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Monday? We can very well save it. In the midst of the celebrations for the author of the Divine Comedy, a long and articulate attack of the Divine Comedy arrives from Germany Frankfurter Rundschau against Dante, Italy and Dante’s celebrations. The Frankfurt newspaper did not use half measures: the whip landed on the front page and on two inside pages, just in the middle of Monday. To sign is the writer and commentator Arno Widmann (founder of the historical newspaper TAZ, as well as Echo and Malaparte’s translator), who lists the numerous “accusations” in an annoying feature article.
According to the German newspaper, a reference point for German intellectuals engagé, there is very little to celebrate: in today’s Italy nothing is celebrated except a medieval poet “light years from Shakespeare”, egocentric and upstart, who has little to do with the birth of the Italian language. Recalling that March 25 is Dante’s national anniversary, Widmann comments that “Italy praises him because he has taken the language to the heights of great literature: he built the language for his work and from this language the language of his readers and then from Italy” . But he immediately states, with a mocking tone that runs through the entire article, that it is a summary that was given to schoolchildren 60 years ago.
But as the father of the Italian language: Dante as a lyric poet was preceded by the troubadours of Provence and, therefore, actually “the first letter in the Italian mother tongue was written in Provençal”. Brunetto Latini, Dante’s teacher and friend, would also write his treasure in French, not so much because he was exiled in France at the time, but “because he knew he would have more readers.” Where in Italy? It is a pity that the Rundschau commentator does not dare to clarify; does not give up its game of malicious allusions and misleading references. And he doesn’t realize the ray in his own eye: Brunetto Latini’s was the language of oil and not French. Born long after Italian, French was enforced by law in 1539 with so little success that even during the Revolution of 1789 it was difficult to find someone to translate the laws into 23 local languages.
Dante’s Day: guide to the most important events
by Raffaella De Santis
The Comedy itself, Widmann insinuates, is not basically original: the Spanish scholar Asín Palacios in 1919 claimed that it was based on an Arabic mystical poem in which the experience of ascension to heaven is narrated. Of course, all Dantes have denied it, but it is only wounded pride: “They saw the originality of their hero Dante threatened.” Finally the invitation comes sarcastically to “do Dante no harm, underestimating his unscrupulous ambition”, because in reality “he could have dreamed, with his Christian journey to the Hereafter, of giving a coup against the Arab poem.” We were missing this: Dante’s plagiarist.
From the bitterness of Frankfurter Rundschau Poor TS Eliot, author of a famous essay on Dante and guilty of comparing him to Shakespeare, is also satisfied. And there is also a touch of Germanic Protestantism: the love between man and woman as a way of spiritual elevation does not come to us from the relationship between Dante and Beatrice, says Widmann, but “from Luther and the Reformation.” A very transparent biographical allusion for German readers: it is known that Martin Luther left the Augustinian order, commissioned the daring escape of a group of nuns from a convent (they were hidden among barrels of anchovies) and married one, Katharina von Bora, of legendary ugliness, founding a great family in the same monastery where the former friar had worn the habit.
Monday unites Italy. The Pope: “Dante prophet of hope”
The German attack on our home on Monday’s celebrations is at least unexpected, considering that Germany, as the great historian William Shirer wrote, “at the beginning of the modern age was still a strange jumble of some 300 states,” and countless locals spoken: for years we have tried to remedy the linguistic and spelling inhomogeneity by always making new laws, the infamous Rechtsschreibreformen (the last in 1996, 2006, 2011, 2017-2018), while German is not even officially recognized as a state language and another newspaper authorized as Time asks to stop the reforms “otherwise it will not be understood what errors our schools should correct. A German Dante, if any, would help. We can lend it to you. Because Dante is not Italian, he is worldwide.
