Week 18: Pound's Pisan Cantos - cursory notes

[cf notes on earlier Cantos]

Images - sensory - the smells - mint under the tent/ sausages etc...
These act as fragments of sense in what otherwise seems to me a rather nonsensical series of poems...

[Remember, Mussolini has just been hanged - this is the end of a dream, when he is somewhat despised for his politics and his actions during a time he was doing what he thought was right, or fitting. (Maybe "meet" is the right term here.)]

cf Canto 2 -> Metamorphosis.
Rhyme -> situational/ historical/ social/ linguistic ...
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Dynamic context of the images, a series with light put through them - like the cinematograph.

Images of eyes/ viewing: Athena with owl's eyes, Aphrodite with almond eyes. This all links in to the insect world (the wasp, the ant)
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Libretto from Canto 81: "thy vanity" "what thy lovest well"
- a lyrical impulse behind all this. (resurgance of the self)
- the tradition uplifting, a heritage to be salvaged.

cf Elizabethan songwriters - madrigals

"eidos" - totality of experience, awareness of knowing.

"to have with decency' - Wilfrid Blunt - a "fine old age" - embodiment of the tradition

last 2 lines: slightly prosaic - to stop the music?

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Canto 82: views, birds on a wire
- the immediacy and actuality of death "at 3om for an instant"
- a theme is struck - going back to past experience, but given the chance, he'd do it again.
- death of Agamemnon/ cf death of Shelley - drowned, weighed down with a copy of Keats' poetry in his pocket...

September 8 - Molly Bloom's birthday - day of the Virgin Mary... 3pm - when Jesus died...

cf Whitman, drowning, rhythm of the sea...

Gaia terra - sinking into the mother earth

Cthonic - of the earth (cf H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu 'mythos')

Pieta - last entry

Just as an example - here's Michelangelo's Pieta (sculpted 1498-99, now situated in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome):






















One interpretation of the work suggests that Michelangelo's treatment of the subject was influenced by his passion for Dante's Divina Commedia. Apparently he was so well-acquainted with the work that when he went to Bologna he paid for hospitality by reciting verses from it.

Pieta - two more references

I found this today, and thought it was quite applicable to what I was thinking about, the constant recurrences of Aeneas and Dante in this course: "Becoming Aeneas, Becoming Paul: Hell & Dante’s Education in Love", by Peter J. Leithart. It's a pretty great article.

The most relevant parts are as quoted below;

from chapter "Love & Piety":

...

Nor has Dante really understood the nature of pieta, another key term in this episode, which ranges in meaning from “pity” to “piety.” When Dante calls out to Francesca and Paolo, it is with a compassionate cry (Inferno 5.87), and Francesca welcomes the pieta that the pilgrim expresses for her wretchedness (Inferno 5.93). When Dante has heard her story, he weeps with “tristo e pio,” sadness and pity (Inferno 5.117).

Pieta, too, is a major theme of the poem. Beatrice’s love for Dante expresses itself in pity for his desperate condition in the dark wood. When she finally meets him at the top of Mount Purgatory, she rebukes him with bitter, sharp pity (“pietade acerba,” Purgatorio 30.81). The pieta of Beatrice ensures that the pilgrim will make his way to salvation, but this is precisely what the pieta of Francesca does not do. Instead of rousing him to continue the pilgrimage, Dante ends the canto in a swoon.

An association with Aeneas is also in the background. In Canto 2, Dante hesitates to enter Hell, telling Virgil, “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul” (Inferno 2.32). The reference to Aeneas is an allusion to that hero’s journey to the underworld in the Aeneid, Book 6, and the Pauline reference is to his ascension to the third Heaven (2 Cor. 12:2). Dante believes he is unqualified to make the journey to Hell and Heaven, being neither Aeneas nor Paul.

Though the word pieta does not appear here, Dante is well aware that Aeneas’s great heroic virtue is his piety (Latin, pietas), manifested in his willingness to shoulder responsibilities, act out of loyalty to his family and city, and submit to the will of the gods. Piety in this sense is echoing in the context, especially since Francesca is a member of “Dido’s flock.” The pieta that Francesca rouses, however, is not loyalty to family and duty and submission to God, but the opposite. Her story of un-pietas arouses Dante’s pieta.

...

Readers of the Comedy have always been attracted to Francesca. Dante meant us to be. But he also meant for us to learn that this attraction is a symptom of our blindness. If we find her attractive, it is because we are still wandering in the dark wood, having lost the path of truth. If we pity her, it is because we have not learned the meaning of true pieta. If we think that her love was genuine love, we have not learned the true nature of charity, a lesson that only Hell can teach. With Dante, each reader has to confess, “I am not Aeneas; I am not Paul.”
...


Also interesting is the Princeton Dante Project, which uses the Hollander translation, but has a lot more resources as well. Well worth browsing through.

Pieta - more notes

In "Dante and the Lobster", we see Belacqua agonising over the seemingly impossible translation of Dante’s “great phrase” “qui vive la pieta quando è ben morta” (Inferno xx:28); whether to translate it as "pity" or "piety"...

From the original: In the Inferno, Virgil reprimands Dante, the pilgrim, for his compassion for the damned: "Here pity/piety lives when it is dead".

The Latin root for both pity and piety is pietas; the Italian word pieta refers to either pity or piety (or, as in Dante, to both). In 'The Divine Comedy', Christian piety and pity can mean the same thing.
For Virgil, writing from a Roman (and pagan) perspective, pieta meant "the subordination of personal compassion to a political duty that served a national destiny decreed by the gods." (Phyllis Carey, "Stephen Dedalus, Belacqua Shuah, and Dante's Pietà")
For Dante, writing from both Roman and Christian persectives, pieta would seem to infer both morality and devotion. "Morality opposes evil; piety aids the good." (Karl Vossler, 'Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times')

In the Inferno, where moral evil is explicit, piety is seen as a moral stance. Conversely, in the Paradiso, with opposition to evil being no longer necessary, the moral will is indistinguishable from piety (Vossler). In Dante, human piety evinces varying degrees of participation in the holiness of God.

Different translators offer slightly different versions:

Robert and Jean Hollander (2000 - verse): "Here piety lives when pity is quite dead."
John Sinclair (1961 - blank verse): "Here pity lives when it is quite dead"
Wallace Fowlie: "Here piety (to God) lives when pity (to man) is dead."

It would be great to line up all of the different versions next to each other, line by line, and just compare them, perhaps in the order in which they were translated - the original, the Longfellow, all the way through to the Hollander. There's a 1997 attempt at doing it here, but it only compares three translations with the original, and only two cantos of the whole thing.

I'm going to try to get hold of Robert Pinsky's 1994 verse translation - the US Poet Laureate, he's been criticised for sounding too much like he just, all of a sudden, got really good at using magnetic poetry, but from the extracts I've read, it seems like a very approachable version of the text. It seems like every text in this course has something to do with Dante, or The Descent, I guess they're very resonant myths and ideas through the ages...

Week 17: Beckett: "Malacoda"/ "Dante and the Lobster" - brief notes

Malacoda: Dante through the 8th circle of Hell, a bad coda to a good life (funeral of Beckett's father, and all the bad things happening)

[The phrase for 'Ulysses' - stay, stay]

"Dante and the Lobster" - "have sense ... they must be."

["It is not."] cf ["No."] - definitive answers to what's happening.

An exercise in absurdity.

Italian: pieta (piety or pity? how to translate this?) - or both. (cf statue of Mary mourning for Jesus) - a more complex emotion, perhaps?

Also: a funny Beckett link.

Quick note

Woolf's sensation that androgyny is the ideal state of the artist - cf her narration - it has an androgynous sense about it, I think. It goes between men and women without discrimination, almost without noticing their gender.
But a distinction should be made between the artist and the narrator, I suppose. A slim difference, but it must be important.