Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture by Barolini Teodolinda;

Author:Barolini, Teodolinda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2006-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Editing Dante’s Rime and Italian Cultural

History: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca . . . Barbi,

Contini, Foster-Boyde, De Robertis

In this essay I will consider the great editions and commentaries of Dante’s rime that have been produced in the last century: the editions with commentary of Michele Barbi and Gianfranco Contini, the commentary of Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, and the edition of Domenico De Robertis. The result of my undertaking a commentary of the rime for the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli,1 this paper tracks an experience that has opened up intellectual and cultural vistas that extend far beyond the philological domain to which it might have seemed limited. As I immersed myself in the editorial history of the rime, I found myself (as someone who claims no expertise as a philologist or an editor) fascinated by the cultural history embedded in the editorial history. This metacritical meditation has therefore a double focus. I analyze the contribution of each of these editions and commentaries in the complicated history of our reception of Dante’s rime. I also suggest that a discourse has built up around the enterprise of editing the rime—signaled by terms like raccogliere, organico, frammento, estravaganti2—that has become freighted with the emotional value that the binary raccogliere versus frammento has assumed over centuries within the Italian imaginary. An enterprise that might seem like a sluggish philological backwater is quickened and made treacherous by the mighty current of Italian identity-formation and cultural history.

Its literary giants peculiarly mark Italian identity—and each of the tre corone plays a part in this story. Indeed, the significance of this particular editorial history is highlighted by the way it implicates right from the start, as we shall see, not only Dante but also Boccaccio and Petrarch. The role of literary culture in overall Italian culture has traditionally been a powerful one: the great cultural debate that resulted in the choice of Tuscan as the national language was a literary debate; by the same token, Italian nationalism was in part constructed on the shoulders of Dante and other literary icons, as all the statues and street-names attest. The ideological and cultural pressures that beset any philological enterprise, given the connection to canonformation, are supremely present in filologia dantesca, because of the enormous cultural investment in Dante’s status as a national icon. The Dante monuments whose cultural significance I seek to interpret here are not the monuments in stone, but rather the great editions of the rime that were produced along the arc of the twentieth century in an editorial enterprise that recently both culminated and concluded with the publication of Domenico De Robertis’s five-volume—truly monumental—undertaking.3

Each of these great editions and/or commentaries of Dante’s lyrics is magisterial in its own way. Michele Barbi’s 1921 edition for the Società Dantesca Italiana forms the textual nucleus of the posthumous edition with commentary published by the two disciples he chose to complete his work, Francesco Maggini and Vincenzo Pernicone.4 Working with Barbi’s notes and integrating his material, both published and unpublished, with their own,

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