Two Dantes

Today, I want to draw from two poems, by two distinct authors that glean inspiration from a common source: Dante.  

The first is "Identity Check" by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.  

Identity Check

This is not Dante.

This is a photograph of Dante.

This is a film showing an actor who pretends to be Dante.

This is a film with Dante in the role of Dante.

This is a man who dreams of Dante.

This is a man called Dante who is not Dante.

This is a man who apes Dante.

This is a man who passes himself off as Dante.

This is a man who is the very spit and image of Dante.

This is a wax figure of Dante.

This is a changeling, a double, an identical twin.

This is a man who believes he is Dante.

This is a man everybody, except Dante, believes to be Dante.

This is a man everybody believes to be Dante, only he himself does not 

fall for it.

This is a man nobody believes to be Dante, except Dante.

This is Dante.

As appears in: Twentieth -Century German Poetry edited by Michael Hofmann (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2005).  "Identity Check" by Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Translated by Hans Magnus Enzenberger.

The second is Anna Akhmatova's  "Dante".  

Dante

Even after his death he did not return

to the city that nursed him.

Going away, this man did not look back.

To him I sing this song.

Torches, night, a last embrace, 

outside in her streets the mob howling.

He sent her a curse from hell 

and in heaven could not forget her.

But never, in a penitent's shirt,

did he walk barefoot with lighted candle 

through his beloved Florence,

perfidious, base, and irremediably home.

From: Poems of Akhmatova translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1997). 

I will start with "Identity Check" and leave "Dante" for tomorrow.  

This is a poem.

This is a poem about a poem written about Dante.

This is a blog attempting to analyze Dante: real and imagined.

I could continue ad infinitum with this attempt at humorous insight, but am more interested in what the Enzensberger is trying to achieve.  The first line "This is not Dante" immediately draws me to Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" and subsequently reminds me of Foucault's This is Not a Pipe.  While both were immediately concerned with visual imagery and representation, this piece of literature continues to interrogate the relationship between reality and representation.  

The poem begins in negation and then proceeds with exclusively affirmative sentences, until the exact opposite concludes the poem, "This is Dante."  I see two different ways to read the poem: progressively with each line accruing meaning until the poem is viewed in entirety or as a series of disconnected sentences (disconnected insofar as each is to be read in isolation, as if each is competing to represent "this" most truthfully).  

This might be a bit unusual (Hegel might be rolling in his grave), but I propose to read this poem as an inverted dialectic.

Thesis: This is not Dante.

Antithesis: This is Dante.

Synthesis: Everything in between: "photograph of Dante", "man who dreams of Dante" "wax figure", et al. 

The verses in the middle of the poem seem to both cancel and preserve the differences of the first and last verse, which ultimately elevates Identity (however indeterminate that might be).  This poem acknowledges textual representations of Dante are inherently imperfect, yet in its attempt to do just that sets a precedent to constantly interrogate familiar modes of representation.