HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

For Lino Pertile, Studying Dante is Divine

By Marvin Hightower

Gazette Staff

As a secondary-school student poring over the Divine Comedy in his native Italy, Lino Pertile was anything but thrilled by the classic he now teaches with enormous delight.

"Nobody made me feel that Dante was talking about me," he said recently in his office at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. "I went through the motions but never felt that I was involved." College did little to improve his response.

Then about 15 years ago, while teaching in England at the University of Sussex, Pertile was preparing to give his first lecture on the 26th Canto of the Inferno (the first of the Comedy's three parts), which takes the tale of Ulysses in directions that Homer scarcely dreamt of.

"In Dante, Ulysses never goes back home," Pertile explained. "He turns out of the Mediterranean and sails into the Atlantic until he comes to an island, where he shipwrecks and dies in the search for knowledge and virtue." The reencounter proved transformative. "Ulysses struck a chord in me, and I wanted to go deeper and deeper into Dante -- and I'm still working at it."

Pertile joined the Harvard faculty last summer as professor of Romance languages and literatures after 27 years of teaching in Great Britain. He has also taught in Italy and briefly in France. Just before arriving here permanently (he was a spring-term visiting professor in 1994), he spent seven years as professor and chair of Italian at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

"My professional career had come to its natural completion in Britain, where having a chair of Italian was the most I could aim to have," he said. "The notion of coming to the States was very exciting for me. I was particularly attracted to Harvard not only because of its teaching system but also because it has wonderful libraries."

In his three half-courses on Dante's grand allegory of the Christian afterlife, Pertile tries to offer an experience very different from his own first encounter. "My principal aim is to make students feel that literature is enjoyable and that it is about them and about us," he said emphatically. "I want my students to love literature because literature is there -- for the same reason we go to see Michelangelo's Moses or the Sistine Chapel or a magnificent Renaissance palace.

"I speak of literature as a linguistic artifact that requires a disciplined approach, but I never forget that this artifact has certain effects on its audience. So I'm not at all ashamed of being moved by poetry. This does not exclude a more technical approach. But I don't think literature is a finite technique. It is something much more complex and more far-reaching than that. If it were a finite technique, we would have stopped reading it many centuries ago. It is an art that owes its enduring vitality to its imprecision."

So far, he said, undergraduates and graduate students from a broad spectrum of the humanities and the sciences seem to like his intellectual fare. Pertile gives students a choice of several translations for their own readings. But in class, he recommends a prose translation that allows him to "mediate between the Italian text and the American student." This text-based method naturally branches out into larger contexts, since "the poetry of the text is part and parcel of the philosophy and the view of life that were typical of Dante and his times."

Early scholarship has imposed blinkers that have long restricted our perceptions of that world view -- and the problem, ironically enough, begins in Italy, Pertile explained. When the Comedy appeared around 1321 (the year of Dante's death), it became a virtual instant classic, acquiring near-biblical respect and quickly inspiring multiple glosses and commentaries. Dante's two sons, in fact, wrote separate commentaries.

"But strangely enough, most of the problems that we have with Dante's text and his ideas are not solved by those commentators," Pertile said. "They are not as aware of those problems as we are, because the writing of the Divine Comedy corresponds with a discontinuity between the premodern and the modern world, in a way." Even Dante's sons seem to perceive the Comedy from the other side of the cultural divide, he noted.

As a result, "commentators in the 14th century seem to ignore things that are now clear to us. They tended to focus on the moral and allegorical explanation of the text, but in a rather superficial, mechanical way. Unfortunately, that provided the guidelines for Dante interpretation for many centuries to come," and mainline Italian Dante scholarship wound up in a straitjacket of textual/linguistic analysis. "Only when Dante moved out of that particular culture was a new interpretation possible."

The most innovative work on Dante in this century was done in Berlin, Istanbul, and New Haven by Erich Auerbach, a German philologist of Jewish origin. In his wake, literary analysts like Charles Singleton began to explore new dimensions of Dante's achievement in ways that shape scholarship to this day. Nearly everyone now recognizes a distinction between Dante the character and Dante the narrator, Pertile said. But as recently as 40 to 50 years ago, the concept was all but unheard of.

"The notion of Dante the pilgrim, for instance, did not exist when I studied Dante in Italy," the 56-year-old scholar recalled. "The strange thing is that the tradition of Dante studies in Italy is very secular. The notion of Dante the pilgrim associates Dante's journey with a religious journey, and this is why it was never accepted in Italy until very recently."

A century and a half ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson perceived a connection between Dante's pilgrimage and the American settlers' westward "pilgrimage," thereby, perhaps, helping to inspire this country's affinity for Dante, Pertile suggests. Singleton later elaborated his own notions of pilgrimage and made them common intellectual property. For all these reasons and more, the most innovative Dante scholarship in the world is happening right now in the U.S. -- and being exported to Italy, where it is changing centuries-old attitudes about Italy's most revered poet.

"I'm sure that we are coming much closer now to the 'real' Dante than we ever were in the past, just because of the substantial correction in the orientation of Dante studies that has been brought about by the American contribution," Pertile said.

After scores of readings, the Comedy itself remains a wonder at every level, Pertile said. "I find most impressive the fact that Dante managed to constrain a vision of the totality of the world within one work of art. Each part is artistically valid in its own right -- each line, each tercet, each canto -- so that I enjoy the whole as much as I enjoy the detail. This is why, very often, as I'm reading the text of a canto probably for the hundredth time, I still am surprised at certain lines and feel an almost physical urge to read them aloud to myself. And the more I read, the more I come to appreciate it."

At the same time, the work crystallizes everything that fascinates him about the Middle Ages. "From the point of view of the history of ideas, I find the Middle Ages a very challenging and interesting period to study. The major problem is really the relationship of good and evil in human affairs. What are we doing here? Where are we coming from? Where are we going? These are the kinds of fundamental questions that we keep asking ourselves in various ways, very often without realizing that this is what we are asking. In Dante in particular, these questions become central to the whole enterprise of writing the Divine Comedy and to the whole journey of the protagonist."

Pertile's first major Dante book (1993) was the first critical edition of a little-known manuscript commentary on the Comedy by the Venetian scholar Trifon Gabriele (1470-1549), whose text he discovered, sometimes unknown or unattributed, at libraries in Naples, Milan, and Vatican City.

"That work made me appreciate Dante more and more, because Dante is so infinitely superior to his commentator! I had to use all my resources as a linguist, as a historian, as a Venetian as well, because the commentary is not written in 'straight Italian.' "

Pertile soon hopes to complete a book comparing the cantos on Dante's visit to Earthly Paradise (in the Purgatorio, part two of the trilogy) with the biblical Song of Solomon (The Song of Songs). "I'm trying to show how Dante is affected by the sacred literature of his own times. The Song of Solomon was one of the biblical books most avidly read and commented upon during the Middle Ages." Combine that fact with the Song's allegorical nature, and you have a scholar's paradise of comparative possibilities.

In another volume, Pertile plans to explore what he calls "Dante's semantics of desire" in the Comedy's concluding Paradiso section. Pertile contends that "Paradise as text cannot exist without the presence of desire. It is a search, a quest. This is the third and final stage of Dante's journey, but Heaven -- blessedness -- begins only when the 100th Canto comes to a close. Only then does true Paradise begin -- outside the text. Paradise cannot be written down, and Dante seems to be aware of this."

Despite his recent immersion in Dante, Pertile considers himself "a classicist by formation." Soon after his early classical training, he was drawn to French literature, especially of the French Renaissance. Montaigne, in turn, became a favorite author, initially through connections to Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher.

"I loved Seneca's Latin, and I loved his Stoicism and humanity. Montaigne, I thought, had learned a great deal from Seneca, so I wrote a doctoral thesis [University of Padova, 1965] on Montaigne as a reader of Seneca. Then I discovered that Montaigne was interesting not so much as a Stoic himself but much more as a relativist. I discovered that my youthful rigors were not as Montaignesque as I thought!"

By year's end, Pertile's name will appear as coeditor (with C. Peter Brand) of the 900-page History of Italian Literature from Cambridge University Press, which will include contributions by some 20 scholars from 6 countries. Besides coediting the whole volume, Pertile has written the chapter on Dante.

Pertile maintains a lively interest in the contemporary Italian novel, whose roots are not so vigorous and deep as those of poetry. "Italians have always thought -- perhaps because of Dante and Petrarca -- that poetry is much more dignified and worthwhile than prose," he explained.

The novel has thus gained a large Italian audience only in this century, especially after World War II, as the nation's many regional dialects progressively weakened in favor of one standard tongue. Initially, most novels were translated imports, but Italian authors have increasingly made the form their own. This phenomenon inspired The New Italian Novel (1993), an essay collection edited by Pertile and Zygmunt Baranski.

But even this range of projects hardly exhausts Pertile's all-devouring literary passion. "To be honest, I wouldn't mind working in Spanish or Portuguese or American or English literature as well," he confessed.

"A love of literature is what drives me in my study of so many different aspects and sections of Italian literature. The tradition among Italianists is that you study and teach the whole of your literature. Perhaps you teach everything equally badly! But I think there is something to be said for that approach.

"If I could, I'd like to learn other languages and read other literatures I've never managed to read in the past. It might be possible, though I can't see how just yet: I've got so many projects in Italian at the moment."