10 April 2025
Although this is a point I have repeated ad nauseum, it is so fascinatingly interesting to me that I cannot help but repeat myself again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, emblem of the jazz-age, singular romancer, and good-old American, nay, Princeton boy was much more than a writer of popular novels. His work can take one many places. For me, he leads back to my friends' high school literary periodicals (and their occasional interviews with such figures as the late David Lynch), the isle of my youth, but perhaps surpsingly also to Dante.
In particular, to Dante's three Cantos XXVI of Il Divina Commedia. Each present a unique linguistic encounter across time:
In Hell, Dante meets Ulysses, who speaks only through Virgil's translation of his Greek, a Greek laced with the raw power of persuasion over his ill-fated crewmates;
in Purgatory, he meets Arnault Daniel, who speaks in his own highly wrought Provençal, a model of vulgar eloquence;
and in Paradise, he meets Adam, who speaks in Dante's own terza rima, but speaks only to express his pre-linguistic animal instinct, revealing that all linguistic construction is finally fleeting, vulgar, and bent to the caprice of stars.
Of the three, it is Daniel who is most important for my story. Dante's great affection for the trobar was picked up on by Ezra Pound by 1910, when he published his study of Provançal culture and poetry, The Spirit of Romance.
Pound further transposed this affection onto Eliot through his imput on The Waste Land---recall that London Bridge falling nel foco che li affina.
Three years after Eliot published his poem, Fitzgerald sent him a copy of his new novel. While there's plenty to be said about the book, I've always had a special affinity for its very last utterence:
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
which, to me, echoes softly, but persistently out of the past:
Ieu sui Arnautz qu'amas l'aura
e cas la lebre ab lo bueu
e nadi contra suberna
I am Arnautz who love the wind
and chase the hare with the ox
and beat on against the current
the other side of paradise
or a view that occasionally reminds me of Fitz (that good ol' sport)
(13 Dec 2024)