Authors: Dante
85–90.
This is an at least somewhat puzzling simile, equating Beatrice with a gust of wind, forcing the top of a tree down from its normal inclination upward. It then goes on to equate Dante with that treetop, regaining its natural upward direction once the gust has blown itself out. The meaning is plain, but the negative associations that surround Beatrice seem strange; nonetheless, the positive ones that accompany Dante’s desires to do something of which Beatrice approves eventually govern our understanding.
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91–92.
Adam was, by tradition, thought to have been created by God as though he were thirty or (more usually) thirty-three years old (thus
matching the years of Christ on earth). Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 91–93) remarks that the protagonist’s phrasing is not very kind, since it brings to Adam’s mind the appetite (for the apple) that caused his fall.
On this passage see Moevs (Moev.2005.1), pp. 101–2, distinguishing between Adam as indeed ripe in himself, as he was made by God (and now again is), and the creature he had mistakenly thought he could improve by opposing God’s will and stealing His forbidden fruit.
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93.
Every bride is both Adam’s daughter and his daughter-in-law. Of course, the same holds true for grooms, if with genders exchanged. See Carroll (comm. to vv. 88–96), explaining that this verse is “an echo of St. Augustine’s
City of God
, XV.16: ‘
Father
and
father-in-law
are the names of two relationships.… But Adam in his single person was obliged to hold both relations to his sons and daughters, for brothers and sisters were united in marriage. So too Eve his wife was both mother and mother-in-law to her children of both sexes.’ ”
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95–96.
The poet (and protagonist) play with the convention established and embellished as we proceed through the last canticle: Souls in Heaven read the thoughts of others in the mind of God. That being true, the protagonist acknowledges, an unvoiced question begets its answer more rapidly, avoiding the time otherwise lost in verbal duplication. Adam himself will underline this point at some length (vv. 103–108).
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97.
This line has caused confusion, even anger, and (perhaps consequently) flights of fancy. It was only with Lombardi (comm. to vv. 97–102) that a commentator disagreed with the earlier commentators’ assumption that the covering was the creature’s own fur. Now almost all agree that the imagined animal is covered (if for a reason not readily discerned) with a cloth of some kind. (Porena [comm. to vv. 97–99] would eventually draw on a childhood experience, when he once carried a cat in a sack, to suggest that Dante was referring to a similarly ensacked feline.) Torraca (comm. to vv. 97–102) suggests the possible reference to a caparisoned horse (if Pézard mainly receives the credit for Torraca’s in fact earlier observation), but then wisely backs away from making any definite identification; he continues by reminding us of the highly similar similetic moment in
Paradiso
VIII.52–54, in which Dante compares the glad soul of Charles Martel to a silkworm clothed in its own glowing light. (And see the earlier and altogether similar appreciation of Poletto [comm. to vv. 97–102].) This, one thinks, is assuredly the model for any attempt at an interpretation; however, it is rare that the verse has been considered in this light.
If one wants to crown a particular exercise for its fervid imagination, one might well favor Daniello’s opinion (comm. to vv. 97–102) of male horses sniffing on the wind the maddening odor of female horses in heat and shuddering thereat. In short, a number of animals have been called (including, in addition to those already mentioned, piglets, dogs, even birds [in particular, the hooded falcon]), but none has been chosen.
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104.
See Moore (Moor.1889.1), pp. 483–86, supporting the traditional reading (“da te”) against that strange but, for some people, overpoweringly attractive variant, “Dante”: “There are few passages where we can pronounce with greater confidence as to the true reading than we can here.…” (p. 483). A goodly number of Dantists are firmly committed to the notion that the appearance of the poet’s name in the poem, his signature, as it were, occurs only once, as the first word spoken by Beatrice, in
Purgatorio
XXX.55. Such as they are most grateful to Moore’s exertions, since there had been, before his intervention, more than a few who were most eager to find “Dante” uttered by Adam, the first namer (see Genesis 2:19–20).
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107–108.
Tozer (comm. to vv. 106–108) paraphrases Adam’s remark as follows: “I see those wishes depicted in the mind of God, in which, as in a faithful mirror, the thoughts of His creatures are reflected; whereas their minds (and therefore your [i.e., Dante’s] mind) cannot know what is passing in the mind of God, so that you cannot reach the same certainty.” He continues as follows: “According to this interpretation,
pareglio
is a substantive, meaning a ‘parhelion’ or mock-sun; from which sense—as a parhelion is a reflected or refracted image of the sun—it is taken to signify simply a ‘reflexion.’ The literal translation, then, of vv. 107–108 will be—‘who makes [H]imself the reflexion of (i.e., in [H]im are reflected) the other things (and, in particular, men’s minds), while none of them makes itself a reflexion of [H]im ([H]is thoughts are not reflected in their minds).’ ” For an exhaustive (it contains more than fifteen hundred words) review of the word
pareglio
, which, if its general sense is understood, has caused considerable difficulty, see Scartazzini (comm. to vv. 106–108).
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109–114.
Adam “repeats” Dante’s four questions: (1) How much time has passed since God put Adam in Eden? (2) How long did he reside there? (3) What caused God’s anger against him? (4) What were the languages that he was given and that he developed? (This fourth question has been variously understood.)
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110–111.
Dante’s “thought question,” intuited by Adam from the mind of God, included his reverent feelings toward Beatrice (unsurprisingly enough), who came to him in Eden, the very place that Adam lost, prepared to lead him on this great spiritual and intellectual journey.
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114.
The early commentators did not realize how problematic (and how important) this verse is. It presents Adam as having two separate linguistic “pools,” each deriving from a different source, from which he first gathered and then formed the first human speech. It was Lombardi (comm. to this verse), at the early dawn of the “modern age” in Dante studies, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, who first made the (fairly obvious) point that the first speaking task performed by Adam was to name the animals God had just created as sharers of his world (Genesis 2:19–20). What was the
source
of that language? That is, did Adam learn it or was it innate in him, put there by God when He formed him from earth? Tommaseo (comm. to vv. 112–114) is (and correctly so) of the second opinion. Andreoli (comm. to this verse) appropriates Tommaseo’s words to this effect, but then adds an important piece of evidence from Dante himself (
De vulgari eloquentia
[I.vi.4]): “I say that a certain form of language was created by God
along with the first soul
; I say ‘form’ with reference both to the words used for things, and to the construction of words, and to the arrangement of the construction; and this form of language would have continued to be used by all speakers, had it not been shattered through the fault of human presumption, as will be shown below” (tr. S. Botterill [italics added]). Thus did Dante at that time account for the origins of human vocabulary, of grammar, and of syntax; these all came directly from God and were inherent in Adam (and Eve, we imagine, though Dante never pays any positive attention to Eve as speaker; that is not something for which he considers her interesting). It is Adam who will name Eve
virago
(“woman”—Genesis 2:23). What Dante believed to have been Adam’s creative process in developing his God-given language by adding words to it may be apparent here: From the pre-Hebrew equivalent of Latin
vir
, implanted in him by God, he derived “
vir
ago” (for “wo
man
”).
While it is clear that Dante had changed his thinking, by the time he was writing the
Commedia
, about the second part of this history of the language (the length of time that the original Adamic speech survived—see the note to verse 134), there is no reason to believe he had altered that first opinion very much, if at all: The first Adamic speech was given by God, but (and we will be surprised by this, as some today still are, even to the point of simply getting it wrong) it was given as perishable. It was, as
we shall shortly see, the core, or seedbed, of the first vernacular and, like all vernacular speech, doomed to die out to be replaced by other always changeful “idioms.” God gave his
Ursprache
to Adam as a form, containing models for his development of vocabulary, of grammar, and of syntax. Simultaneously, He granted him the privilege of naming the animals himself. As a result, “dog,” “owl,” “lion” were terms invented by Adam, not by God. The language that he got from God was thus immediately, even if it first served as a model, in flux, a part of the mortal world of becoming, as was, we shall shortly learn, the one word that we can safely assume he got directly from his Creator, His name. This was “I,” but became “El” (again, see the note to verse 134). (For God’s changing His own name, see Exodus 6:2–3: “I [
Dominus
] appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty [
in Deo omnipotente
], but by my name the Lord [
Adonai
] I did not make myself known to them”).
For the word
idïoma
, which we have here translated “language,” but which seems to be identified by Dante with vernacular speech, see the note to
Paradiso
XV.121–123, the passage in which it has its only other occurrence in the poem. On the language of Adam, see Mengaldo, “La lingua di Adamo,”
ED
(IV [1970]), pp. 47b–48b; Imbach (Imba.1996.1), pp. 197–214. For the treatment of Adam in
De vulgari eloquentia
, see Corti (Cort.1978.1), pp. 243–56.
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115–142.
Tozer summarizes the rest of the canto (comm. to these verses): “Of Dante’s four questions, which have just been stated, Adam answers first No. 3—‘What was the real cause of the Fall of Man?’ (vv. 115–117); next No. 1—‘How long a time had elapsed from the Creation to the present moment?’ (vv. 118–123); then No. 4—‘What language did Adam speak?’ (vv. 124–138); and finally No. 2—‘How long a time did he spend in the Earthly Paradise?’ (vv. 139–142).”
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115–117.
Adam answers first the third question that Dante has put to him, a question that, as many commentators point out, reflects the gravest issue that Adam knows: his own disobedience, which cost him and all our race Eden. This is “paradisal” behavior that we witness here; what sinner in
Inferno
would voluntarily recite his worst sin first (or at all)? There are a few exceptions, beginning with Ciacco (see
Inf.
VI.53), but most, as we saw, try to avoid this subject.
Hardly anyone dealing with this tercet recently (and this is particularly true with respect to American Dantists, who are perhaps more drawn to Ulysses than may seem reasonable) fails to discuss the obvious “quotation”
in the phrase “il trapassar del segno” (the trespass of the boundary line) of
Inferno
XXVI.107–109: “… we reached the narrow strait / where Hercules marked off [
segnò
] the limits, / warning all men to go no farther.” Surprisingly, the only apparent mention in the commentaries collected in the DDP (but see, e.g., Chiavacci Leonardi [Chia.1997.1], p. 728) is in Bosco/Reggio (comm. to vv. 109–117), referring to this passage’s relationship with the theme of transgression, as embodied in the canto of Ulysses. However, cf. (among others) Iannucci (Iann.1976.1), p. 426; Hawkins (Hawk.1979.1); Brownlee (Brow.1990.1), p. 394; and Barolini (Baro.1992.1), pp. 49, 52, 58, 106, 108, 112, and 238, whose treatment begins with reference to Nardi’s consideration (Nard.1942.1) of both Ulysses and Adam as having trespassed boundaries. See also Rati (Rati.1988.1), pp. 513–14.
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116.
The last occurrence of the noun
cagione
(reason, cause), of its forty-six instances in the poem, is found here (and for the penultimate, see verse 113). As the poem concludes, discursive reasoning yields to more intuitive forms of understanding and expression.
The use of the noun
essilio
(exile) binds two other figures to Adam in having shared this bitter experience, Dante and Virgil (who sees his afterlife as exilic—see
Purg.
XXI.18). It is not surprising to find “Virgilio” as its rhyme in verse 118.
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