MARCO NANNINI WROTE:
>DEAR TOR,
>I WILL GO AND DO SOME RESEARCH AS YOUR QUEARY IS CONCERNED, YET I THINK THE
>PROBLEM TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT IS DIFFERENT. DANTE DOES NOT STATE ANYTHINK
>BECAUSE
>NOT ONLY DID NELLO KILL HER BUT PROBABLY HE DID IT IIN SUCH A VIOLENT AND
>CRUEL WAY
>THAT HE'LL RATHER SKIP IT. THE INTERPRATATION SOUNDS PERHAPS TOO NAIVE BUT
>THINK OF
>A SOUL LIKE PIA'S HAVING TO MENTION OF HER CRUEL DEAHTH, IT QUITE DOES NOT
>SUIT
>DANTE'S SIMPATHY TOWARDS THE SOULS HE MEETS, AND MOREOVER WHY WOULDN'T DANTE
>MANTION THE NAME OR AREFERENCE OF THE "KILLER" IF HE HAD BEEN SOMEONE BUT NOT
>HER BEHALF....
>
>MARCO NANNINI.
To which I reply:
Dear Marco,
Yes, I took your point the first time, but the point I was making in
response was that the whole story of Pia's being murdered by her husband
derives not from Dante's text as it stands, but from a tradition of
commentary which has, to my ear, the distinct flavour of a gratuitous gloss
on Dante's text, viz. the quotes from Lana and the Ottimo commento in my
previous post. It is particularly the circumstance that these two early
sources insist that the murder was committed secretly, and that the secret
was so successfully kept that only the perpetrator knew about it, which
makes me fairly sure that their only source was, not Dante's text, for as
you rightly point out Dante's text is silent here, but the imagination of
the commentators. This is not a problem which can be solved by "further
research", (so please don't do any on my behalf), but has to be referred to
a close reading of Dante's text itself.
My central point, to reiterate, is that we cannot know what is not said,
and "la Pia" in Dante's text does not say how she died, therefore there is
no way for us to know it. To take her silence as proof that she was
brutally murdered by her husband is, well, to take an unusual view of human
communication. But of course the reason that I am particularly unhappy
with the story of her murder by her husband is because I feel that it does
not fit into the general direction of the poem here. Which is a much
longer discussion, so I shall stop.
Tor
-----------------------------------------------------------
Tor Torhaug
Research fellow
University of Oslo
Department of Classical and Romance Studies
Postboks 1007 Blindern
0315 Oslo
Norway
Phone: +47-22 85 71 28
Fax: +47-22 85 44 52
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|