Un Benigni da Nobel

The Conferment of the Degree of Doctor of Literature (Honoris Causa) on Maestro Roberto Benigni was held at the Church of the University, Valletta on 22nd April, 2008.

Oration by Dr Gloria Lauri-Lucente:
Click here for English version
Click here for Italian version

Robert Hollander testing Roberto Benigni about La Divina Commedia.

Si è inginocchiato davanti al Presidente della Repubblica di Malta, Eddie Fenech Adami, e lo ha anche abbracciato chiedendogli ripetutamente di aiutarlo e di farlo cavaliere di Malta, e questo riferendosi al risultato delle elezioni politiche in Italia. È l’exploit di Roberto Benigni a La Valletta a Malta dove ha ricevuto la laurea honoris causa in letteratura dalla Facoltà di Lettere dell’Università di Malta.
Questo uno dei momenti più suggestivi della serata nella chiesa dei Gesuiti, tra le più antiche di La Valletta, e alla presenza delle più alte cariche istituzionali maltesi e di tutto il corpo accademico nelle loro pittoresche toghe delle università di mezzo mondo. Poi il premio Oscar ha tenuto una vera «lectio» e la recitazione di due brevi canzoni nella Chiesa barocca avvolta da un velo di silenzio assoluto.
Emozionatissimo e in perfetto «maltese», Benigni ha ringraziato poi ogni «angolo dell’arcipelago per il conferimento di questa prima laurea maltese».
Gloria Lauri-Lucente, vice decano della Facoltà di Lettere ha pronunciato durante la cerimonia la laudatio nella quale, tra gli elogi alla carriera di Benigni, ha ricordato anche le parole del professor Robert Hollander, esperto in letteratura dantesca, che così ha commentato le letture del regista-attore: «Ha tenuto delle lezioni sul poeta davanti a quasi un milione di persone solo in questi ultimi due anni. Sta ricostruendo un pubblico per questo grande poema, finora troppo dimenticato, anche se oggi è tanto rilevante quanto lo era più di settecento anni fa».

Effettuata la cerimonia di conferimento della laurea, Benigni ha pronunciato la sua «lectio doctoralis». In serata, infine, ha inaugurato una mostra di 100 illustrazioni a colori che accompagnano una nuova traduzione in inglese della Divina Commedia di Hollander e sua moglie Jean. Le stampe sono di Monika Beisner che ha lavorato a questo progetto per sette anni nella sua residenza di Gozo, l’isola di Calypso. «È una delle poche occasioni in cui vengono illustrati i tre canti- ha detto la Beisner- perchè di solito ci si ferma all’Inferno». 
Benigni ha concluso ieri sera la sua visita a Malta con una serata dantesca che si è tenuta sempre all’università, e che ha visto la recita di alcuni brani della Divina Commedia preceduta da una discussione sul Sommo Poeta tra l’attore e il professor Hollander.

11/04/2008 - Dalla raccolta dei dati di vendita della prima settimana di aprile emerge che Tutto Dante di Roberto Benigni – Volume 1 è primo assoluto nelle librerie italiane nel settore audiovisivo ed ai primi posti nelle classifiche generali di vendita fra tutte le unità video.
L’opera teatrale supera nelle vendite i film di prima visione confermando che il nostro paese premia una proposta culturale e riconosce a Roberto Benigni di avere realizzato e divulgato un’opera molto attesa.
La prossima settimana, martedì 15 aprile, uscirà il secondo volume ed entro il 10 di giugno saranno messi in commercio tutti i cofanetti onde consentire a tutti di collezionare l’opera completa.

*”La lingua italiana è in grande espansione nelle scuole americane. Le pubblicazioni dell’Inferno e del Purgatorio si vanno moltiplicando negli Stati Uniti, grazie alle stupende traduzioni come quella del mio amico Robert Hollander, il massimo esperto dantesco in America” (Roberto Benigni, Chicago, 2003)

Here are some interesting extracts from the article by Nicholas Desai published on The Dartmouth Review on July 16, 2007. Robert Hollander speaks about Dante and his great appreciation of Roberto Benigni’s readings.

[...] Robert Hollander has taught his course on the Comedy here at Dartmouth before in 1979 and 1982, though he is on the faculty of Princeton, from which he graduated in 1955. A well-recognized Dantist for decades, he has written scholarly articles and books, but only this year will his greatest contribution to the field be completed: a collaboration with his wife, the poet Jean Hollander, on a translation and detailed, line-by-line commentary on the poem. Unlike other scholars and poets who have written their translations in blank verse or the terza rima used by Dante himself, the Hollanders have chosen the less constricting form of free verse; their lines appear side-by-side with the original Italian. The rich notes following each canto deliver both necessary background to the events of the Comedy as well as a clearly stated explication de texte.
[...] In his estimation, The Divine Comedy is the world’s greatest poem. “It’s beautifully structured, it’s got complex thought, and it has a vision of God for the climax—I mean, you want more? Tell me where I can go buy it.”
[...] If he meets people in a café or on a train, and they ask him what he, an American, is doing in Italy, his response often astounds them, for why would an American study Dante? “Almost all of the ordinary Italians—businessmen, working people—say, ‘I hated Dante in school!’ ‘That’s because you weren’t taught right,’ I respond. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, for instance, you were taught that Virgil represented “reason,” right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, that’s totally incorrect.’ And they go bonkers—becoming either angry or interested.”
It is perhaps because of Hollander’s belief that the poem belongs to the people that he speaks with such admiration of Roberto Benigni, the Italian director and actor. Known to Americans mostly for his film Life is Beautiful, the man has lately embarked on a quest to bring Dante to people “who have banished him from their lives,” as Hollander puts it. Though he admits he and the director are “about as different as two people can be,” the professor feels that they are the same in at least two respects: their lack of interest in playing to received opinion and their passion for Dante. During a meeting, Hollander told Benigni that if he offered him a chair in Dante studies at a university, the man would drop show business and become a full-time scholar. “He laughed, he didn’t say anything—but I still think that’s right.”
On Christmas 2002, Italian state radio/TV decided, against their better judgment, to give Benigni an hour and a half for Dante recitation—by memory, of course. Hollander recalls that about thirteen or fourteen million people tuned in—an immense percentage of the Italian population. In Hollander’s estimation, Benigni recites Dante as well as it can be done. He doesn’t overdramatize: “He just lets the poem work on you; he releases the poem into the air.” Benigni continues to recite around Italy, appearing recently for two nights (there were traffic jams) at the Arena di Verona, an immense Roman amphitheater which Hollander suspects is the model for the stadium in paradise. Hollander once snuck into the Arena during a horse show, making believe he was involved in the show, and stood in the middle of the amphitheater floor and looked up, saying “My God! It’s Paradiso!”
[...] Throughout our conversation, Hollander returns most often not to arcane academic disputes but to the popular recitations of Benigni.
“So, here’s this actor reciting it to a studio audience, and the whole thing started out as typical Benigni. He was running around like a little boy–it’s one of his personae, the little boy-clown. He was dancing on the stage. And all of a sudden he starts talking about Dante, and it took about an hour and fifteen minutes to get to his recital, and that went for about seven minutes, beginning “Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio…” and going on for 145 lines of that canto; when he got to the end of it, there was this total silence and then no bravos. I don’t know about you, but anytime I hear “Bravo!” I sense fakery, either in the performance or in the audience or both—if you really get to people, they sit there stunned for a while. Total silence.
“Montaigne has a great line about moments of stirring virtue (he’s thinking of Cato, one of Dante’s heroes, too); these bring one to silent admiration and a sense of redirection, and he describes this moment as magnetized needles hanging in a chain. And that’s what happened that moment with Benigni. Everything stopped, and everything had meaning, and for one moment everything was understandable and beautiful, the way we wish it always were, and then this total, harnessed applause—no shouts—but serious applause.”

*See also…

• Readings of the final canto of “Paradiso” by Robert Hollander in English and Roberto Benigni in Italian.
• The Dartmouth Dante Project
• The Princeton Dante Project

Dante, THE DIVINE COMEDY.
Volume 1: Inferno. Volume 2: Purgatorio. Volume 3: Paradiso. Translated by Robert and Jean Hollander, Verona, Italy Edizioni Valdonega 2007, slipcase 700 pages.

The English version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, printed by Edizioni Valdonega.

“Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost”.

E’ arrivata sugli scaffali mondiali “The Divine Comedy”, l’ultima fatica degli studiosi Robert e Jean Hollander, con un contributo speciale di Roberto Benigni, che firma una “Lettera a Dante” nella prefazione. Gli autori della traduzione in lingua inglese della Commedia di Dante sono Robert Hollander (*) e Jean Hollander. Uniti nella vita e nella carriera letteraria, Robert e Jean hanno introdotto, tradotto e commentato ogni singola rima dantesca. Hollander ha raccontato che “Negli Stati Uniti ci sono persone che si incontrano tutte le domeniche per leggere ‘La Divina Commedia’. Purtroppo l’interesse è ancora circoscritto, ma Roberto Benigni sta facendo tanto per far conoscere il Sommo Poeta nel mondo”

For the edition printed in Verona at the beginning of the third millennium, Monika Beisner (**) lent her inspired hand; she is probably one of the first  women – if not the first – to illustrate Dante’s masterpiece, seven hundred years after it was first printed. A hundred colour plates, reproduced with great accuracy and fidelity to the colours, on velvety ivory-coloured paper (Gardapat 13 in the Klassica version of the Cartiere del Garda), help the reader to access and comprehend this poem, whose means of expression differ more and more from our day-to-day language – so much so that in the “strictly personal” preface, written in the form of a letter by the irrepressible actor and director Roberto Benigni, it is defined as “very difficult, mysterious, incomprehensible: I had to ask my illiterate grandparents to explain it to me before I could understand it.”
The English edition, which follows the Italian edition of two years ago, has been graced with a wonderful preface written by Roberto Benigni, which, as the saying goes, is worth the price of the ticket alone. Worried by inflation in Purgatory, which could damage him in the eyes of his muse, Benigni speaks directly to Dante in order to recognise his ownership of the rights to the work. Benigni is currently touring Italy with the work and has already performed Cantica V of the Inferno to over seven hundred thousand fans in the main city squares of Italy.
This is the strength of this timeless masterpiece: it excites the minds of artists like the Tuscan jester Benigni and it has generations of ordinary people stuck to their seats listening excitedly to its rhythms and rhymes. 

The English edition, translated by one of the greatest experts on Dante in the world – Robert Hollander, who worked hard alongside his wife Jean on the translation – will be distributed on the American market. In his humorous and ironic preface, Benigni said of the Hollanders’ version that it is “a masterpiece, so good that when I read it again in Italian, I though the Italian version was the translation!” What better endorsement?
Laid out using the Centaur font in the Stamperia Valdonega Group’s special VAL version, the English version has been printed in a limited edition of five hundred numbered copies in collaboration with Grafiche Siz, part of the same corporate group.

(*) Roberto Benigni and Prof. Robert Hollander, will be conducting a Serata Dantesca on April 23 at the University’s Sir Temi Zammit Hall in Malta.
During his visit Benigni will be conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by the University, on the initiative of the Faculty of Arts. On April 23 the evening will start with a discussion on Dante between Benigni and the eminent Dante scholar Robert Hollander, Professor of European Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the founding director of the Princeton Dante Project. Following the discussion, Benigni will give a much-anticipated recitation of one of his favourite “canti” from the Divina Commedia.

(**) While in Malta, Benigni will also be inaugurating an exhibition of illustrations of the Divina Commedia by the artist Monika Beisner at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Valletta. The illustrations form part of a translation into English of the Divina Commedia by Robert and Jean Hollander with a Preface by Roberto Benigni published by Edizioni Valdonega in 2007.