In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Holy Office raised a file with the Puebla master builder Melchor Pérez de Soto, accused of being a necromancer. After his apprehension, to pay charges against him, the inquisitors took and inventoried his library which contained – a luxury for a private individual of that period – 1663 volumes. Commented on the bookish relationship by Manuel Romero de Terreros, we find the best of Castilian literature up to that time, from Tirso de Molina to Ercilla, from Gracián to Góngora, but also numerous chivalric novels as if to drive Alonso Quijano crazy again, as well as books related to his trade, the Architecture of Vitruvius, of course, and others. “Nor were they missing,” notes the historian, ” Divine Comedy of Dante nor The Lusiads of Camoens ”. Fatally, in that delicacy of bibliophiles “the works of astrology were legion”, a situation that would end up aggravating the accusation of the master builder who would die in jail with stones, without convincing explanation, by his companion in captivity.
The Italian editions of the Commedia they were on the shelves of most of the conventual libraries of New Spain. The incunabula in the National Library of Mexico, printed in Venice in 1493, confirms the trade, reading and appreciation of this book since the dawn of the viceregal. For this reason, Sor Juana’s scholars are surprised that the Florentine’s poem was not among his “dear friends”; no allusion to Dante and his work is located in the writings of the nun Hieronymite. Did you read it and dismiss its merits? Did you incorporate it as part of what was floating in the air? Certainly the Rhymes, The vita nuova and the Commedia played the Spanish lyric in several of the exponents of the Golden Age, and of course, the poet of First dream was no exception. In this period, the sun of Petrarca eclipsed any other star, so the few remaining Dantists in the seventeenth century marched with “extinguished torches.” On the other hand, we must understand that that was a confusing time to distinguish between original versions and translations, periphrasis and imitations that circulated many times without copyright in the countries of Romance languages. Notwithstanding the Spanish translation of Enrique de Villena of the Divina Commedia (ca. 1428) or the version of Hell (1515) by Pedro Fernandez de Villegas, European printers and booksellers preferentially circulated the Tuscan classic in its original language until at least the beginning of the 19th century. The valuation of the Dantesque legacy in Mexico begins precisely in that century, and not so much in the area of letters but in that of painting and sculpture. With the refounding of the Academia de San Carlos, the work of Antonio López de Santa Anna In 1843, it was arranged that the brightest promising Mexican art be awarded scholarships to Europe with a stay at the Academia de San Lucas in Rome. The romanticism of the old continent, from Blake to Leopardi, from Goethe to Shelley, from Foscolo to Victor hugo, they had placed Dante Alighieri as one of its captains in the crusade against the old regime of reason and lights.
In their tours of museums and galleries, churches and public buildings in England, France and Italy, young Mexican artists would often come across canvases and murals, bronzes and marbles whose themes and characters came from the Commedia. A must for those students was the Louvre Museum. On those medieval walls Dante’s boat (1822) of Eugene Delacroix it would be a delayed station in the journey of those young people. Also in the city of light, at the Palace of Versailles, they were able to continue with the French painter’s Dantean passion and admire the murals of the five domes of the library painted between 1840 and 1847. On the Italian journey, Dante and his imaginary would fulfill expectations of our youthful prospects, whether these were the prodigious Juan Cordero, Santiago Rebull or Felipe S. Gutierrez. From the archives of the Academy of San Carlos it is known that Rebull presented a copy of the fresco by Raphael – The Dispute of the Sacrament painted in the Vatican – where the Florentine poet appears crowned with laurel between the pope Sixtus IV and Savonarola. Where will that canvas be? In addition, in the same files there is a record of three works entitled Dante and Virgil of the authorship of Manuel Buenabad, Isidro Santoyo and Rafael Flores placeholder image (1832-1889). The latter’s work, protected by the National Museum of Art, deserves the qualification of a capolavoro. Dated in 1855 and exhibited in the annual exhibition of the students of the academy, the canvas presents the two poets on the ledge of a mountain where they observe – with an evil glow on their faces – the valley of the bad advisers with Ulysses and Diomedes to the head; Thousands of souls swarm there, burning for eternity like nighttime torches.
However, the great tribute of the Commedia in the Mexican 19th century it was headed by the young architect Jacobo Galvez to whom the Academia de San Carlos rejected his scholarship application. However, with support from Guadalajara patrons, he will make the trip to Europe at the end of 1851; He will spend little more than a year between France and Italy to return with ideas and dreams that will soon materialize in his native Guadalajara. His most memorable work is the construction of the Degollado Theater (1856-1866) in whose vault he would paint —in collaboration with Gerardo Suarez and Carlos Villasenor– a recreation of canto IV of Hell, Limbo of the most noble castle of the sages and poets of antiquity. For the great Mexican painters and sculptors of the following century, the Florentine’s lyrical paintings will not call their attention to translate them into images and volumes, at least not in the coordinates and dimensions of the works of Auguste Rodin, Salvador Dali or Miquel Barceló. There are small approaches such as the vignettes that he made Jose Clemente Orozco for the Basque edition of The Divine Comedy of 1921 and an ink on a passage from Canto XXI del Infierno, a plaster piece of Ignacio Asúnsolo of a sculptural project on Dante that was proposed to be erected in the Alameda Central, the drawings of Guillermo Guzman for the book Dante Alighieri, his life, his work and his time (1983) from Oscar Flores Tapia and illustrations of Isabel Leñero for editing Hell (1989) from Vicente Leñero, a parodic and “Mexicanized” version of the Florentine’s poem. In the vast world of lost illusions, there remains the possibility – a dream of a master engraver or an exquisite editor – of having raised a graphic folder or a Dantesque edition with pieces by José Clemente Orozco for Hell, by Diego Rivera recreating Purgatory and Rufino Tamayo for the sacred planets of Paradise.
Among our modernists, the work of the Florentine hardly found modest tributes: the sonnet “To Dante” from his book Verses of 1890 and the poem “In front of the house degli Alighieri” by Luis G. Urbina, as well as the couplets “Incip vita nova” of Loved nerve of his posthumous work The last moon. By then the translations of The Divine Comedy of the Count of Cheste —in verse and third rhyme—, released in 1868, to be followed by prose versions of Manuel Aranda and San Juan in 1869 and the one carried out, also in prose, by Cayetano Rosell in 1872. After those three Spanish editions, Bartolomé Miter he would publish his, also in verse and with rhyme, in 1889. One of these versions in prose bought the young and poor man Jose Vasconcelos, as referred to in your Ulises Criollo, in a lance bookstore on one side of the Cathedral, a reading that disturbed the spirits and affirmed the character of the future philosopher, confirming the main place of the Italian: “In Milton artifice is noticed, in Shakespeare the pathetic vein of wounded ambition tires and always human. Only Dante in each verse embodies a portion of eternal reality ”. Without being a central presence in their interests, Alfonso Reyes writes a short essay, “Dante and the science of his time”, useful to read the Commedia with keys from the 14th century. From the generation of Contemporaries, except for a few Dantesque winks from Carlos Pellicer, Xavier Villaurrutia will write a high-flying, intense and restless poem, “Amore condusse noi ad una norte”, a title taken from the parliament of Francesca da Rimini from canto V of Hell. By multiple references, we verify that Octavio Paz he fully read Dante although he did not consecrate an essay or an article on his legacy. On the occasion of the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri, in 1965, the essay was published On Dante’s path, 1265-1965 of Samuel Ruiz Cabins, the Latin translation of Eclogues of DA in charge of Ruben Bonifaz Nuño, in the Magazine of the University of Mexico of the month of May. Jaime Garcia Terrés celebrates the anniversary in his column “The fair of the days” and publishes fragments of the Commedia and of The vita nuova in translation of Homer Aridjis and in the month of July he shares an essay by Vittore Branca on the most scrupulous edition of La vida nueva, while the Revista de Bellas Artes dedicated its number 2 to the Tuscan vate in whose index you can read “The Epitaph of Dante” by Boccaccio in version of Eduardo Lizalde, the mysterious letter to Can Grande della Scala, essays by Santayana, Guardini, Pound, Eliot, Borges, Ungaretti … The institutional celebrations were carried out by the Secretary of Public Education, Agustin Yanez, in a speech, “Dante, integral conception of man and history”, read at the Palacio de Bellas Artes on May 19, 1965 and published in a careful plaquette. In his dissertation, he would recall the commemorative act of 1921, in which his counterpart at that time, Vasconcelos, pronounced this phrase: “after reading Dante we feel like new men in the face of an infinite destiny”.
Ten years after the birthday celebration, in 1975, the most complete study written by a Mexican will be published, Dante Alighieri from Antonio Gomez Robledo, work of many years of research in libraries of Europe and America where he analyzes the entire corpus of Dantesque work and its probable sources. At the time, there was not a volume of such dimension and depth in Spanish, a work that owes much to his years as ambassador in Rome (1967-1970), where he would listen, every Sunday, to a specialist in the field in the famous Cathedra Dantis Romana. Among the modern translations of The Divine Comedy is the one made by the Guanajuato Salvador Sanchez, published by Libro Mex Editores in 1958, a somewhat marginal effort that would be worth rereading. The ideal candidate for a “Mexican” version of the Tuscan classic was the indefatigable Guillermo Fernandez, translator of a hundred titles of Italian authors. Interestingly, one of his first jobs would be The divine comedy: thirteen songs from Dante Alighieri’s “El Infierno” and other texts 1981, perhaps the foundation for later embarking on the complete journey of the hundred songs of the immortal poem. His assassination in 2012 deprived us of that possibility. More recently, the Dante (2019) of Marco Perilli, a very personal reading of the journey from beyond the grave with connections to other readings, especially modern ones, and with epicurean enjoyment stations to comment on passages, triplets or verses where the major art of the Florentine turns to the minimum, the intimate and the subtle. To conclude the account of Dante in Mexico, the Martín Pescador Workshop of Juan Pascoe edited this 2021 -exquisiteness for bibliophiles- Six songs by Dante Alighieri in version of Francisco Segovia.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/dante-alighieri-his-traces-in-mexico/
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