In one of his notebooks, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883-1882) wrote that, in his time, Dante “would be born an American.” This thought-provoking statement still seems relevant today, because ever since the nineteenth century, Dante’s influence on American culture has only grown stronger and more profound. It makes sense, therefore, that this recent scholarly collection of essays, which originated in a 2021 lecture series, chooses precisely this geographical angle, focusing on the reception of Dante in American culture of roughly the last two hundred years.
Since approximately the 1990s, the contemporary reception and transformations of Dante and his Comedy have become the subject of countless scholarly works, leading to the formation of a thriving subdiscipline within the traditionally more philological field of Dante studies. Dante’s presence in modern culture has often been analyzed along the lines of particular genres and media—with special attention for novels and poetry, visual arts and illustrations, music, performing arts, comics and graphic novels, advertising, cinema and tv-series—; within the context of a single nation or continent; within a delimited chronological timespan—e.g., the Renaissance, the nineteenth century etc.—, and, of course, within the works of single authors or artists.
By choosing a broad chronological and geographical perspective, American Dantes unavoidably offers an incomplete picture: as the editors themselves indicate, “an overabundance of ‘American Dantes’ [is] not addressed here,” and many of the omitted or scarcely discussed American Dantes could certainly fill many volumes of their own. The volume’s broad and diverse scope is largely offset by the numerous new and captivating insights it provides into Dante’s multifaceted influence on American culture.
Some contributions revisit artists and works of art that have already been extensively studied from a Dantean perspective. For instance, Henry Weinfield’s nuanced analysis of T. S. Eliot’s poetry innovatively centers on the themes of desire and form, providing a fresh perspective on even well-known Dante-inspired poems like Little Gidding. By meticulously examining Eliot’s distinctive approach to terza rima, Weinfield unveils new layers of meaning within this classic work.
Other contributions analyze cultural personalities, cultural phenomena, and genres that have not been studied (or not sufficiently) from a Dantean perspective. In “Dante, Jazz, and the Black Radical Tradition,” Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg ingeniously analyzes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell, and Sherman Irby’s Inferno: A Jazz Ballet. Apart from the original thematic connection between Dante and jazz, this contribution also manages to open up new methodological possibilities by applying Wai Chee Dimock’s concept of “resonance,” which “articulates how familiar texts, when placed within new historical and geographic frames, can be rendered strange and unfamiliar, simultaneously similar and dissimilar to how we might read them in their more familiar historical settings” (221). Seen in this light, the Dantean elements in Ellison, Baraka, and Irby’s works acquire new and more subtle depths.
A surprising theoretical perspective is also used to study Dante’s presence in certain “anomalous” Dante translations. Kristina M. Olson convincingly suggests making use of “the sociological turn in translation studies that sees the target texts as products of the poet-translator’s artistic career and their communities, either real or imagined, with other artists and authors engaged with Dante” (164). By moving away from fidelity analysis and taking into account cultural networks of influence, Olson efficiently reevaluates translators like Thomas William Parsons—the pioneering American translator of Dante who was largely overshadowed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—and some of the most recent American versions of Dante’s Commedia, like Sandow Birk’s and Mary Jo Bang’s, which combine translation, adaptation and appropriation.
Christian Y. Dupont tells the intriguing and mostly unknown stories behind the formation of the vast collections of Dantean literature in the American universities of Harvard, Cornell, and Notre Dame. The story of the Zahm Dante Collection at Notre Dame is especially worth reading. After years of trying to build his collection himself, “Zahm realized that he needed to change strategy. The most efficient means would be to acquire the fruit of another collector’s labor intact” (154). He did just that, and the way he eventually (and anonymously) managed to buy Giulio Acquaticci’s fine collection, and for a “shrewd” price, makes for an enthralling read.
An eye-opening and captivating chapter is dedicated to Paul Laffoley (1935-2015), an extraordinary American who “created an encyclopedic, visual cathedral reminiscent of Dante’s poetic one” (240). Apart from paintings, journals, and other writings, Laffoley’s main endeavors are his “illus-translation” of the Commedia in a massive triptych (1972-75) and the so-called Dantesphere project (1978). Laffoley’s good friend and admirer Arielle Saber takes us on a fascinating journey through both this unique triptych—in Saber’s words, a “painted poem” (251)—and the truly incredible Dantesphere, a “full-sensory-immersion illustration of the Commedia” (271).
This volume continues to contribute to existing scholarship in numerous other ways. Laura Dassow Walls analyzes Dante’s role in the life and works of the two leading American transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, for whom “Italy’s great national poet seemed to offer a model for America’s own ascent as an imperial nation” (29). Apart from Emerson’s Dantean ambitions (“he did believe he could strive to incarnate Dante’s spirit anew, raising the eyes of his countrymen from their infernal descent to their heavenly destiny,” 34), we find in this contribution a striking portrait of Margaret Fuller. She was not only “our first philosopher of women’s rights” (43), but also a partisan and foreign correspondent of the Italian Risorgimento, and an original reader of Dante: “To learn Dante, Fuller urges, don’t read books. Go listen, instead, in the forest of human passions to all the terrible voices he heard; go down with him into our private hells; pass with him through the purgatory of struggling hope; soar with him if you can” (44).
A recurrent topic in several essays is the similarity many American writers and intellectuals felt between the American Civil War and the political situation of Dante’s Italy. In particular, Joshua Matthews discusses the transformation of Dante’s Comedy into an “American Civil War Epic.” In this transformation a clear echo can be heard of the many nationalist abuses of Dante during the Italian Risorgimento. Union supporters like Longfellow and the members of his Dante Club read Dante’s journey “as an allegory of the divided, then united nation” (51) and in this light Longfellow’s translation also becomes political. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Longfellow’s translation contains the hapax “chief captain” for God: “Presented to America in 1867, Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy championed the triumph of the Union, which was predestined to victory by God’s providence and which promised a new era of peace and freedom” (70).
In “Abolitionist, Confederate, Indigenous Dantes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Dennis Looney discusses four personalities—William Henry Seward, Sarah H. Bradford, Augusta Evans and Richard Henry Wilde—who all look to Dante “for guidance on how to construct a better world as they imagined it” (75). These remarkable readers prove once more that the reception of Dante in America is not “primarily a scholarly phenomenon rooted in New England” (72), and that it still needs expanding, as demonstrated already in Looney’s groundbreaking Freedom Readers (2011). Let us quote just one vivid detail from Sarah H. Bradford’s portrayal of Harriet Tubman, the “She Moses” who successfully led many slaves to freedom: starting from Doré’s illustration of the first ditch of Malebolge, Bradford imagines Tubman’s mistress and other “plantation devils” getting whipped by demons: “Bradford takes pleasure in visualizing them getting their comeuppance in hell being whipped by fiends for eternity” (84).
The powerful and often existential relationship between Dante and American immigrants is discussed on several occasions in this volume. Kathleen C. Boyle analyzes linguistic, narrative and thematic connections with Dante in Christ in Concrete by Pietro Di Donato, who is just one of the many immigrant authors for whom Dante served as a reference for “negotiating their proximity to and distance from their culture of origin” (95).
In a beautiful closing chapter Peter S. Hawkins analyzes several contemporary spiritual approaches to Dante’s work, focusing especially on Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood, and Rod Dreher’s How Dante Can Save Your Life. Here the Comedy turns into a self-help poem, Dante into a spiritual life coach: “a guru for lost souls who want to get found” (286). Dante’s healing journey through the afterlife also seems to resonate on a deep level with the American dream: “Something in us, it seems, needs to hear the story of a transformation that begins in wretchedness and ends in hope: ‘Once I was lost, but now am found; / was blind, but now I see’” (299).
As the final quote suggests, there seems to be a distinct, inherent American-ness in the Dantes discussed in this volume. Although we may not get more than a “glimpse of the remarkable complexity” (xii) of Dante’s influence on American culture, this volumeprovides valuable new insights into a vast and colorful mosaic.