Abstract
The Italian writer Dante Alighieri was inevitably located in the center of this radical transition from Latin to Italian vernacular, which occurred as part of the global shift from the Medieval to the modern era. Responding to the demands of his time, he considered such indispensable concerns as salvation, justice, community, and love, and the issue of the vernacular was undoubtedly one of the fundamental questions. He proposed, in both theoretical and creative writings, that the Italian vernacular was the most crucial problem in his contemporary culture and successfully suggested his conception of the “illustrious vernacular (vulgare illustre)”. His choice of the vernacular instead of Latin in his writings was mainly for the purpose of making his language a tool for communication with the world in which he was situated. Dante’s project for the Italian vernacular can be characterized as giving stability to the vernacular without transforming it wholly into a grammatical language. Interestingly Dante’s project starts from his consciousness of the nature of the ‘dead’ language (Latin), which is unalterable and perpetual; ironically, this is possible only through the living, organic cycle of ‘death and rebirth’, which originally belongs to the vernacular rather than Latin. Dante’s vernacular is not so much the mother tongue, if that indicates the language that a human acquires in his or her childhood at home, as a social language that is circulated and reforged as a refined literature through education and learning. The Babelic diaspora is the environment in which the so-called cosmopolitan vernacular appears and degenerates. If translating Latin into the regional vernacular does not end up by returning to the origin-Latin and deconstructing the regional vernacular itself, and if the life of the regional vernacular can last in such way as to maintain its relationship with the origin-Latin horizontally, then this vernacular can be called a cosmopolitan vernacular. Using this term is among the most persuasive ways to explain Dante’s vernacular. My aim is not so much to define Dante’s vernacular in terms of the cosmopolitan as to trace up the symptom of cosmopolitanism in it. Therefore, even if I use the term ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’, I do it only as a point to take further, implying the whole process of vernacularization or bilingual writing, which was predominant in Dante’s theoretical and creative writings.
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Notes
Plato (2003), p. 40.
Spivak (2006).
Alighieri (1993) Vita Nova, XXV. 1–7. Hereafter cited as VN.
In Vita nuova, Dante “is concerned with justifying the poetic use of the vernacular” and makes “a distinction between the spoken and the written (literary) vernacular which it is essential to bear in mind when interpreting the De vulgari eloquentia.” Ewert (1940), p. 355.
See Alighieri (1996) De vulgari eloquentia 1.8.3/2.1.1-5/2.4.6. Hereafter cited as Dve.
Bakhtin (1981), p. 295.
Pertile’s statement is noteworthy: "De vulgari was to demonstrate in Latin the formal dignity of his vernacular poetry in the context of a universal theory and history of language and literature…. The major logical contradiction of the De vulgari lies in its presentation of the illustrious vernacular as both a historical reality and a transcendent ideal…. He is seeking to find one integrated solution to two discrete orders of problems concerning language as a historical phenomenon, and language in terms of salvation history" (Pertile 1999, pp. 47–49).
Burckhardt (1990), p. 136. To me this entire context is worthy of consideration, except for the idea of the ‘national’, which is to be rearticulated, at least in the case of Dante. I will return to this point later.
Alighieri (1995) Convivio, 1.5.7. Hereafter cited as Conv.
Dante explains the vernacular by enumerating some characteristics such as love, intimacy, goodness, and benevolence. Dante loves the vernacular; this is “not only love, but the most perfect love” (Conv. 1.12.2) for it exists in him. “Whilst demonstrating this to him who will understand well, I will tell how I became the friend of it, and then how my friendship is confirmed.” (Conv. 1.12.2). Dante stresses the intimacy, saying that “one’s own native language is nearest to him, inasmuch as he is most united to it; for it, and it alone, is first in the mind before any other.” (Conv. 1.12.5). Dante evaluates the goodness, observing that “to express a thought well and clearly is the thing most to be admired and commended.” (Conv. 1.12.13); he goes on to say that “it is manifest that it has been the cause of the love which I bear to it; since, as has been said, “Goodness is the producer of Love.” (Conv. 1.12.13) (See also Conv. 1.15.12).
The books of vernacular grammar were turned out much later; Leon Battista Alberti wrote the first book of vernacular grammar Grammatica della lingua Toscana between 1437 and 1441, although it was not published until 1908, Giovanni Francesco Fortunio wrote Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua in 1516 and Pietro Bembo published Prose della vulgar lingua in 1525.
“On this subject I[Dante] will speak elsewhere more completely in a book which I intend to write, God willing, on the ‘Language of the People’” (Conv. 1.5.10).
The term ‘choice’ is here deliberately adopted to reflect Dante’s will to favor the vernacular rather than Latin, based on a cosmopolitan affirmation that “vernacular literary languages do not emerge like buds or butterflies, they are made.” (Pollock 1998, p. 7) Pollock refers to Bakhtin’s idea of the actively literary linguistic consciousness of the necessity of having to choose a language (Bakhtin 1981, p. 295). What matters to Pollock is what is at stake in the choice, what else in the social and political world is being chosen when a language-for-literature is chosen.” (ibid.).
“One concedes it[Latin] to be more beautiful, more virtuous and more noble.”(Conv. 1.5.14).
Auerbach (2007), p. 77.
Ibid.
Baranski (1986), p. 6.
Fubini (1990), p. 10.
Furthermore, the mother tongue which Dante implies is “the nutrix tongue to be viewed not as ‘mother’ tongue but as ‘other’ tongue, associated explicitly with the object, reflecting a paradigm that dictates the rejection of the nursing body as a prerequisite to rational language and self-hood.” Léglu (2010), p. 63.
Lepschy (2010), p. 19.
Witt (2000), p. 229 and 506.
Cornish (2011), p. 8.
What I call translation here can be explained in two aspects; first, Dante translated into the vernacular what he learned through Latin; second, he also translated into the literary vernacular what he experienced with the spoken vernacular. The former can be called ‘translation’ while the latter can better be called ‘coincidence between the spoken language and the written language’. The latter later gave rise to the plural vernaculars and the translation among them.
Latin-vernacular transfer was a transposition intralinguale from a language of culture to a language of diffusion. Cornish (2011), p. 3. I agree with him partly because it is difficult to say that vernacularization played merely the role of diffusion but we need to pay active attention to its creative role in its entirety. Therefore, we need to consider what ‘transposition intralinguale’ implies; it should be the disappearance of consciousness of translation between Latin and vernacular. Contemporary linguistics tends to understand translation as a phenomenon of cultural exchange rather than switching the places of different languages. See Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, “Introduction: Proust’s Grandmother and the Thousand and One Nights: The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies.” in Bassnett and Lefevere. Translation, History and Culture. London and New York: Pinter Publishers. (1990). pp. 1–13; Homi Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of vultural translation.” in Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. (1994). pp. 212–235; Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia. Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2007); Doris Bachmann-Medick, “Translational Turn.” in Bachmann-Medick. Cultural Turns. Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. (2006). 238–283. Also on translation as circulation, see Eliot Weinberger. Outside Stories 1987–1991. New York: New Directions. (1992). p. 61; Susan Sontag. “The World as India.” At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. New York: Ferrar Strauss Giroux. (2007). pp. 156–179.
Aristotle pays attention to the fact that human speech has sounds based on divisibility and combinability (De interpretatione 16a, 27-29. Poetics 1456b, 22-24), which differ from animal sounds (“indivisible and non-combinable and as such cannot be called lettered sounds” De Benedictis 2009, p. 190). Dante seems to follow Aristotle in that he distinguishes the sign-language by convention from animal sound. Dve. 1.3.2-3.
After the comparison of the sounds of human voice and speech, Dante states that as “the power of speech was given only to human beings” (Dve. 1.2.7), the sign in human language is based on the interchange or interaction of reason and perception. “this sign needs to receive its content from reason and convey it back there, it has to be rational; but, since nothing can be conveyed from one reasoning mind to another except by means perceptible to the senses, it has also to be based on perception. For, if it were purely rational, it could not make its journey; if purely perceptible, it could neither derive anything from reason nor deliver anything to it.” (Dve.1.3.2).
Somerset (2003), p. 10.
By “form” Dante seems to mean the written aspect of language in which the spoken aspect is embodied. This did not exist until Dante discussed it and composed a literary work with it, because it was “the illustrious, cardinal, aulic, and curial vernacular in Italy as that which belongs to every Italian city yet seems to belong to none, and against which the vernaculars of all the cities of the Italians can be measured, weighed, and compared.” (Dve. 1.16.6) Of course it is what Dante will propose, with his theory and creation, as the language armed with its grammatical principles.
See Inferno 10.25-26; 22.7-9; 33.8; 33.80.
We need to refer to Dante’s experience of neologism facing ineffability in the situation of “trasumanar” in Paradise (Paradiso. 1.70-72/33.55-57). Dante also states: “This is the other unspeakable thing, that the tongue is not a complete and perfect follower of all that the intellect sees.” (Conv. 3.3.15).
De Benedictis (2009), p. 201.
Somerset (2003), p. x. The vernacular itself was born in the multilingual environment; “Vernacular can be thought of as a collection point for a diversity of sociolinguistic issues, one whose usefulness for scholars lies in its multiform ability to bridge time and distance, discovering intellectual relationships between widely separated cultural situations in the process.” Somerset (2003) 7.
Worley in Somerset (2003), p. 19.
Mignolo (2002), p. 157.
Cornish (2011), p. 4.
Appiah (2006), p. 4. Appiah understands cosmopolitanism in a way that implies there is already a ‘traverse’ in its origin.
See also Wallerstein (2006).
Bhabha (2001).
Pollock (2002), p. 20.
Pollock (1998), p. 9.
Pollock (2002), p. 22.
Pollock (2002). p. 18.
Kosin (2009), p. 179.
I am not saying that all other modern national languages have universality; nor that we have to recognize Dante’s universality as it is; nor that his universality belongs to modernity or the modern era. I would say that if the modern national languages look universal, it is because of the imperial properties and effects arising from modern Western civilization; the universality of Dante can be re-highlighted only if it is regarded as located outside them.
“Creator of her language and founder of her literature, Dante gave to Italy both word and thought, added intellectual individuality to the idea of race and soil, and hence is fairly entitled to be regarded as the father of an Italian nation, of an Italian autonomy; but neither as prophet nor father of the present Italian unity, of which he never dreamed.” J. A. Symonds. "Dante." Cornhill Magazine. XII, July. (1865), p. 244; quoted in Wilson (2011), p. 220. The Italian language as the ‘national language’ is something that was established in the historical process of Italy building up its own modern nation-state. In fact this phenomenon happened in most nations that planned to inscribe the ideology of national unification into their ‘national languages’ in modern history, as shown by the example of Sprachnation in Germany. The term ‘national language’ is itself a political concept but nevertheless it conceals its political nature.
The relationship between cosmopolitanism and modernity is intriguing enough, but I would like to recall Mignolo who holds, by adopting “critical cosmopolitanism”(Mignolo 2002, p. 159), that cosmopolitanism needs to be understood as originating and being pursued from the perspective of modernity. I would also like to consider the case of Gramsci, for which I quote: “He[Gramsci] seems to have placed the blame for the failure of national consciousness to develop in Italy on a certain ‘cosmopolitan casteism’ and the long-term alienation of the intellectual class from the state, something intimately connected in Gramsci’s mind with the continuing use of Latin and the concomitant failure of a national language—indeed, Dante’s ‘illustrious vernacular’—to come into being.” Pollock (2002), p. 42. What we need to bear in mind in the case of Gramsci should be the tension “between, on the one hand, an ideal of cultural cosmopolitanism and political internationalism and, on the other, the very pragmatic pressures of national-popular action.”(ibid).
Botterill (1996), p. xxi.
Dante formed, rather than discovered in the Italian peninsula, his ‘illustrious vernacular’ in a more speculative way, because of the absence of a supreme literary language as well as “a single focal point of political authority in the peninsula.”(Botterill 1996, p. xxiii.).
Auerbach (1953), pp. 182–183.
VN, 13:4. The phrase in Latin means: “Names are the consequences of things.” See Genesis 2:19-20.
Auerbach reminds us that the language Dante used in the Comedy included expressions of everyday life by taking as examples some phrases like “come dicesti? Egli ebbe?” that Cavalcanti spoke to the pilgrim. Auerbach states that “The ‘da me stesso’ perhaps stems from the spoken language; and elsewhere too it may be observed that Dante by no means scorns colloquialisms. The ‘Volgiti: che fai?’, especially from Virgil’s mouth and coming immediately after Farinata’s solemnly composed apostrophe, has the ring of spontaneous and unstylized speech, of everyday conversation among ordinary speakers. The case is not very different with the harsh question ‘chi fur li maggior tui?’ unadorned as it is with any of the graces of circumlocution, and with Cavalcante’s ‘Come dicesti? Elli ebbe?’ etc. Reading further through this canto, we come, toward the end, upon the passage where Virgil asks, ‘perche’ sei tu si smarrito?’(Inferno 1.125). All these quotations, detached from their context, could well be imagined in any ordinary conversation on the familiar level of style. Auerbach (1953), pp. 183–184.
This leads us to say that the reason why Dante wrote the Comedy was to show that the vernacular is nobler than Latin in its aspect of a literary language. In doing so he achieved the best level of Italian vernacular. Cachey states: “One would have thought that Dante had resolved the Latin versus vernacular question once and for all by writing the Divine Comedy in the vernacular. The Commedia was the first classic work of literature written in a modern vernacular, the first to receive the kind of extensive scholarly treatment by learned commentators in its own day that had until that time been reserved for the Bible and literary classics such as Virgil and Ovid; and more than six hundred surviving manuscripts of the Comedy testify to Dante’s enormous success throughout Italy during the Trecento.” Cachey (2005), p. 17.
See Saussure (1959).
Deleuze and Guattari (1987), p. 101. They go on to say that “Becoming minoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming.”(106) See also the whole of chapter 4. “November 20, 1923—Postulates of Linguistics.” pp. 75–110.
Deleuze and Guattari state that “linguistics is nothing without a pragmatics (semiotic or political) to define the effectuation of the condition of possibility of language and the usage of linguistic elements.”(Deleuze 1987, p. 85).
Semiotics is a metalanguage, where one sign-system denotes another sign-system, for it studies the production and communication of signs. As such, it can be linked to such elements of openness as the structure of structure, code and form. But the difference is that, for the open text, those types of metalanguage are explained by virtue of the message of the message, that is, the self-reflexive or poetic message. To use Saussurrean terminology, this is parole of parole, whereas semiotics is langue of langue. See Park (2001), p. 170.
Benedict 2006.
“I say that one can see clearly how the Latin would have given its good gift to few, but the Mother Tongue will serve many.” Con. 1.9.4.
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This work was supported by the research Grant of the Busan University of Foreign Studies in 2016.
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Park, S. Post-Babel language: a condition of Dante’s cosmopolitan literary vernacular. Neohelicon 43, 303–334 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0338-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0338-9