origen, and it was popularized by Thomas Aquinas. See Cosman, Madeleine Pelnerand Jones, Linda Gale, Handbook to Life in the Medieval World, 3vols. (New York, 2008), 2:341.Google ScholarFor an example of Thomas's fourfold interpretation, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part 1, question 1, article 10, at www.ccel.org/ ccel/aquinas/summa.FP_Ql_A10.html (last accessed 1 May 2014).

4. Susan Handelman asserts that while Thomas ascribes primacy to the literal meaning, Dante presents all four interpretations as equal. Susan, Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modem Literary Theory(Albany, 1982), 108.Google Scholar

5. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 423.

6. See lurii, Levin, “Zametki k ‘Razgovoru o Dante,'”in Izbrannye trudy: Poetika, semiotika(Moscow, 1998), 142-52Google Scholar. Here Levin constructs his own fourfold scheme for reading Mandel'shtam's “Conversation“: as an essay on Dante, a theory of poetics, an autocommentary, and a poem. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

7. “Instead of merely retelling the so-called content, we will look at this link in Dante's work as a continuous transformation of the substratum of poetic material, which preserves its unity and aspires to pierce its own internal self.” Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 414.

8. Ibid., 440.

9. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 426.

10. Nancy Pollak proposes that for Mandel ‘shtam, the making of poetry is indivisible from reading in and into the poetic tradition; “he thus defines the poet as a reader.” Nancy, Pollak, Mandelstam the Reader(Baltimore, 1995), 5.Google Scholar

11. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 397.

12. Rereading “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate), Gasparov proposes an interpretation radically different from all prior ones: “The poem, which begins with the mass deaths in Stalin's war against his own people, appears quite complete and perfectly matches the traditional image of Mandel'shtam as a fighter against the regime and as its victim. And yet, this understanding is incorrect. In the poem's next-to-last redactions, this episode is followed by twelve more lines that make it clear that this roll call takes place not in a camp but during a military call-up; not among persons repudiated by the state but, to the contrary, among those summoned by it. This is not a renunciation of the Soviet regime but rather the acceptance thereof.” Gasparov, M. L., O Mandel'shtam: Grazhdanskaia lirika 1937goda(Moscow, 1996), 14.Google Scholar

13. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 436.

14. Ibid., 424.

15. Osip, Mandel'shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh(Moscow, 2010; hereafter PSS), 2:200.Google Scholar

16. Glazov-Corrigan, Elena, Mandel'shtam's Poetics: A Challenge to Postmodernism(Toronto, 2000), 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. In his article “Mandel'shtam's Ode to Stalin:History and Myth,” Russian Review41, no. 4 (October 1982), Gregory Freidin gives an insightful analysis of the poet's borrowings from the “contemporary official rhetoric in all of its maniacal verbosity” in constructing this ode (412). Readings that note Talmudic echoes in Mandel'shtam's approach to poetry include Mikhail Epshtein, “Tsadik i talmudist: Sravnitel'nyi opyt o Pasternake i Mandel'shtame,” 22, no. 77 (June-July 1991): 186-209; Pollack, Mandelstam the Reader, 9; and Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition(Princeton, 1995), 199.

18. Gorodetskii, L. R., Kvantovye smysly Osipa Mandelshtama: Semantika vzryva i apparat inoiazychnykh interferentsii(Moscow, 2012), 147.Google Scholar

19. See Hartman, Geoffrey, “Midrash as Law and Literature,” Journal of Religion 74, no. 3(July 1994): 338-55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Handelman, The Slayers of Moses.

20. Gorodetskii, Kvantovye smysly Osipa Mandel'shtama, 25.

21. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 399,414,433.

22. Lotman, Juri, Culture and Explosion, ed. Grishakova, M., trans. Clark, Wilma(Berlin, 2009)Google Scholar. Having conceived the developmental model on which Gorodetskii draws for his interpretation of Mandel'shtam, Lotman, surprisingly, never mentions “Conversation about Dante” among his many examples of explosive texts.

23. Ibid., 12.

24. According to Mandel'shtam, the search for comparisons is at the heart of Dante's method of discovering and experiencing the world, of being in it: “'I compare, therefore I am,’ so Dante might have put it. He was the Descartes of metaphor.” Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 451.

25. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 439.

26. Lotman, Culture and Explosion, 2. Emphasis in the original.

27. Ibid., 171.

28. Indeed, in his own commentary on Dantea's Divine Comedywe find Lotman pinpointing two highly pertinent axes of movement: the absolute, transcendent movement upward that characterizes Dante's journey, and the horizontal, human trajectory of Ulysses's travels, as portrayed in this work. Proposing that each trajectory signifies a different worldview—Dante, a traveler, represents medieval man's submission to a preordained, religiously organized universe, while the Renaissance man Ulysses sees himself as the center of creation—Lotman argues against identifying Dante the poet with Dante the pilgrim, insisting instead on the dialogic complementarity of these two worldviews’ trajectories in the Divine Comedy. The coexistence of these principles, as opposed to the replacement of one by the other, is also evident in Lotman's confounding of the directions of influence and transformation: his Dante is a follower of Ulysses in the drive to explore and cognize the world, even as the ancient Greek Ulysses represents the individualistic worldview of the Renaissance about to supplant Dante's religiously integrative medievalism. Iurii Lotman, “Puteshestvie Ulissa v ‘Bozhestvennoi komedii’ Dante,” in Semiosfera(St. Petersburg, 2010), 303-13.

29. Jacob, Neusner, The Midrash: An Introduction(Lanham, Md., 1994), xi.Google Scholar

30. David, Stern, “Midrash and Indeterminacy,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 140.Google Scholar

31. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 417.

32. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 398. The “understanding which brings it about“— ispolniaiushchee ponimanie—can also be translated as its “performative understanding.“ Mandel'shtam, PSS, 2:156

33. Mandel'shtam, PSS, 2:185.

34. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 436.

35. Mandel'shtam, PSS, 2:186.

36. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 414; Mandel'shtam, PSS, 2:173.

37. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 434.

38. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 442.

39. David Winston, “Philo and Rabbinic Literature,” in Adam Kamesar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philo(Cambridge, Eng., 2009), 236. See also Cosman and Jones, Handbook to Life in the Medieval World, 341. In “Rabbinic and Christian Models of Interaction on the Song of Songs,” in Marcel, Poorthuis, Joshua, Schwartz, and Joseph, Turner, eds., Interaction between ludaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art and Literature,(Leiden, 2009)Google Scholar, Tamar Kadari refrains from “taking a position on the interesting question of whether [the coevals Origen and Rabbi Johanan] had any direct or indirect interaction,“ but she argues that they at least “shared a three-level understanding of the Song of Songs“ (71). She cites the existence of a scholarly viewpoint that “stresses the influence of Jewish exegesis on Origen's work.” Ibid., 65.

40. Dante, Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol. 3, Paradise, trans, and ed. Musa, Mark(New York, 1986), 215.Google Scholar

41. Having fully deciphered the message, Dante dedicates seven stanzas to the last letter, m, which slowly takes the shape of a great eagle. Ibid., 216. Musa comments on this passage, “This mass of silver inlaid with an M of gold is a fitting background for the presentation of the sign for Monarchy…. Dante in his De Monarchia(I, xi, 2) writes: ‘The highest justice is attained only under a Monarch; therefore, in order to have a perfect order in the world, there must be a Monarchy or Empire.'” Ibid., 219.

42. Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” 438.

43. Ibid. Translation modified.

44. Consider the episode in Egipetskaia marka(The Egyptian Stamp) in which a St. Petersburg drawbridge induces Parnok to hail “emptiness and gaping” as “magnificent merchandise [pustota iziianie—velikolepnyi tovar],”or in “Chetvertaia proza” (Fourth Prose), in which the value of the bagel is said to lie in its hole, and “real labor” is likened to “Brussels lace,” whose pattern is based on “air, perforations, skipping out [vozdukh, prokoly, proguly].”Mandel'shtam, PSS, 2:298,2:358. On Mandel'shtam's view of art as the creative questing after connections between phenomena amid emptiness, see my “Indelible Inscriptions: Rewriting the Self in ‘The Egyptian Stamp,'” in Bozena, Shallcrossand Ryszard, Nyczeds., The Effect of Palimpsest: Culture, Literature, History(Frankfurtam Main, 2011).Google Scholar