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“As a Leaf on a Branch …”: Dante's Neologisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Joseph Luzzi
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Abstract

This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in the Commedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry [18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language in Paradiso 26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration in Paradiso that joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’

Type
Cluster: Philology Matters
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 2 , March 2010 , pp. 322 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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