L. MARINELLI On Milosz's debt to Dante

Luigi Marinelli

In the sphere of twentieth-century poetic Danteism, the work of Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) occupies a central position among numerous lines of intertextual and intercultural relations. Within that complex context of relations, the article aims to identify some of the constants and variants with respect to the multiple cultural and literary options, lines and interrelationships in which, directly or indirectly, Miłosz's Danteism is situated as a broad and luminous 'space of intersection'. The study of some important "nodes" that connect these lines (e.g. the Dante-Eliot-Miłosz node, the Dante-Conrad-Milosz node, the Dante-Gombrowicz-Milosz node) can be particularly interesting and innovative, as well as the investigation of the influence on Milosz's Dantism of writers-bridges between different cultures and orientations, all of them translingual, expatriates, exiles or stateless, such as Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Brzozowski, Brodskij, Heaney, and first and foremost Oscar Milosz, his initiator into knowledge of the Divine Comedy. So the judgement that Eliot made of his own Dantism certainly applies to Milosz's as well: «the important debt to Dante does not lie in a poet’s borrowings, or adaptation from Dante», but «is the kind of debt which goes on accumulating, the kind which is not the debt of one period or another of one’s life».

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