The Sophomore Jinx
fiction by Drew Zimmerman*

Illustration by Drew Zimmerman: "The Seating Chart of the Afterlife (after Dante)," paper, newsprint, insulation board, 66 X 44" (2025).

Leonardo Bruni (1377-1444) of Florence is called the first modern historian. We don’t know which commentator on his body of work coined the troublesome phrase, but by imagining history has a starting point, an anonymous scholar fixed the precise date when European man turned on his recording devices in the vain hope that someone in the future would peruse the print footage and figure out when humanity goes astray.

Bruni’s The Life of Dante (1436) presents the subject’s edifying devotion to truth and art while crucially separating the facts of the poet’s exile from the myths in circulation across Europe a century after his death. As it turns out, the first modern history of the origin of European humanism has many inconsistencies and fanciful reconstructions based on unsubstantiated gossip. Bruni does his best to deliver an account of Dante’s exile and the writing of the Comedia in a flatly objective voice, but his scholarship is less stringent than ideal, which is understandable since he was the first writer who ever attempted to compose all the pinpoints and footprints of a life into narrative form or assembled the perspectives of the people around him as being consistent with a man’s true nature.

The Life of Dante consciously avoids the more literary perspective of Dante’s follower Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), author of the Decameron (1352). Boccaccio was the first influential compiler and editor of Italian vernacular poetry and essentially created his own legacy by establishing himself in relationship to Dante. Significantly, he gathered together all the far-flung manuscript copies of Dante’s poems and determined which versions best represented the poet’s intentions. While the documentary tone of Bruni’s history substantiates Dante’s physical self, Boccaccio validates Dante’s place and his own in inventing forms of Italian literature that will be imitated across the continent for the next two centuries.

Despite his intention to be accurate, Bruni recorded many dates and mile markers in his account of Dante’s post-Florence exile that scholars have since exposed as spurious. The truth is multiple possibilities exist for Dante’s whereabouts at any given time during the last fifteen years of his life, up until his death almost certainly in September, 1321, in Ravenna.

Bruni had heard a description of but never actually seen a jawdropping document that indicates Dante may have been in either Avignon or Milan in 1320. By Bruni’s day, the actual papers were dust, but at one time, Boccaccio was said to have possessed part of an ongoing correspondence between several of Dante’s contemporaries that describes the dynamic poet’s complicity in a fantasic plot to kill Pope John XXII with the black arts and destroy once and for all the blasphemous Avignon papacy!


March, 1320

Dear Friends:

Affixing the date above reminds me it has been a full twenty years since I joined this correspondence, and I am certain as I am of my birthright that the custom of exchanging poetic verse between gentlemen who live in any one of the lands where people say si to mean yes elevates our times. Differences in politics and the historical animosity of clans are subsumed in the shared joy of manipulating the words and sounds of a common language. By writing our thoughts in the vernacular, we spread noble ideas to every citizen. Squeezing the sentiments of our expansive hearts into the tiny jeweled boxes of hendecasyllabic terza rime cultivates keenness of reason and a loftiness of expression that I am assured honors the Creator.

The date also recalls a nobleman by his own eloquence not birth, the founder of our epistolary enterprise, Dante Alighieri, who was recruited by the White Guelphs to urge a reasonable peace before the Council of a Hundred, an appeal to the Higher Powers of Man that was rebuked by the mob, who chose instead the protection of tyrants and their military might. Alighieri’s reward for expressing the virtues of Temperance and Justice to the uneducated rabble was to be marked as an enemy when the Black Guelphs organized a coup and exiled or murdered the elected priors of the short-lived Republic of Florence—including our brother in letters. Alighieri’s commitment to truth made him the natural enemy of the greedy and vengeful families who rule his city today, the brutish sort who exaggerate the fears of others and offer protection in return for utter submission.

In July, it will be sixteen years since Alighieri was once more selected to turn the mob by his eloquence, and again was destroyed for it. When the combined forces of the White Guelphs and Ghebelines made ready to retake Florence at Lastra, the man whose unparalleled oratorical prowess was evident to all was sent to rouse the surrounding villagers to bring their pikes and stones in support of the calvary when it breached the city walls. Perhaps Alighieri had a sinful excess of pride in his Orphic skills; in any case, when he spoke at the fairgrounds, his audience pelted him with vegetables and clods of dirt. Blood relations with the Donati clan who were aligned with the Black Guelphs spread word that the speaker was part of a Ghebeline alliance, and stirred up hatred against the Empire, so Alighieri was driven off. Without mob reinforcement, the attack on Florence was beaten back, and Alighieri took a portion of the blame, although plainly he was set up to fall by those whose treasure comes from exploitation of the worst impulses of the mob.

Declaring himself rid of all the desperate and compromising allegiances of men, Alighieri became ‘a party of one,’ affiliated with no political group but devoted to Truth. Beginning the pilgrim’s epic soon after the last hope of his return to Florence was dashed, Alighieri’s genius divined the architecture of the cosmos, faithful to the Golden Chain that links all of creation from the lowliest creeping thing, through every refinement of flawed substance by chastisement and reward, on up to the angels and the very pinnacle of God’s glory! He planned the nine crypts of sin beneath the seven terraces of Purgatory that lead to the nine celestial spheres, a cathedral of essential reason to stand eternally against the accidents of history.

The order of the cosmos imagined thus, Alighieri shared his vision with us, and we exchanged verses on it as we had done with love sonnets, making his overall structure and poetic form our starting point. And when our leader disappeared somewhere in the Apennines under circumstances as yet unresolved, we continued as this correspondence always has, marveling at the first canticle of the project Alighieri himself wrote out, and extending his work by inventing terza rime 11 syllables at a time and choosing the best contributions from rival poets in the same manner the Republic of Florence elected the greatest soul among them to be its last prior—by virtue of common consent.

Having reminded my readers of the sacred foundation of the project, I am writing of a development in the Paradiso that could create repercussions in our own, physical world and compromise the virtuous objectivity of the pilgrim’s tale. Milan has submitted a canticle representing the Moon and those whose work in God’s name is corrupted by personal ambition; thus, they are inconstant as the phases of the lesser sphere. Our character Dante attributes to Pope John XXII this sin after hearing an angel in Beatrice’s entourage prophesize his banishment in Heaven.

As we know, the Visconti’s of Milan are sworn enemies of the Avignon papacy, and thanks to the brilliant reputation across all of the northern peninsula of our Inferno and Purgatorio in Dante’s name, calling out an Avignon usurper of Rome’s right to the throne of St. Peter will lay a powerful curse upon his reign. Milan calls his contribution to the whole as the “sophomore jinx,” after Pope John following Clement V as the first Avignon pope and the reference to the moon as the second sphere of Paradise.

I thought Milan’s extension of the metaphor was well reasoned. One generation justifies its actions with elaborate ideologies and vain rationales; disastrously, its heirs don't bother to learn the arguments and protocols that brought them to power. They will learn, if not on Earth, then at the Last Judgement: great deeds aren’t accomplished by leaping to the effects without tending to the labors that created them. This is why when the spiritually lost pilgrim Dante submits to the unerring path of salvation, Virgil leads him from the chaotic to the orderly without skipping a lesson. We could say the Sophomore Jinx killed the Florentine Republic: the merchants and commoners who battled valiantly at Campaldino—remember Alighieri himself was on the front line!—died for the principle of government by the many. The next generation forgot doctrines that were so second nature to their fathers, they never bothered to teach them, and their sons gladly submitted to the same despots and monarchs their fathers abhorred as if the resolve upon which the Republic stood was a fog that disappeared.

Once Milan’s addition to our expression of the vast Human Comedy has circulated and generated a response in our group, we can adopt or reject the material. Your qualified critical opinions will inform my own. I realize each day what a blessing it is to have the means to express my internal life in my native language, and how much greater is my fortune to have others whose whetstones I can hone my reason against.

In memory of Dante Alighieri,

Ravenna


May, 1320

Fellow Scholars:

I read Ravenna’s missive with interest, not only because the linguistic project we have uncoiled for the last twenty years could see completion this year or next, but also for the courtesy of our friend’s speech. That a nobleman expresses himself nobly is too obvious to mention, except I want to bring into our correspondence the memory of Guido Calavanti, whom Alighieri called his first literary peer and who sharply chastised the prior of Florence when he spoke for the commoners in the final days of the Republic. “You used to maintain the language of poets—the language of the royal court—elevates us above the illiterate mob, and now you are the champion of their distemper, making sense of the cackle and squawk of the angry flock. I don’t know you any more!”

As it turned out, both men were burned out of their homes and all their properties confiscated by political rivals who easily led the mob to do their bidding by appealing to its baser qualities. We lost honorable, headstrong Cavalcanti when he succumbed to the bad air of an exile encampment near Arezzo.

Cavalacanti had said of Alighieri’s first distributed verse that it “intuited all the virtues,” which, although high praise, also referenced Alighieri’s relatively low position in the hierarchy of Florentine life. As Virgil leads the pilgrim from the creation’s lowest to highest, years of study and erudition earned Dante his status, not a title he was born to. Alternately, Calvalcanti behaved like a magnate with his whole heart, believing the economic status of his family and a name that could be traced to the 11th century entitled him by birth to ride through town in armor, heraldic banner flying, and attack his rivals in a bloodthirsty manner wherever he came upon them. Worst of all, he annoyed the neighbors. I recall researching in the library here the heraldic courtesies Cavalcanti’s family adhered to when they came to me 25 years ago to invent a backstory that traces their lineage to Fredirick the First.

Some of you exalt our purpose as an expression of man’s inherent nobility, which requires only the cultivation of God’s law to reach full bloom, yet we find education to be the primary requisite of the refined nature. If it should appear, in fact, that noble blood makes a virtuous character, that is only because nobles like their useless youth to get a university degree–and every other title or honor money can bestow–to paper over the fact that their sons are genuinely useless and the rest of the world sees it as plainly as their disappointed fathers. In my experience, the nobility some men are born with is the determination to understand exactly where they fit in with the culture of their times, and how their times fulfill the aspiration of the societies of antiquity. The path of the autodidact, searching for a truth of use to no one but himself, forms an understanding rarely sought: an ignoble nature passively receives accepted wisdom and can conceive of nothing not already in public circulation.

As a professor of heraldry and the Latin of St. Jerome, I declaim a rigorous classical education as the only means to nobility, beginning with the mandatory study of Cicero and Ovid; also, the works of Aristotle, Boethius, Lucretius, Zeno, and other natural philosophers; and above all the Holy Scriptures. Most important, Socrates demands of the scholar the relentless pursuit of truth and a personal questioning of all received knowledge to find it. Because the Socratic method requires him to essentially rediscover and reaffirm the nature of all things for himself, the student by his thorough examination of it makes his own Comedy worth living.

The seat of learning we have created in Romagna owns a worldwide reputation for offering the new mode in education, modelled on Aristotelian principles. My firm belief is that someday the word Bologna will be synonymous with probity. Just as the Vulgate Bible standardized classical Latin, fixing it in amber, immune to the connotations and popular allusions of everyday speech, the popularity of the Comedia is standardizing our transcription of the Tuscan dialect as the common written language of all the realms where si means yes! Princes and knights vie to demonstrate their wit by writing in it, having for the first time an alphabet suited to express ordinary desires and gratifications.

At what point does an individual’s immersion in a new manner of expression, an excitement shared and codified with peers, become a style, a mere affectation? For it is this developing trend I see in these latest verses attributed to the Dante character by our contributor in Milan. His gleeful condemnation of the second pope of Avignon, the section he calls “The Sophomore Jinx,” seems cursed by the same necromancy. It has Dante’s airs but not his art. We called our communal creation a comedy because it was the story of a man after all, but we gave it the grace of the epics of antiquity. Milan’s section doesn’t suggest the interplay of the divine in the comical wanderings of a raw orphan through a gallery of swindlers and degenerates. It insults a sworn enemy of the Visconti family to produce a stinging effect, a bloody nose, but conveys only personal indignation, not the poet’s long suffering in a dishonorable, treacherous world.

Nor does Milan’s canto reverberate with the liberating joy of seeing one’s internal life presented in writing for the first time and finding in those grammatical forms and rhyming structures an aspect of divinity entirely absent from our own flesh. As I say, it has Dante’s arrogance before man but not his humility before God.

By the way, the decree by John XXII that the beatific vision of the face of God promised by Jesus to the pure of heart in Matthew 5:8 does not come at the moment of death but only upon the Last Judgement seems motivated entirely by this Babylonian pope’s envy of the Dante project, which everyone knows will end with the poet’s personal, ineffable vision of God.

Bologna


August, 1320

Poets!

Corresponding with such esteemed men gives me an unalloyed feeling of satisfaction. I was born too late to remember the craze for exchanging love poems that swept through the fraternity of young, literate men in Alighieri’s Florence, who celebrated the modern pleasure of describing love in a language so alive as its subject and not that old, dead Latin, stiff as a marble statue. I am late to this lively exchange of verse and ideas; especially, I appreciate the occasional witty riposte that has the same purpose as the chestbeating of rival brutes. The sonnets of the tenzone by which one shows his elegance and sophistication as a challenge to his peers is the only safe place in Veneto where one may venture upon insult! Who can forget the one about Dante da Maiano and his reaction to the first love sonnet Alighieri submitted to other poets, and how he suggested the youth should go soak his testicles in cold water until he got over his passion?

That was a good one!

Didn’t Dante venture in one riposte that a man’s wife was out of sorts because his side of the bed was so often cold? And wasn’t the reply that Dante’s father was in an unconsecrated grave fit only for a Jewish usurer? Ouch. Hey, guys—No mothers!

So, I was in Bologna on a legal errand for the della Scalas of Verona, and I accidentally came upon the verse that takes a shot at the Avignon pope. Notaries in Bologna write out whole sonnets next to their seal at the bottom of documents because pulling a fashionable lyric out of the air and fixing it to parchment indicates the time of the transaction more vividly than any date. On the contract I had only just signed, I read a verse making the rounds, attributed to 'Dante, author of the Paradiso,' that describes John XXII as the “shriveled ball-sack** of a castrated papacy.”

I can’t remember the line verbatim, but it was magnificent! Anyway, what happened is I was telling my some courtiers with whom I dine about it, and a nobleman said he heard the same story, except Ballsack XXII was the satirical name of the Pope of Babylon whom the pilgrim Dante is told was turned away at the desk of St. Peter because his 'holiness' was a 'hollow' remnant of the Holy Church. Isn’t it remarkable how quickly these new suggestions for the epic enter into circulation? Among the crowd I run with, the number of times one’s poetry turns up on a ledger in Bologna is cause for much boasting, the numerical estimate of genius.

Growing up in Verona, everyone knows the parts of Comedia where Dante either defames or praises a member of the della Scala family or the despots of Romagna, creating discontinuity between separate incidents in the pilgrimage. Alberto della Scala had a paralytic illegitimate son whom he set up as the superior in a major monastery, and Dante makes a point of saying dick moves are proof of his ignobleness. Later, he extols the hospitality of Cangrande, a more recent head of the della Scalas, because he thinks he may soon need to appeal to him for temporary protection. Inconsistency should be expected, I suppose, in a work written on an ad hoc basis, which at the same time establishes ‘real time’ correspondences between the verses and the made-up poet’s made-up itinerary.

Such academic concerns mean little to those of us in the Veneto region who style ourselves troubadours. You can’t imagine how the character of the pilgrim Dante influences the dress and mannerisms of the young men here. They all want to be like Dante–who after all is the idea of Dante, not a real person. Dressing in the way he appears in artists’ conceptions, we style ourselves as romantic troubadours exiled among coarse drabs with deplorable taste in clothes and unfashionable home towns.

One of my friends hopes to become a man of the court like our mythic, wandering Florentine, earning his bread on the basis of jovial witticisms and speeches in the palaces of nobles. He’s a hit at small venues and parties, lots of laughs, hoping to get a break. He figures if you earn your bread by charming some old Duke until the routine gets tired and you have to move on, your last host was a crude bumpkin and the next one has a pedigree going all the way back to Frederick Barbarossa. When all one cares about is being up on the latest styles and inoffensive to present company, the creation of noble content is far less important than collecting the royalties.

The thing that gets me is that the epic Comedia is pretty much a standardized text up to the final dozen cantos or so, and a young writer like me doesn’t get much of a window to climb in through. Believe me, I know terza rime like I know my ABCs (or my ABA BCB CDCs, ha ha!). I have all these great ideas for keeping the story going after it ends. Not the essence of the concept, an individual man posting his own stars against the cosmos or whatever, but the continuing accidents of the plot.

For instance, what if, after reaching Paradise, Dante takes over from ancient Virgil, and now he has to guide a new-generation poet from Hell to Eternity. But get this: the new kid’s a real snotnose, a regular ankle-biter, but he proves he’s alright in the end. Think of the new cast of sinners and scaliwags they could encounter in the rings of the damned. You could even have crossovers with characters from the Arthurian Knights in those popular French romances. That’s why we started writing in the vernacular in the first place, right, because it’s popular. Plus, whose illuminated face is pulling the new kid forward? How about Beatrice’s younger sister, who has her own special powers and colored lights, and she’s HOT!

I have all kinds of ideas to keep this Dante story fresh forever. Dante loses his memory and has to retrace his steps backwards to the Lost Wood to recover it. Or–Dante Meets the Monster! They’ve had three years of famine in Tuscany; the people don’t want to think about heavy messages or figure out a complex new allegory. Give them something pre-sold and pre-loved. Come on, fellows! I like it, but all that humanitas and veritas gristle is way too pomp and heraldry for ordinary yeggs. Let’s have fun with it!

Thanks in advance for your consideration,

Verona


January, 1321

Gentlemen:

I feel strange continuing this correspondence after letting it lapse for so long, almost ten years. I knew Alighieri when he used his knowledge of classical rhetoric to move the people of Florence to make peace; I knew him when the people attacked, condemned, and exiled him for the same words. We were still well acquainted when he fashioned his resentment towards the squandered human lives who were his enemies into a vast floating cabinet existing parallel to our own world, where all the sins and virtues of man are indexed and each soul is filed away according to its nature for eternity. I knew him when he was proud of the numerical order of the cantos, the lines within each cantical, and the rhyme scheme of every line, because the epic reflected the mathematical and logical order of God’s cosmos and the poet’s striving to become a part of God’s perfect creation through his art.

When it looked like the military intervention of Henry VII to reclaim the whole peninsula for the Holy Roman Empire would permit White Guelphs and even the anti-Republican Ghebelines to return to Florence, Alighieri was one of the camp followers. Hoping for his return to property and family, the former prior of the Florentine Republic wrote a treatise on the benefit of kings and tyrants. And when Henry VII caught a cold and had to retire to his bed all the way back in Luxembourg, Dante disappeared into the mountains. Here we are, ten years afterwards, nearly finished writing by committee his epic of the poetical redemption of an individual man.

By the way, on the subject of completely reversing one’s dearest principles when changing circumstances dictate, I am well acquainted. During one of the periods since I was also an exile, when Florence needed more men to defend itself from other cities, my destroyers offered repatriation. The terms were paying a hefty fine and submitting to symbolic and ceremonial humiliation in a public place. Wandering from city to city, I had written some declarations and legal documents for one of the local princes, and he offered to pay my fine. Another noble of Florence whose politics made him my enemy but loved me as a brother in poetry, arranged for me to reenter my city with a completely new identity and the liberty to reconnect with old business interests.

As for the other condition, public humiliation, I no longer so much as lift my head to acknowledge symbolic behavior. The misery I have endured from others isn’t symbolic, no matter how they state its cause. I once thought mastery of words was the refinement of one’s being, but it is not: words are most prized as a magician's black cloth to hide a sleight of hand. Rather than evidence of the spiritual cultivation of the speaker, rhetorical skill is enviable because of its ability to justify corruption and lies. The deceiving power of words is such, I could defend my own torture with arguments as solid as the monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo, if there were a florin in it.

I understand today what I refused to accept in my youth: every citizen is emphatically not born with equal dignity and humanity; they are not self-evident qualities of every man. Because no abstraction by definition can be understood empirically, the meanings of truth, honor, and liberty must be learned. The Socratic model of education engages the mind with an argument substantially, requiring the student to reproduce with his own cognitive processes the reasons the race praises virtue or demands liberty over comfort. In completing his civic duty to know why his city is arranged as it is from foundation to spire, the scholar spreads his genuine learning with others, while the opinions of an untutored mind are empty platitudes like the nervous twitter of birds.

Of course, the benefit of discernment accrues only to the thinker. Because thoughts have no substance whatsoever, this is necessarily the case. I offer my opinion as an aside, since some people think copying the work or ideas of more accomplished writers somehow lets them off the hook for being unable to articulate their own viewpoints and desires or examine their emaciated lives. Do we not understand instinctively that an idiot lives a much more impoverished life than even an uneducated person of average intelligence? Doesn’t it follow that a literate individual is richer in his experience of life than some dolt who cannot understand the written ideas of others or intelligibly synthesize the abstract components of human discourse on his own—even to himself?

At my stage of life, well past its median, I do not wish to form in my head any thoughts about the lies, myths, and rumors the powerful use to manipulate the undiscriminating masses. I have too long suffered the futility of fueling old resentments and vowed not to list them, so let me come to the business of my writing, since I do not intend to add any more verses to the Comedia. For the sake of the originator of that poem's design, I would like to inform his followers that Alighieri has three heirs, two boys and a daughter, who had lived with their mother while they were underage, but joined their father in exile as soon as they were liberated by the laws of those who claim Florence as their prize for tearing their rivals to pieces.

On behalf of Alighieri’s heirs, can anyone in this expansive and noble company perhaps provide a sinecure or position with a modest income? For those of us who have made so much of ourselves by attempting to imitate him, we can show our fealty to his memory and to his art in this way. I can relay a message to the poet’s children, if it will encourage those three who are forced to leave.

As I mentioned, my days of sharing Dante’s vision and speaking with his passion are long gone, and poetic inspiration is not why I reached out to the friends I had in my old life. The 'sophomore jinx' Milan introduced as a subject for a canto of your epic applies to anyone who thinks he can be what he once was. I know I am not. I have always admired how we were compiling the words and suggestions of so many and building from those pieces a recognizable character with a recognizable voice and diction, since it echoes the continuity we all imagine between the many characters we play from infancy and schoolboy immaturity, to our heyday and dotage.

As if we were the same person from one minute to the next, we drag the baggage of our practised, public self everywhere we go. In each new station of our slow retreat from dreams and aspirations, we tell a much-repeated tale purporting to explain how we got there, our tale of woe. But attend me: all moments are the same moment, the present instant in which I feel, suffer, and bless my life. I have no past, just my sensibility of the present, a moment spanning eternity. If Democritus is right, I am a cloud of atoms moving randomly from place to place that everyone believes is me but only God can truly solve. I deplore the fraud of supposing to present the millions of accidents that created us by deciphering the mere tracks, broken twigs, and recent sightings of such a complexity as the nature of a single man. We ought to leave that calculation to the angels.

What we do know immediately if we listen to our senses is that the past is gone and unrecoverable. I can no more avow my existence has any of the qualities of a narrative, than I can claim to have made a tour of Tuscany by circling a handful of cities on a map. Literature avails us nothing in this dilemma. The verses we wrote twenty years ago no longer mean what they meant then because the connotations and the references have changed or vanished from the common memory. A hundred years from now, no one will read the Comedia; they will read the footnotes. Not the same, is it?

At one time, I believed everyone knew who Bené and Cecile were. You remember them, don’t you? They starred in a puppet show that played all through my boyhood in the parish square of Sant’Ambrogio. In those days, I could compare an acquaintance to Cecile and all my friends from the neighborhood knew the boy was simple. Today, no one knows Benē and Cecile; analogously, no one in the present generation understands how we felt when we fought for the people’s rights over despots and kings at Campaldino. Nothing remains of those causes except their hollow recitation. Understanding has to be remade from its components, but we don’t effectively teach essential values, believing they are obvious and don’t need to be learned.

At the present moment in this life of mine, I am prepared to accept the disappearance of the Republic, its professions of liberty, and all the other puppet shows of my innocence. When or if my countrymen should in the future stumble upon a forgotten truth every schoolboy knew in 1289, it will not be from any light my art provides, but I wish the rest of you success. With so many verses from different authors naming different content details, I wonder how the final form of the document will be determined?

Language itself is a convenience of the times; so then is the meaning of the literature one generation leaves to the next. That was one of the concessions of our movement to write in the vernacular. I suppose an official Comedia is no more likely than an official life of Alighieri. I know a young scholar in Florence who has started a project of collecting every version of Dante’s work and all the contradictory reports about him with a mind to some day compile and edit an anthology of Italian poets, himself included. As Virgil justified the tyrant Augustus with Aeniad, and Dante presents Virgil as his pedigree, let future writers proclaim themselves upon a stitched together Dante! Maybe I will leave young Boccaccio my papers when I die.

Florence


May, 1321

Dear Friends:

I wish to share with members of this correspondence some news of Alighieri’s heirs, the two men and a girl child who share their father’s condemnation and exile since they reached the age of liberation from their mother. I would also suggest that developments overseen by us here may also determine a logical time to conclude our mutual poetic project, the Comedia.

Between myself in the court of Polenta and our mutual friends in Verona, I think we can provide mitigation to ease the exile of Alighieri’s heirs. We have mapped out a course by which Iacopo receives a canonry in the diocese of Verona that will net him 60 pounds annually. Through our ties to the clergy here, Paolo also controls certain benefices and is undertaking the study of Law in Bologna as a guest of our friend, the distinguished professor of heraldry at the university. Lastly, Dante’s daughter, Beatrice, has taken vows at the convent of San Stefano dell’Uliva, and as a matter of obedience to God, renounced her family.

I know many different versions of the final cantos of the epic are in circulation, but most of us agree on a canon that predates all the verses written since Milan’s sophomore jinx was aimed at the counterfeit pope in Avignon. If the entire band of contributors cooperate, I have a scheme that can do great things for the heirs of Alighieri and the reputation of our epic. I am sure Lord Visconti has material wealth and esteem enough by right of birth to endure this obstacle to his literary reputation and retract his thread of the Paradiso!

With very little trouble we can establish that Dante has died suddenly, perhaps having contracted an illness on a diplomatic mission while returning to his place in Polenta. The author of the first two parts of the epic having been acclaimed a genius for most of their lives, Alighieri’s sons Iacopo and Paolo have already benefitted. Both have hoped to capitalize on their family name by influencing fashionable commentaries on the poem. I know Iacopo’s writing a bit. In my opinion he hasn’t understood the role of Beatrice in the allegory and he doesn’t back up any of his ideas with quotes from the text, but my sensibilities were formed in a vanished kingdom of formal letters, and his audience will share their generation’s sloppy appropriation of their forebear’s ideas.

I vote let’s put our best version of the complete epic in a cabinet where Alighieri may be reasonably said to have lived. After letting the inevitable anxiety among his fanatics over whether or not Dante had time before his death to complete Paradiso, we can allow his sons to at last discover the missing cantos behind a secret panel—or something equally dramatic. In their own self interest, they will defend their version as being the one intended by its author for final distribution, and all of us can confirm their opinion, while realizing intention is one of those human fantasies like fate and free will. The soul who produced the Comedia was scattered across the whole land of speakers of the language that uses si to mean yes, and like the Tuscan dialect that was the contribution of hundreds of thousands of users across generations, not a one of us can claim to know who made it or who in the future will speak it, sprinkled with such coarse grammatical constructions and ridiculous notions that it will be unrecognizable to us as educated human speech.

Ravenna


In an edition distributed in 1360, Boccaccio was the first to call Dante’s epic The Divina Comedia . Scholarship is divided on whether he meant the Comedia was a poem inspired by God, or that God is the author of mankind’s errors.

*The factual material misunderstood, misrepresented, or misquoted in this work comes from Dante: A Life, by Alessandro Barbero, Pegasus Books.

** "Balzac" is the incorrect answer the author gave in "Final Jeopardy!" when TV host Alek Trebec asked which famous author was represented in Rodin's Gates of Hell. Balzac was the subject of a favorite statue at MoMA the author had seen in New York three days before the Jeopardy! show was taped, but he passed both Rodin's representation of Dante and The Gates of Hell every day: they were just down the street from his house.