To 700 Years of Dante

translated by Peter Thompson

This essay, here slightly abridged, was first delivered as a lecture at the University of Thessaloniki on 12 May 1966.

To recall Mistral, who in the nineteenth century doggedly continued the pre-Dantean Provençal tradition on his own, I am no more than a 'humble pupil of Homer' ('umble escoulan dou grand Oumèro').

Two things deterred me from approaching Dante earlier than 'half way along the road we have to go' (A, I, 1).* The first was that I never had the good fortune to live for long in Italy, nor had I learnt Italian. The second was that I was irritated by certain echoes of Dante in areas with which I was more familiar. I had not yet sufficient experience to know that a pupil, however devoted, can be something disastrously different from his teacher.

So through my own foolishness I was deprived for many years of the knowledge of a great poetry, which is for the contemporary Latin world what the poetry of Homer is for us. I confess this with sorrow, for since first acquaintance I have never taken leave of Dante. It was in the summer of 1935 in Pelion, I remember, that I found my teacher, a master of his craft. I always had this need of an apprenticeship, as one might call it. I was always gladdened when on my dark path someone else would turn up, with authority and ...