Two maximum busts of poetry converse under a timeless light in Conversations about Dante, the magnificent essay that Osip Mandelstam dedicates to his beloved Dante Alighieri and to the Divine Comedy. The Russian author, one of his country’s most renowned in the 20th century, dictated the text to his wife Nadezhda while he was closely watched by the Stalin regime; Mandelstam died some time later in a concentration camp for having ridiculed the Soviet leader in his verses.
Dante’s nonconformity with his Italian homeland was no different, and from that free spirit was born the inexhaustible machine of Divine Comedy. Spokesperson for a lyric that draws both from myth and from the future, Mandelstam sympathizes in supreme lucidity and ambition with the Florentine (whom he called a “mental derelict of the 14th century”) and assumes himself capable of questioning him on his terms.
Thus, he comes to the ground with allegorical or sociological interpretations of Dante’s work to celebrate everything Promethean about it, an extraterrestrial artifact launched into the cosmos.
Mandelstam compares Dante with Rimbaud and points to the Divine Comedy as a “single, indivisible stanza” that transmutes poetic matter into glass, into geological layers, into textile colors, into improvised music; Dante is the pioneering conductor of an impossible orchestra, the architect of a “sacred induction” that exchanges tradition for experience: this is the only way to explain hilarious gestures such as the interview that Dante engages in with Adam in canto XXVI of Paradise.
Fierce in every sentence, Mandelstam is guided by Dante to register his heavenly conception of poetry in hell.
- Conversations about Dante. Osip Mandelstam. It will be Brief. 80 pages. $1,200.