Serious Applause for Robert Hollander

By Nicholas Desai | Monday, July 16, 2007

One early afternoon last autumn, Robert Hollander was arguing a point in a lecture when he suddenly, and certainly not after having been challenged, went all in. If, he explained, he could be proved wrong on this point, then he has been wrong for so long and misled so many people that he promised not only to refrain from writing any more about Dante but also to issue a public apology. “Isn’t that what we should all do?” he mused through a sly, white-mustached smile. “I have a number of colleagues who ought to do that.”

Wheeled around by his assistant, an Italian graduate student, Hollander, his arms folded, wears the look of a stately don, even in his wheelchair, until he speaks, evincing a young man’s energy and daring. In his estimation, The Divine Comedy is the world’s greatest poem. “It’s beautifully structured, it’s got complex thought, and it has a vision of God for the climax—I mean, you want more? Tell me where I can go buy it.” In a barely lit and barren room in Blunt, his face glows with excitement.

He has taught his course on the Comedy here at Dartmouth before in 1979 and 1982, though he is on the faculty of Princeton, from which he graduated in 1955. A well-recognized Dantist for decades, he has written scholarly articles and books, but only this year will his greatest contribution to the field be completed: a collaboration with his wife, the poet Jean Hollander, on a translation and detailed, line-by-line commentary on the poem. In August, Random House will publish their Paradiso, and the whole picture, as filtered through the Hollander lens, will become clear.
Unlike other scholars and poets who have written their translations in blank verse or the terza rima used by Dante himself, the Hollanders have chosen the less constricting form of free verse; their lines appear side-by-side with the original Italian. The rich notes following each canto deliver both necessary background to the events of the Comedy as well as a clearly stated explication de texte.

Robert Hollander pictured with his wife Jean Hollander.

His sources of interpretation are various, including fellow scholars, his own readings, and the readings of his many students, whom he cites by name. “People say this, and I sometimes question their honesty, to be truthful,” he says, “but, my God, I have learned so much from my students. I like retirement, but I miss the stimulation from students.” One of his critics, he noted, saw little to praise in his work except that he cited his students.

This kind of honesty about his scholarship--he admits, for example, that he once figured out a subtle point about Dante in the middle of a lecture--is also linked to his belief that the poem is accessible to all. Traveling around Italy, he is sometimes in conversation initially taken for a dentist instead of a Dantist (the words are as similar in Italian as they are in English), but attempts to engage regular people about Dante. If he meets people in a café or on a train, and they ask him what he, an American, is doing in Italy, his response often astounds them, for why would an American study Dante? “Almost all of the ordinary Italians—businessmen, working people—say, ‘I hated Dante in school!’ ‘That’s because you weren’t taught right,’ I respond. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, for instance, you were taught that Virgil represented “reason,” right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, that’s totally incorrect.’ And they go bonkers—becoming either angry or interested.”

It is perhaps because of Hollander’s belief that the poem belongs to the people that he speaks with such admiration of Roberto Benigni, the Italian director and actor. Known to Americans mostly for his film Life is Beautiful, the man has lately embarked on a quest to bring Dante to people “who have banished him from their lives,” as Hollander puts it. Though he admits he and the director are “about as different as two people can be,” the professor feels that they are the same in at least two respects: their lack of interest in playing to received opinion and their passion for Dante. During a meeting, Hollander told Benigni that if he offered him a chair in Dante studies at a university, the man would drop show business and become a full-time scholar. “He laughed, he didn’t say anything—but I still think that’s right.”

On Christmas 2002, Italian state radio/TV decided, against their better judgment, to give Benigni an hour and a half for Dante recitation—by memory, of course. Hollander recalls that about thirteen or fourteen million people tuned in—an immense percentage of the Italian population. (A credit to Italy: If Kenneth Branagh were to speak soliloquies on PBS, one doubts such a percentage of the American Idol set would even notice it in the TV guide.) In Hollander’s estimation, Benigni recites Dante as well as it can be done. He doesn’t overdramatize: “He just lets the poem work on you; he releases the poem into the air.” Benigni continues to recite around Italy, appearing recently for two nights (there were traffic jams) at the Arena di Verona, an immense Roman amphitheater which Hollander suspects is the model for the stadium in paradise. Hollander once snuck into the Arena during a horse show, making believe he was involved in the show, and stood in the middle of the amphitheater floor and looked up, saying “My God! It’s Paradiso!”

On the surface, a rift appears between Hollander’s professed disregard for the “compact majority” and his hope that greater numbers of non-scholars will take up the Comedy or other important literature. One book he reveres but considers underread is Rameau’s Nephew by Denis Diderot, a book his wife does not much care for, nor do many of his colleagues. He insinuated it into a great books course. “I’d always put it on the syllabus, then when I’d go on leave, they’d take it out; I’d come back and put it back in.” But perhaps the key to relaxing this tension is his remark that “The common understanding of Dante isn’t worth squat, but the common enjoyment is.” Enjoyment, as opposed to clean, cerebral figuring out, can be had from Dante, he insists. To prove it, he encourages his students to read the entire poem from start to finish, without recourse to footnotes, sitting under a tree. Even without scholarly expertise, he argues, someone can miss entire “playing fields” of the text and still appreciate a vast, colorful one.

The young Hollander might have been surprised to discover that he would spend his life studying a medieval poet. “My and my father’s plans for me were, when I was at Princeton, to graduate, even if barely, and then go to Harvard Business School, make a lot of money, sleep with a lot of women.” All Princeton undergraduates must write a thesis; Hollander churned one out in Greenwich Village during two weeks of his senior year. He feels he robbed myself of an education at Princeton. After college, he spent time tutoring, teaching at a New York prep school, and giving tennis lessons to “rich brats,” while beginning his graduate studies at Columbia.

Hollander started out graduate school as a modernist, intending to study Henry Green and Henri Michaux. This was Columbia, and he had to teach in the Great Books Course, which included Dante. “What I said to myself was, ‘If this was the greatest medieval poet, I am really glad I’m a modernist.’ Yet although I didn’t like Dante very much, and I didn’t understand him, I was smart enough to know that I was missing something key.”

He asked various people “What am I not getting about Dante? How does allegory work?” but found no satisfactory answer until one day in the library when he stumbled upon the annual report of the Dante Society of America. In it was an article by Charles Singleton—the publication used to publish only one article per issue—making a distinction between the “allegory of the poets” and the “allegory of the theologians.” Suddenly, the poem began to work. “I had a genuine raptus. Uh, I left my body. I didn’t know where I was, but I was with the argument of this article, and came back to myself maybe two hours, three hours later holding the periodical in my left hand at my side, looking out the window watching a tennis ball go back and forth outside John Jay Hall on the Columbia campus. And my first conscious thought that I remember was, ‘So that’s how it works,’ which I believe I said aloud. And then left the library determined to study Dante.” He identifies this as a Pauline moment, a conversion not to a religion but to Dante.

Though not a religious man, Professor Hollander seems to revere the Comedy to an extent that seems nearly religious. The impulse, though, does not bring out woolly-headed obsession with the poem’s rank in the canon but instead renewed determination to understand the text and enjoy it. Throughout our conversation, Hollander returns most often not to arcane academic disputes but to the popular recitations of Benigni.

“So, here’s this actor reciting it to a studio audience, and the whole thing started out as typical Benigni. He was running around like a little boy--it’s one of his personae, the little boy-clown. He was dancing on the stage. And all of a sudden he starts talking about Dante, and it took about an hour and fifteen minutes to get to his recital, and that went for about seven minutes, beginning “Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio…” and going on for 145 lines of that canto; when he got to the end of it, there was this total silence and then no bravos. I don’t know about you, but anytime I hear “Bravo!” I sense fakery, either in the performance or in the audience or both—if you really get to people, they sit there stunned for a while. Total silence.

“Montaigne has a great line about moments of stirring virtue (he’s thinking of Cato, one of Dante’s heroes, too); these bring one to silent admiration and a sense of redirection, and he describes this moment as magnetized needles hanging in a chain. And that’s what happened that moment with Benigni. Everything stopped, and everything had meaning, and for one moment everything was understandable and beautiful, the way we wish it always were, and then this total, harnessed applause—no shouts—but serious applause.”

Serious Applause for Robert Hollander

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