Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature by Martin Eisner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature by Martin Eisner Andrea Quaini Martin Eisner, Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), xviii + 259 pp. Martin Eisner's initial observation is that Dante's Vita nuova (1294) is an innovative and lively book whose possible readings are constantly evolving: reproduced in different formats, translated into various languages, and transposed into different media, in each of its transformations it says something new and different. In the present volume, Eisner translates this finding into an effective working method and proposes a way of reading that overturns the traditional one: instead of starting from a supposed "original," in order to see if and how other interventions have "betrayed" the Vita nuova, Eisner starts each chapter with a different incarnation of Dante's work, showing how each transformation enlightens Dante's text and themes in a new and particular way. Eisner's methodology follows the idea that the book is not "the single material object but also to the network of multiple objects that contributes to the work's survival through time" (6). The prologue is thus fundamentally important for understanding the theory behind Eisner's book, and indeed functions as a short essay of critical methodology. Referring in a continuous dialogue to the ideas of Plato, Singleton, Auerbach, Barthes, and Barolini, among others, this prologue is argued at a theoretical level that perhaps could benefit from more thorough consideration in a separate work; indeed, an elaboration of Eisner's methodology would be of great service to other scholars. In the prologue, Eisner proposes a "philology of world literature that investigates the significance of the work's material survival in the world" (3). Therefore, he does not start with what came before Dante's text, but instead begins with its afterlife: not only the readings and literary rewritings made by Boccaccio, Rossetti, and Mandelstam, but also its transformations in painting, music, postcards, and in Hollywood movies. Eisner's book is divided into three parts that each address the classic problems regarding the Vita nuova, while each chapter starts with one of the hundreds of incarnations that the text has had over the centuries. Beatrice is the metaphor image for each of the three parts: chapters addressing problems of interpretation fall under "Interpreting Beatrice"; those concerning comments under "Glossing Beatrice"; and those about time under "Remembering Beatrice." In the first part, "Interpreting Beatrice," Eisner shows the extent to which the Vita nuova innovates upon previous poetic traditions. Chapter 1 opens with an [End Page 249] image of a postcard by illustrator Ezio Anichini (1888–1948) for a Dante calendar; in the bottom part of it, there is a quote from Sermartelli's 1576 edition of the Vita nuova that censored Dante's original term gloriosa, replacing it with graziosa. In this chapter, Beatrice is presented as a Homeric character for whom Dante performs an operation that had only been carried out by the Greek poet: that of showing a human being and a god on almost the same level. Starting with the Hollywood film Hannibal (2001) and Augusto de Campos's Antropófago movement based on Oswaldo Andrade's "Cannibalist Manifesto" (1928), chapter 2 shows how Dante "not only mixes poetry with two kinds of prose; he also includes Cavalcanti's poetry" in a sort of real cannibalization of other people's poetry (51). Chapter 3 is dedicated to music: the transcription by Alfred Mercer for Dante Gabriel Rossetti's edition of the Vita nuova provides Eisner with the opportunity to investigate the musicality of the text and the relationship that the poem had with performance, especially in relation to the ballata. In the second part, "Glossing Beatrice," Eisner returns to the problem of Dante's divisions of the text and to the alternating fortune they have had over time. Chapter 4 deals with the problematic reference to Beatrice's mouth in Dante's division of Donne ch'avete in order to introduce an analysis of the value of the body and corporeality in Dante's poetry. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the visual arts. Beginning with an ultraviolet...