Robert Hollander speaks about Dante and Roberto Benigni

*”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

Filed Under: Dante, Divina Commedia • Roberto Benigni

Tags: English