In Dante’s imagination the magical protected space of friendship takes the form of a boat in which he wishes the three friends could together navigate the sea of life, the sea that in Paradiso will have become the metaphysical “gran mar de l’essere [the great sea of being]” (Par. 1.113). Or we could think of the sea of love, of which one day Dante will write “tratto m’hanno del mar de l’amor torto,/e del diritto m’han posto a la riva [they took me from the sea of erroneous love and placed me on the shore of right love ]” (Par. 26.62–3). In this vessel of his imagination,53 the friends would be immune from the wearying and perilous passions of life / love: the wind that typically afflicts the poet-lover of the love lyric,54 instead of opposing them, here concurs with their every desire: “in un vasel ch’ad ogni vento / per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio;/sì che fortuna od altro tempo rio / non ci potesse dare impedimento [and set upon a ship to sail the sea / where every wind would favour our command,/so neither thunderstorms nor cloudy skies / might ever have the power to hold us back]” (3–6).
Throughout the octave the friends’ unity is emphasized. To the multiplicity (“ogni vento [every wind]”) and difficulty of life (“fortuna od altro tempo rio [thunder-storms or cloudy skies]”) is contrasted the unitary force of their friendship (“un vasel” [one boat], “voler vostro e mio” [your will and mine]), with which the poet wishes they could face any “impedimento.” He also wishes they could be united in a single desire, a single wish (“un talento”), such that their “disio [desire]” to be together would grow: “anzi, vivendo sempre in un talento,/di star insieme crescesse il disio [but rather, cleaving to this single wish,/that our desire to live as one would grow]” (7–8). The resolution of the many into the one makes unity grow, and from love more love is born, precisely as will be theorized in Purgatorio: “E quanta gente più là sù s’intende,/più v’è da bene amare, e più vi s’ama [And the more people up there are in love, the more there are to love truly, and the more they love each other]” (Purg. 15.73–4).55
In the octave Dante imagines a state of complete and timeless harmony, in which the friends are protected from the flux of time and multiplicity. Dante’s dream includes immortality, living “sempre [forever] in un talento.” In this atemporal state of absolute nondifferentiation (time is that which condemns us to difference, being “number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after’”),56 the desire for further harmony – of being together, “star insieme” – could not but grow: this is a virtuous circularity, in which always living together with one sole desire will increase the desire to continue living together. And who wouldn’t choose to be together in conditions so different from those of real life? The sonnet imagines individuals who, while remaining individuals – while continuing to be Dante, Guido, and Lapo – are able to suspend all individual desires and thus all “impediments,” or conflicts. In real life individual desires are the origin of the conflicts that lessen the desire to be together; if we shared a single desire, conflicts would necessarily diminish, indeed would disappear.
Dante proposes to eliminate the differing wishes of the three protagonists, without however doing away with their irreducible and separate individual selves, indicated by means of the brilliant series of names and pronouns that opens the poem. This use of pronouns is part of a long-term “semantics of friendship” developed early by Dante (see the introductory essay to Deh ragioniamo). Pronouns are markers of intimate bonds of male friendship in the Commedia, for instance in the devastatingly beautiful verse that memorializes Dante’s friendship with Forese Donati: “qual fosti meco, e qual io teco fui [what you were with me, and what I was with you]” (Purg. 23.116). We think too of the verses that celebrate the friendship of Statius and Vergil: “Ma dimmi, e come amico mi perdona” (Purg. 22.19) and “e come amico omai meco ragiona” (Purg. 22.21). The most intense use of pronouns to suggest complete interchangeability of being between one person and another occurs not, in the Commedia, in an exchange between a man and a woman but in that between Dante and another old friend, Carlo Martello, which features the coinage of intense verbs of mutual penetration made of pronouns: “s’io m’intuassi, come tu t’inmii [if I were to in-you myself as you in-me yourself]” (Par. 9.81).
In Guido, i’ vorrei the pronouns and names indicate separate identities that set up an aporia – how can the one and the many coexist? – that Dante will eventually treat in Paradiso in philosophical terms but that now he approaches by using a profane and magical setting. In life as we know it separate identities (identities indicated by the names “Guido,” “Lapo,” and by the pronouns “tu,” “io,” and – the last word of our sonnet – “noi”)57 necessarily carry divergent wills. Absent a supernatural or theological context, perfect unity is not possible without violating individual identity; the various attempts in human history to enforce unity of will in political terms have led to forms of totalitarianism. Guido, i’ vorrei does not go in that direction; it belongs rather to an enchanted state that is knowingly unreal.
If it is true that the intensity of this longed-for unity diminishes in the transition from the octave to the sestet, where we encounter the poets’ ladies (“monna Vanna” and “monna Lagia” are the ladies loved, respectively, by Guido and Lapo),58 it is also true that the very presence of the ladies is important: the impulse to reconcile difference is so strong in Guido, i’ vorrei that women are present in the boat. As we can surmise from the segregation of men and women notable in the Vita Nuova, the presence of ladies in this boat testifies to an idealized situation, one that is outside the quotidian societal norm. Their altogether unusual presence helps us to understand the risk that Boccaccio took in creating his mixed company of men and women in the frame-tale of the Decameron. Dante does not need to defend the probity of the ladies in his boat, as Boccaccio continually defends the virtue of the female members of his brigata, because the conditions in which they are placed are explicitly unreal and magical: the ladies are placed in the boat by a magician (“con noi ponesse il buono incantatore [borne to us …/by our good enchanter’s wizardry]” [11]). It is important to note that Dante, imagining perfection, should include women. As we will see also in the essays on the sonnets Voi che portate la sembianza umile and Se’ tu colui c’ hai trattato sovente, Dante’s imagination is not boxed in by his society’s norms of appropriate comportment.
On the other hand, there is a clear lowering of intensity in the sestet. The poets’ ladies are added to the dream of friendship in a second installment, formally separate in the sestet. And to the desire that those in the boat may always talk about love (12) – let us imagine that the ladies are taking part in the conversation, as in the Decameron – is added the hope, shadowed by the implicit possibility of failure, that “ciascuna di lor fosse contenta [each of them would find herself content]” (13).
Even if the sestet offers another occurrence of the adverb “sempre” (“ragionar sempre d’amore” [always talking about love]) (12), the dream of perfect unity is no longer intact: the tear in the fabric (the crack in the golden bowl) shows in the stubborn presence of singularity among the ladies, in the fact that the poet refers to “ciascuna di lor” – “each of them” – when in the case of the men the plural pronoun “noi” – “we” – is sufficient. And it is worth noting, without entering into discussion as to whether “quella ch’è sul numer de le trenta [(she) who’s number thirty]” (10) is the first screen-lady of the Vita Nuova or not (Barbi maintains she is), that the use of a number for referring to one’s lady (in Vita Nuova VI.2 [2.11] Dante mentions a lost serventese in which he names the sixty most beautiful women in Florence) can only increase the sense of a multiplicity that is hardly amenable to unity.
There is, therefore, tension in Guido, i’ vorrei: tension reflected in the structural division between octave (the friends) and sestet (their ladies). However, if this structural dichotomy recalls Sonar bracchetti, the comparison between the two sonnets only highlights how in Guido, i’ vorrei the poet’s will is dire
cted towards eliminating dichotomy and difference while creating instead the privileged space of unity. Guido, i’ vorrei is a dream of floating, light as the foam of the sea, far from any division: distant not only from the divisions that can separate a man from a woman, but distant as well – perhaps above all, given the strong male identities of the incipit – from the divisions that can separate a man from another man. The authentic privileged space of the sonnet is the male space of the octave, before the addition of the ladies to the sestet. Is there a latent homoeroticism in this sonnet? We note that the past participle associated throughout the courtly tradition with erotic love, preso, is used for the men who are “presi per incantamento [carried off by some enchanter’s spell]” (2).
In the case of the two men separated by the space of the first verse – “Guido” on the one side, “I” on the other – their friendship was not able to withstand division, and so it is difficult to avoid attributing the melancholy of this sonnet in part to an obscure foreboding of the poetic and ideological falling-out that will eventually rupture the harmony between Dante and his “first” friend, differentiating them in a way that can no longer be overcome. We have already mentioned the sonnet written by Guido after Beatrice’s death, I’ vegno ’l giorno a·tte ’nfinite volte. At that stage a rupture had not yet occurred, given that Guido still “comes” every day, insistently, to find his friend. But, however it came about, the rupture did ultimately occur: in the end, this boat landed, if you will, on the shore of the River Styx. By this I do not want to suggest that I subscribe to the view according to which Dante condemns Guido with his father Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti in the tenth canto of the Inferno (even less that he is already thinking about such a condemnation when he wrote Guido, i’ vorrei); I have always maintained that Dante is deliberately ambiguous with regard to the destiny of the friend who, in the fiction of the Commedia, is explicitly “co’ vivi ancor congiunto [still among the living]” (Inf. 10.111).59 And in any case Dante does not condemn sons for the sins of their fathers: one need only recall the examples – which Dante is at pains to provide us – of Manfredi and Bonconte. But on the other hand there is no doubt that the move of Inferno 10 contaminated the historical reception of Guido Cavalcanti – as the story about Guido Cavalcanti in the Decameron (6.9) demonstrates – and that Dante in this sense cast a shadow on Guido’s reputation, linking the name of his friend in perpetuity to hell and damnation in the cultural imaginary.60
But it is not necessary to think of the future to access the melancholy of Guido, i’ vorrei. The melancholy is inherent in the very subject of the sonnet: in the fact that this dream of escaping difference remains, even in the consciousness of the poet who dreams it, only a dream. The many similarities with passages in Paradiso are instructive. In Paradiso these dreams are recounted in the present or future tense, not in the conditional. For example, to stay within the context of multiple wills pacified by a single will, Dante does not write in Paradiso 3 “vorrei che nella sua volontade fosse nostra pace” – “I wish that in his will were our peace” – but “ ’n sua volontade è nostra pace [in his will is our peace]” (Par. 3.85). In other words, Paradiso offers not dreams, but imagined realities, while in Guido, i’ vorrei the poet’s imagination remains in the state of desire, without reaching the state of lived imaginary reality.
The syntax of Guido, i’ vorrei, the fact that all the conjugated verbs up to the last line are subjunctives that depend on the initial “vorrei,” keeps the discourse afloat but on a sea that is explicitly unreal, not even dreamed as real, but as part of an “enchantment” brought about by a “good enchanter” (11). Nor does the final verse change the perspective. In fact, it serves to encapsulate the problem and reproduce it with utter clarity in the restricted confines of a single verse, replacing the verb of the incipit with a new verb: “credo” (I believe). The problem of a “noi” that is longed for but reached only conditionally is not resolved; if anything it is reinforced and encapsulated by the last verse: “sì come credo che sarémo noi [just as I think that we should likewise be]” (14). The true enchantment of this sonnet resides in its dream of a perfect friendship but even more in its awareness: this dream of evasion knows that it cannot evade its own evanescence.
19 (B LII; C 9; FB 15; DR 35)
Dante to Guido Cavalcanti
Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io fossimo presi per incantamento e messi in un vasel ch’ad ogni vento
Guido, I wish that Lapo, you, and I were carried off by some enchanter’s spell and set upon a ship to sail the sea
4
per mare andasse al voler vostro e mio; sì che fortuna od altro tempo rio non ci potesse dare impedimento, anzi, vivendo sempre in un talento,
where every wind would favour our command, so neither thunderstorms nor cloudy skies might ever have the power to hold us back, but rather, cleaving to this single wish,
8
di star insieme crescesse il disio.
that our desire to live as one would grow.
E monna Vanna e monna Lagia poi con quella ch’è sul numer de le trenta
And Lady Vanna were with Lady Lagia borne to us with her who’s number thirty
11
con noi ponesse il buono incantatore: e quivi ragionar sempre d’amore, e ciascuna di lor fosse contenta
by our good enchanter’s wizardry: to talk of love would be our sole pursuit, and each of them would find herself content,
14
sì come credo che sarémo noi.
just as I think that we should likewise be.
METRE: sonnet ABBA ABBA CDE EDC.
20 Amore e monna Lagia e Guido ed io
My decision to include this sonnet despite the not complete certainty of its textual tradition is based on various considerations. Amore e monna Lagia is, among the lyrics of uncertain attribution, the one traditionally held to be most certain: Barbi places it first in a list that moves from more to less certainty of Dantean paternity; and Contini, while following Barbi in placing it among the “Rime dubbie,” writes that “the attribution to Dante can be considered secure” (p. 229). Two codices give the sonnet to Cavalcanti, only one (less authoritative) to Dante, but, “if the problem is to choose between Dante and Guido Cavalcanti, there cannot be any doubt of Dante’s paternity – Guido being excluded because referred to in the text of the sonnet in the third person” (Barbi-Pernicone, p. 663).
And in fact the attribution to Dante is based on non-codicological criteria, such as the presence in the sonnet of “Guido” noted by Barbi-Pernicone. Similarly, Contini refers to the characters named in the poem, not to material evidence. The presence of lady Lagia calls for Lapo Gianni: “Dante and Lapo must therefore be on the one hand the author and on the other the unnamed protagonist of the sonnet; and since the tradition has never assigned this poem to Lapo, one can safely attribute it to Dante” (p. 229).
De Robertis, however, takes Amore e monna Lagia out of the rime dubbie and places it among the lyrics certainly written by Dante, but his procedure lacks the methodological transparency that would induce unreserved confidence in his readers.
De Robertis cuts the number of the doubtful lyrics from Barbi / Contini’s twenty-six to sixteen, adding eight compositions to the regular canon and completely excluding two (Deh, piangi meco tu, dogliosa petra and Nulla mi parve più crudel cosa). The eight doubtful lyrics readmitted into the canon are Aï faus ris, Quando ’l consiglio degli ucce’ si tenne, Amore e monna Lagia e Guido ed io, Se ’l viso mio a la terra si china, Questa donna ch’andar mi fa pensoso, Non v’accorgete voi d’un che·ssi more, Io sento pianger l’anima nel core, and Degli occhi di quella gentil mia dama.
The problem, as I noted previously, is lack of transparency in the classification. Consulting De Robertis, one finds that he classifies differentially the eight lyrics that he readmits to the canon, without offering an explanation of his different classifica-tory rubrics. Two carry the rubric “restored to Dante” (“restituita / o a Dante”), four the
rubric “probably Dante’s” (“probabilmente di Dante”), and two have no rubric at all:
18 [restored to Dante]
Aï faus ris, pour quoi traï aves
34 [restored to Dante]
Quando ’l consiglio degli ucce’ si tenne61
41
Amore e monna Lagia e Guido ed io
51 [probably Dante’s]
Se ’l viso mio a la terra si china
53 [probably Dante’s]
Questa donna ch’andar mi fa pensoso
54 [probably Dante’s]
Non v’accorgete voi d’un che·ssi more
55 [probably Dante’s]
Io sento pianger l’anima nel core
59
Degli occhi di quella gentil mia dama
Given the lack of explanation, it is difficult to interpret these rubrics. Do they indicate a hierarchy according to which the lyrics with no rubric are presumed the most certain, those “restored to Dante” a little less certain, and those that are “probably Dante’s” still less certain? Perhaps.62 But in this case, Amore e monna Lagia shares the advantage of silence with Degli occhi di quella gentil mia dama, a sonnet whose Dantean paternity is much less convincing. In his review of De Robertis’ edition, Leonardi writes regarding Degli occhi di quella gentil mia dama that “the consensus of what is moreover a scant tradition fails to justify the authenticity of this ‘awkward’ sonnet” (“goffo” or “awkward” is Contini’s word for Degli occhi di quella gentil mia dama), and concludes, “in sum, I would have left it among the poems of doubtful attribution” (p. 88).