"Là è casa mia". intorno al dantismo di Czeslaw Milosz

In the context of 20th century poetic Dantism, Czesław Miłosz’s oeuvre (1911-2004) looms large among its many intertextual and intercultural connections. Amongst these multiple options, this essay sets out to identify some of the recurring and variant issues at work in Milosz’s Dantism, which can be considered a luminous “intersectional space”, starting from the beginning of Milosz’s career in the 30s to his death. Four main lines of investigation can be detected: the Polish line (Mickiewicz - Brzozowski - Gombrowicz - Vincenz), the Russian line (Puškin - Dostoevskij – Mandel’štam - Brodskij), the Anglo-American line (Blake - Eliot - Pound - Auden - Frost - Pinsky), the Anglo-Irish line (Yeats - Joyce - Beckett - Heaney). Analysing some of the most important intersection ‘points’ of these lines (e.g. Dante-Eliot-Milosz; Dante- Conrad-Milosz; Dante-Gombowicz-Milosz) as well as investigating the influence of Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Brzozowski, Brodskij, Heaney, and Oscar Milosz, Czeslaw’s relative, who first introduced him to Dante’s Commedia, might prove particularly interesting and groundbreaking. So this contribution takes into account not so much Milosz’s works directly dealing with Dante - the essays Religia i przestrzeń (‘Religion and space’, 1969), O piekle (‘On hell’) and Saligia (1979), the latter including the translation of vv. 91-105 of Purgatory XVII; Ziemia Ulro (‘The Land of Ulro’, 1977); the poem Dante, included in the collection Dalsze okolice (‘Provinces’, 1991), and other poems and essays - but attempts above all to investigate the “accumulation” of a threefold presence of Dante in Milosz’z works - a presence which can be explicit, invisible and unconscious – in the wake of T.S. Eliot’s statement in his celebrated lecture What Dante means to me: «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».