The term has just begun and, after a term on medical leave, the return to work is both enriching and exhausting. Further, my daughter has surprised me with a side trip from her studies in Cuernavaca, Mexico to El Salvador, where Anti-Americanism is admittedly low, but violent street crime is “critical” (in the official language of the US State Department) and this has distracted me for a few days. And so I am already behind in responding to seven serious comments.
I do not wish to ask my readers to endure a disjointed response to them all at once, nor do I dare try to weave them together into one unified reply. I have neither the talent nor the energy to pull that off. So I will jot off a few short postings, dealing with them individually and in natural bundles.
In response to my last posting (The Problem is Unilateralism, not Ideology), Annie Rhodes, an MIT-trained biologist who has lived and studied in Italy, noted that a literal translation of Dante would be “In the middle of the journey of our life…” I had translated the line more cautiously as “In the middle of the journey of life.” I am quite pleased that this point has been noted. As my wife, Carol, can testify, I agonized over this very word in the draft of my post. While it is clear that “nostra vita” should be transliterated as “our life” – and therefore gives even more weight to Dante’s prescience (or at least relevance here as Annie points out) – I failed to note this in my original posting, and I owe you my reasoning now.
Dante was literally inventing the Italian language in the La Divina Commedia. In fact, it may be safe to say that this is the very first sentence ever written in Italian; at least we know it is the first written sentence preserved until today. Therefore, as the true meaning was seven centuries removed, I could not decide if “our” life was standing in for “life” generally, for Dante’s life (as it seems in the Canto), or for the lives of all of us when he hit the middle of our journeys (or even our collective journey – here, the journey of H. sapiens on planet Earth). So I took to the web, checking on multiple translations, and to my dismay, most of the standard translators chose to pass over “nostra” and use the first meaning, instead. I fell in line, disappointed, and changed it from the clearly trans-literal “our life” to the weaker usage, “life.” My father always said the scholar of highest integrity presents the weakest, not the strongest, version of the evidence that clearly support’s one’s position. To this day I try to convey to my best students that if one’s case can be advanced with the sparest, least controvertible form of the argument, it is made most convincingly, even if less flamboyantly. And I have had the lifetime habit of discounting researchers whose literature review bypasses the strongest criticisms of their positions.
But there is nothing whatsoever wrong if a careful and astute reader notes that you have left out something that seems to advance the case on some important level. So I am thrilled that Annie, whose Italian is far better than mine, has given me a chance to raise the point more strongly: perhaps Dante was telling us that in the middle of our collective life we come upon a dark wood (a deeply obfuscated decision) and must make our way – with significant consequences if we get it wrong. Shall we choose the wrong path and enter El Infierno?
For untrained readers (as am I), Dante appears deeply sympathetic to the sufferings of many of those he encountered in the Inferno. Modern critics have a long tradition, however, of criticizing naïve (soft-hearted) readings such as my own, arguing that Dante presented the cases of the condemned impartially and generously not to evoke sympathy from us, but to invoke a greater conviction among us that the sins were real and the punishment correct.
Which brings to mind two things. One, my father apparently learned something important from Dante, as the less inflammatory path was thought to be the more compelling. And two, according to whose diety shall we expect sympathy for ourselves if we condemn future generations to a severely damaged environment?
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