Translating Philosophy in the Early Italian Lyric Akash Kumar Submitted in partial fulfillment of th

210 Pages·2013·1.53 MB·English

Sì come dice lo Filosofo:
Translating Philosophy in the Early Italian Lyric

Akash Kumar

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2013
©2013
Akash Kumar
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT
Sì come dice lo Filosofo: Translating Philosophy in the Early Italian Lyric
Akash Kumar

This study pushes back to the origins of the Italian lyric tradition in order to
demonstrate that the impulse to distill the highest levels of intellectual culture into the
vernacular love lyric was present from the very inception of the poetic vernacular. I aim
to nuance our understanding of the divide between the early schools of poetry as
determined by Dante in his role as a literary historian by analyzing early experiments in
vulgarizing philosophy and science in the lyric production of Giacomo da Lentini, Guido
delle Colonne, Guittone d’Arezzo, and Guido Guinizzelli. By isolating both formal
elements of Scholastic argumentation and complex renderings of philosophical/scientific
ideas, I develop a broad understanding of the early vernacular poetic engagement with
Aristotelian philosophy that encompasses such areas as sensory perception,
meteorology, and ethics. I trace the progression of this engagement from its Sicilian
beginnings to the poetry of Guido Guinizzelli that is informed by the university culture of
Bologna and posit that this early lyric form of vernacular humanism has profound
implications for Dante’s poetic identity as well as the development of a vernacular
intellectual identity that feeds in to such developments as Humanism and the Scientific
Revolution.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Prime Mover:
Giacomo da Lentini and the Philosophy of Vernacular Innovation p. 1
1. A Culture of Translation: Logic and Nature in Madonna dir vo voglio p. 5
2. A “Scholastic” Exchange: The Tenzone between the Notaio and the Abate p. 33

Chapter 2 Laws of Attraction:
Translating Magnetism from Pier della Vigna to Guido Guinizzelli p. 51

Chapter 3 Not the First:
Guittone, Bonagiunta, and the Implications of Philosophy in Verse p. 95

Chapter 4 The Weather in Bologna:
Guido Guinizzelli and the Poetics of Natural Philosophy p. 145

Conclusion “In tai parole pone”: The Philosopher Translated p. 185

Works Cited p. 196

i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Columbia University and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for
the generous support that I have received over the past years of my graduate
education. Thanks in particular to the faculty and staff of the Institute of Comparative
Literature and Society and of the Department of Italian for never failing to provide me
with administrative support and an ever plenty convivial banquet of knowledge, of which
I can only hope a small part has made its way into the pages below.
I am immensely grateful to Professor Teodolinda Barolini, who has taught me what it is
to be a scholar. Your wisdom, grace, and intellectual zeal have been a source of
inspiration to me second only to the poetry of Dante.
Thank you to Professor Paolo Valesio, who continues to remind me that poetry is not
dead. And to Massi Chiamenti, who first taught me how to read medieval lyric and how
to live the poetry that we love.
I owe great thanks to Professor Christia Mercer, who has taught me to make important
philosophical distinctions and bring this work into a larger conversation.
I could not have reached this point without the friendship and support of my colleagues.
I cannot name you all, but know that your company has meant the world to me over
these past years. To the Italian cohort—Gian Maria, Valentina, Patrizio, and Davide—
thank you for indulging me in my efforts to draw closer to the culture that I so love, for
your gentle corrections of my faltering Italian, and for your warmth and generosity of
spirit (and your cooking!). To Lynn and Savannah, thank you for your laughter and
intellectual camaraderie. To Steve, for your unfailing enthusiasm and sense of
adventure.
To my father and sister, thank you for your love and your unwavering confidence. And
finally, to my dearest Jess, thank you for standing by my side and refusing to let go.

ii
For my mother
Tu prima m’inviasti / verso Parnaso a ber ne le sue grotte

iii
1
Chapter 1
Prime Mover: Giacomo da Lentini and the Philosophy of Vernacular Innovation
When Dante crafts an encounter between himself and the earlier Tuscan poet
Bonagiunta Orbicciani in Purgatorio 24, he creates a division between the older lyric
tradition and the sweet new style of poetry that is demonstrated by the citation of
Dante’s own canzone Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore. It is from Bonagiunta’s mouth
that the words emerge to codify both the new style that Dante exemplifies and the older
tradition that could not reach such a height: “O frate, issa vegg’io”, diss’elli, “il nodo/che
‘l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne/di qua dal dolce stil novo” [‘O brother, I finally see,’ he
said, ‘the obstacle/ that held the Notaro, Guittone, and me back/on this side of the sweet
new style’] (Purgatorio 24.55-57).1 One way that this poetic divide has been viewed is
through the lens of Bonagiunta’s sonnet Voi c’avete mutata la mainera, which criticized
Guido Guinizzelli for changing the nature of the vernacular love lyric by importing into it
the philosophical wisdom of Bologna.2 The resulting binary, especially in the way that
Dante exploits it, would seem to imply that the lyric before Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, and
Dante was bereft of philosophical content and intellectual pedigree.

1 Here and throughout, I use the Mandelbaum translation of the Commedia. See Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy, Allen Mandelbaum, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980-
1982).
2 As Chiavacci Leonardi puts it in her commentary to the canto, it was probably because of this
sonnet that Dante chose Bonagiunta to speak these words: “Probabilmente proprio a questo
sonetto si deve la scelta fatta da Dante di introdurre il notaio lucchese come suo antagonista in
questa scena” (792). For a full rendering of the intertextual complexities that are inherent in
Dante’s treatment of other poets and of his own lyric poetry in the Commedia, see Teodolinda
Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1984). I will fully treat the tenzone between Bonagiunta and Guinizzelli in Chapter 3 in a
way that problematizes the “senno…da Bologna,” as it relates to the poetry of both Bonagiunta
himself and his predecessors.
2
I will show through each of the poets that Dante mentions—Giacomo da Lentini,
Guittone d’Arezzo, and Bonagiunta Orbicciani—that this storied reception of the early
lyric tradition ignores an impulse found in the very first moments of Italian vernacular
poetry to raise the pedigree of the love lyric through the importing of philosophical form
and content. Through this newly formed perspective on the earlier lyric tradition, we can
also change our approach to Dante’s own lyric poetry included in his incomplete
philosophical treatise Convivio and call attention to the vital links between Dante and his
poetic predecessors that go beyond his own determination of the trajectory of Italian
literary history. We thus embark upon a systematic reinterpretation of the inception of
Italian poetry and the development of the poetic vernacular into the language that Dante
will eventually use to write the Commedia.
I subscribe fully to Gianfranco Folena’s reformulation of the birth of the
vernacular poetic tradition, but I do not agree with his characterization of it. Folena
argues against the overly romantic notion of a first poet creating a new literary tradition
out of nothing. Instead, he looks at translation and interpretation as being at the very
heart of the moment of new vernacular creation. Thus, he argues that the correct
formula is not In principio fuit poeta (“In the beginning was the poet”), but rather In
principio fuit interpres (“In the beginning was the interpreter”). Folena calls this
reformulation a dose of humble reality (“l’umile realtà”)3, but I will show how the acts of
translation and interpretation in the early Italian lyric—specifically with regard to
engagement with the philosophical tradition—were radical acts of vernacular creation.
In this, I enlarge the idea of translation to include not just the technical process of

3 See Folena, Volgarizzare e tradurre (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), p. 3. Folena focuses on the act and
rhetoric of translation as a fundamental aspect of the beginnings of the Italian literary tradition.
3
translating from one language to another but also the importing of philosophical form
and content. It is this more global sense of translatio, the carrying across of material
over boundaries of language and cultural space, that I wish to emphasize about the
beginnings of the lyric tradition in the court of Frederick II.
Alison Cornish, in writing of the movement of “volgarizzamento” in the time of
Dante, argues that the model of translatio imperii et studii makes every author a sort of
translator.4 Moreover, there is a particular link between philosophy and translation that
Walter Benjamin teases out in his essay “The Task of the Translator.” Benjamin speaks
of the language of truth as the object of the philosopher’s search and characterizes
translation as a process of distillation that focuses that language: “And this very
language [the language of truth], whose divination and description is the only perfection
a philosopher can hope for, is concealed in concentrated fashion in translations.” 5
Benjamin’s link between translation and philosophy is all the more suggestive in the
context of the historical moment of the inception of the Italian lyric, when philosophical
and scientific texts were being made newly available to the Latin West through the
translation of Arabic versions and commentaries.
The court culture of Frederick II is itself marked by moments of translation. In
some ways continuing where the polyglot Norman court left off, Frederick fostered an
intellectual culture that attracted such translators as Michael Scot and Jacob Anatoli
(men whose translation work at the Federician court included Aristotle’s De animalibus

4 Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3. Cornish
5 See Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, Harry Zohn,
trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 77.
4
and Ptolemy’s Almagest respectively). David Abulafia, while arguing against the
overblown portrait of Frederick’s court as a pinnacle of cultural and scientific activity,
nonetheless concedes: “At the very highest rung of the intellectual ladder there were
scholars of all three religions who were willing to confront together problems they
shared, in science or even religion, such as the proof of God’s existence or the eternity
of matter.” 6 It is in this refined air of intellectual engagement and translation that the
Scuola Siciliana begins its lyric creation, and it is precisely this culture of translation and
intellectual exchange that I wish to emphasize in my reading of two ‘prime moments’ in
the poetic oeuvre of Giacomo da Lentini.7
Giacomo da Lentini has been widely acknowledged as the “caposcuola,” the
founder and innovator of the Scuola Siciliana.8 Giacomo’s status as first poet seems to
be confirmed both by the level of his lyric production and by the extent to which his work
is relied on by others. Moreover, it is Giacomo who appears first in the two sections of
the Vaticano Latino 3793, the programmatic compilation of early Italian lyric poetry.
This manuscript, assembled a mere generation after the inception of the Italian lyric and
dated to the late 13th-early 14th century, is set apart from other collections of the early

6 See Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp.
256-257 and more generally the chapter entitled “Culture at Court,” (pp. 251-289). Abulafia is
careful to avoid the more fantastic and laudatory language of Charles Haskins or German
historians in characterizing the intellectual activity in Frederick’s court and characterizes it as
dependent on the Castilian court. He is also highly critical of the lyric production of the Scuola
Siciliana, calling it unoriginal and not intended to begin a vernacular tradition. This is no
surprise, since his focus is entirely on Frederick and it serves his purposes to make the poets of
the court relevant only in the context of entertaining the emperor.
7 For an overview on intellectual engagement on a number of fronts, see Federico II e le nuove
culture: Atti del XXXI Convegno storico internazionale (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto
Medioevo, 1995). See also Intellectual Life at the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, William
Tronzo, ed. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994).
8 See, for example, Roberto Antonelli, “Giacomo da Lentini e l’invenzione della lirica italiana,”
Critica del testo 12.1 (2009), pp. 1-24.