Dante and Polish Writers: From Romanticism to the Present

How did Polish writers, from Romanticism to the present, read Dante? How did they read him differently from writers from other nations and within changing times, worldviews, and poetics? In his contribution to this volume “The Dante of Stanisław Vincenz,” Lorenzo Constantino (of the Polish Institute in Rome) offers a succinct answer: “Polish Danteism is an element in Polish Italianism and Europeanism. Its paradigms emerged in the darkest periods of the nineteenth century, when it was linked to exile and historiosophic reflection. The twentieth century, with its new catastrophes, inherited this tradition, renewing the ‘ethical’ and ‘political’ principle of great poetry” (p. 107).Exile to unwelcoming foreign countries was a motivic constant of “encounters” (the term proposed by Andrea Ceccherelli in his “Inhuman, Transhuman, Posthuman: Introduction to Polish Danteism over the Centuries”) with world poetry's greatest expatriate. In “Dante and Mickiewicz: The Story of a Common Journey,” Tomasz Jędrzejewski (University of Warsaw) notes that for Adam Mickiewicz it was his empathy with the Inferno's condemned, which he conveys in both the Vilnius-Kaunas and Dresden Dziady Forefathers’ eve, 1823, 1832 and later in Księgi narodu i pielgrzymstwa polskiego The books of the Polish people and of the Polish pilgrimage, 1832. A good example is his rendition of the Ugolino episode from Canto 33, where empathy with the victim of Archbishop Ruggiero reflects Mickiewicz's own struggles with the Church of Rome. Another aspect of Mickiewicz's attraction to Inferno could be linked with his interest (i.e., in Ballady i romanse, 1822) in the horrific and uncanny: its “thriller” quality, as Clive James called it in the introduction to his 2016 translation of Inferno.Juliusz Słowacki, a critic, like Mickiewicz, of the Vatican's attitude toward Poland, parodied Inferno in his picaresque Poema Piasta Dantyszka herbu Leliwa (1839)—the subject of Krystyna Jaworska's (University of Turin) “Słowacki's Poem of Piast Dantyszek, or the Macabre Despair of Father-land.” As her title suggests she draws attention to the Poem's mockery of exalted nationalist visions of Poland's history, but also (allusive of Ugolino devouring his children) of its traditional view of the sanctity of parenthood. Further in her essay Jaworska, who calls Słowacki “the most intertextual and the most European of Polish Romantic poets” (p. 25), points to the rich axiological variety in his further engagements with Dante, most notable in his late “mystical” period, in Genesis z ducha Genesis from the Spirit, 1844 and Król Duch The Spirit King, 1844–1849.Other Polish Romantic and post-Romantic Polish writers would encounter Dante with veneration for his poetic genius fused with a quest for spiritual guidance in their own journeys through individual and collective hells. In “Reason and Will: Dante and Krasiński, a Comparison,” Marina Ciccarini (Tor Vegata University of Rome) quotes the conservative and devotedly religious Zygmunt Krasiński from his poem “Przedświt” Daybreak, 1843: “Like Dante—I passed through hell in my life” (p. 45). If his hell was engendered by chronic depression, he prophetically envisioned its terrors in his dramatic masterpiece Nieboska komedia Undivine comedy, 1835 as resulting from sociopolitical revolution. For Cyprian Kamil Norwid, whose life, unlike Krasiński's, was burdened by relentless poverty in Poland and in exile, hell and purgatory materialized in a Prussian prison, where he recorded his numinous encounters with Dante. This is the subject of Francesco Cabras (Pedagogical University of Kraków) in “Dante in Norwid's Prayer Book”—the self-made book in which along with several Psalms of David he inserted a long fragment of Canto VIII of Purgatorio. The author emphasizes Norwid's masterful application of Dante's device of lacunae and omissions, which were also characteristic of his own poetics.With the later part of the nineteenth century's turn to rationalism fewer Polish writers sought inspiration in Dante's medieval eschatology while others would see contingency between the fiercely realistic imagery of Inferno and their lived experience. Two examples are recalled here: one by Andrea F. De Carlo (University of Naples) in his “Echoes of Inferno V in Kraszewski's Narrative and Lyrical Work,” the other by Luca Bernardini (University of Milan) in “‘Better to Fall with Alighieri Than to Triumph with Nogaret,’” an article about Julian Klaczko. Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, best known to generations of Polish readers as the prolific author of historical novels, not only worked on translating La Divina Commedia but wrote two novels inspired by its episodes: Paolo. Powieść wenecka Paolo. A Venetian novel, 1843, and Pod włoskim niebem. Fantazya Under the Italian sky, 1872. Klaczko, the pen name of Yehuda Lejb, was a multilingual literary scholar, whose languages included Hebrew, and an ardent Polish nationalist who participated in the Poznań uprising of 1848 and emigrated to France after its defeat.Moving into the twentieth century, the symbolic value of the stratified Dantean hell (piekło dantejskie) with its individualized sinners would be diminished by the real-life genocidal hell. Writers like Stanisław Vincenz and Teodor Parnicki—the subject of Marcin Wyrembelski's (University of Florence) “Teodor Parnicki Encounters Dante: Only Beatrice and Not Only”—endured journeys from which, as protagonists of Parnicki's novels repeat, it is difficult to return. Like Mickiewicz and Słowacki, Parnicki wrestled with Dante's vision of salvation. And like those Romantic poets, like Kraszewski and Klaczko, Vincenz and Witold Gombrowicz, he did not return to Poland. Gombrowicz, ever averse to piety and authority, stands out as an unambiguous detractor of Dante. In his “From Parody to Polemical Pamphlet: Gombrowiczian Deformations of Dante,” Andrea Ceccherelli quotes some of Gombrowicz's disparagements of the Divine Comedy in his Dziennik Diary, 2012: “Crude, mean, boring, and inferior” (p. 125, and in a brochure Sur Dante (Editions de L'Herne, 1968). Ceccherelli concludes: “Gombrowicz the atheist, after asserting his own stylistic and moral superiority, is unable to formulate a final judgement on the greatest Christian poet of all time (p. 135). A friend and admirer of Vincenz, and Gombrowicz's competitor in international fame, Czesław Miłosz receives a thorough examination of his engagements with Dante in Luigi Martinelli's (University of Rome) “On Czesław Miłosz's Debt to Dante.” These engagements, Martinelli asserts, “explicit, invisible and subconscious” (p. 139), permeate Miłosz's entire oeuvre: explicit in several poems, essays, and letters, and above all in Ziemia Ulro The land of Ulro, 1977.The final two articles discuss recent translators of La Divina Commedia into Polish. In “What Dante Owes to Stanisław Barańczak,” Marcello Piacentini (University of Padua) considers Barańczak's translation of four Cantos of the Inferno as failed, but credits Barańczak with employing paraphrases from other poets in his translations. Closing the volume with “Dante in Twenty-First Century Poland: The Case of Jarosław Mikołajewski,” Leonardo Masi (Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw) provides an in-depth comparison of Agnieszka Kuciak's and Jarosław Mikołajewski's praiseworthy renditions of La Divina Commedia, while underlining Mikołajewski's multifaceted engagement with Dante, as an Italianist, a poet, and a reporter on disasters, notably the 2016 earthquake in Central Italy.Attractively produced, as to be expected from Routledge, Dante and Polish Writers is to be appreciated by scholars for the impeccable methodology and rich biographical material. Lay readers interested in Polish literature, Dante Alighieri, and his afterlife in disparate cultural contexts will be rewarded by this encounter.