BOOK: Giovanni Pontano, "Dialogues" (Vols. 2 and 3)

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano: Dialogues. Vol. 2: Actius. Edited and translated by Julia Haig Gaisser. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 91. Harvard University Press, 2020. 9780674237186. xi + 463 pp.

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano: Dialogues. Vol. 3: Aegidius and Asinus. Translated by Julia Haig Gaisser. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 92. Harvard University Press, 2020. 9780674248465. xi + 264 pp.

Eight years after the first ITRL volume of Pontano's dialogues, the remaining two volumes have finally been published — better late than never :)

Actius

The second volume contains just one dialogue, Actius, which is thus much longer than the two dialogues we saw in the first volume. Apart from that you might say it has much in common with Antonius. The characters are Pontano's humanist friends, who together with him constituted a kind of “academy”, though perhaps this term suggests a more formal institution than this really was (the translator of the present volume consistently calls it a “sodality”, which seems to be little more than a fancy Latin term for ‘a group of friends’).

There is pretty much no plot, and frankly very little dialogue; it is more like a series of monologues. The friends take turns delivering long and learned speeches which they must surely have prepared in advance, and the result in many ways resembles less a normal conversation between people than a formal session of some learned society, with papers being read and lectures being given. The topics do not change quite so frequently and wildly as they do in Antonius. The dialogue is named after Actius Sincerus, the academic pseudonym of the poet Jacopo Sannazaro (we had a volume of his poetry in the ITRL a few years ago; see my post about it), who does the largest share of the talking in this dialogue.

I wonder how Pontano's friends felt about appearing as characters in his dialogue, characters which (I presume) deliver Pontano's opinions that may or may not have agreed with what that particular friend really thought. Well, judging by the introduction that one of these friends wrote for the first printed edition of Pontano's dialogues (which he prepared for publication after Pontano's death), they seemed to like it (vol. 2, p. 341–9).

Well, without further ado, let's have a look at the various topics discussed in this dialogue:

§1–4: a short comical scene as an introduction, involving two peasants that appear before a notary to transfer the title of a house from one to the other. Much of the humour here seems to be is supposed to be derived from word-play, ridiculous personal names and the like; but I didn't find it very funny. One of the peasants is so uneducated that when he hears, in the text of the contract, something about buying the house “for himself, his children, [. . .] with the entire posterity”, he thinks this refers to the back part of the house and keeps insisting that he wants to buy the anterity as well. At the end of the scene, Pontano's humanist friends show up as witnesses to the transaction, at which point the dialogue turns into a learned discussion between them and all pretence to a plot is hastily abandoned.

§5–10: Actius remembers his late friend, Ferrante Gennaro (a Neapolitan diplomat), who appeared to him in a dream and told him that the soul after death yearns to be reunited with the body.

§13–18: various Latin usages that some pedants object to, but that actually have plenty of support in the work of important Roman authors.

§19–21: dreams and where they come from; they are a mechanism whereby an external mind (mens) provides an individual person's mind (animus) with information, prophecies etc. (a view “of dubious orthodoxy”, n. 61 on p. 404).

§22–56: a long section about the various sound effects in (Latin) poetry, especially rhythm but also effects arising from a juxtaposition of sounds, either pleasing repetition of the same sounds or syllables (this includes a discussion of alliteration, a term apparently coined by Pontano himself; see n. 233 on p. 419), or rough clusters of harsh consonants if that's the effect that the poet wants to go for.

Pontano gives countless examples, especially from Virgil, in which we can supposedly observe these things; but sadly, I was able to profit very little from this section, and overall found it much more boring than I had hoped. Knowing no Latin, I could notice some of the repetitions of sounds, though I'm not sure if they really have such a big effect on how the line sounds as Pontano claims; but maybe my sense of these things just isn't finely-tuned enough.

But when he talks about rhythm, he loses me completely. I guess that the problem is that in Latin poetry the metre was based on the length of syllables, but besides this words also had stress, so the poet had, as it were, two (somewhat) independent things to play with, and could use this to achieve a certain rhythm. But since I don't know any Latin, I had no idea which vowels are long, couldn't feel the metre of the verse, and could make only the most tentative guesses as to which vowels are stressed.

If there really is any rhythm in the examples Pontano gives, I was unfortunately not in the position to notice it or appreciate it; and the English translations of his examples convey (with a very few exceptions) only the meaning of the originals, not the sound effects that may be present in them.

It also didn't help that Pontano often speaks of rhthym in very impressionistic terms, as something that can be ‘weak’ or ‘strengthened’ and the like, and clearly has many quite determined opinions along the lines of ‘a word of x syllables, in the y-th foot of the line, does/doesn't sound good’. Such statements, without any explanation of why they are supposed to be true, are of little use to someone like me, but would probably be interesting to someone that knows Latin. But I would love to read something about this topic with examples in Slovenian or English, where I'd have some chance of seeing what's going on.

§57–60: miscellaneous Latin etymologies. They don't all sound quite as wacky as some of the others that we've encountered in the ITRL series over the years, but I'm still not quite sure how much to trust them. For instance, there's the idea that a root am ‘round’ is the basis of such diverse words as hamus ‘hook’, annus ‘year’ “because it returns in a circle”, amnis ‘stream’ “because the courses of rivers are usually full of turns”, anulus ‘ring’ and anus ‘anus’ from their shape, anus ‘old woman’ because “an old person's posture bends forward [. . .] and becomes curved” (§59).

§61–8: a comparison of history and poetry. Nowadays historians probably think of themselves as doing some sort of social science, but in ancient times, as well as in Pontano's day, one gets the impression that history was thought of as more of a branch of literature; the historian and the poet both “undertake the narration of matters far removed from the business at hand” (p. 207), the difference is only in whether they are real or fictional. There is also a difference in style: “history is purer in style, poetry more extravagant” (p. 199); he continues with a funny analogy: the difference between the style of history and that of poetry is like the difference between a sober matron and a heavily made-up girl :))). Pontano gives a number of examples from Livy and Sallust of historical writing with a literary, even poetic, quality (§64, 67).

Incidentally, there's a funny instance of anachronism in translation on p. 229: one of the participants in the dialogue admonishes another by saying “I am certainly not going to allow you range any farther, Altilio, and waltz around [exultare] outside the prescribed limits”. And of course you can't help thinking ‘wait a minute, this dialogue was written in the 15th century, and the waltz was invented circa 1800...’ The OED's earliest citation of this word in English is from 1781, and Byron wrote a satirical poem about this new, shocking, lewd form of entertainment in 1812, when it was introduced into England. Thus seeing it here in a 15th-century context is definitely a bit jarring.

§69–72: again a section about etymology, this time mostly about words that emerged as contractions of earlier forms: e.g. vinum ‘wine’ is supposedly a contraction of vitinum, derived from vitis ‘vine’ (p. 239). He is particularly interested in words containing x, which he says is often from an earlier ss (p. 231); this surprised me as I had the impression that the change usually goes in the opposite direction, e.g. we see that Latin x developed into Italian ss, and likewise for other ‘hard to pronounce’ combinations of a stop and another consonant (ct and pt turned into tt).

§73–88: the discussion of historical writing is resumed. The historian should of course be truthful and unbiased, and his style should be neither too long-winded nor so terse as to be obscure. Poliziano recommends an interesting technique that he calls “speed” (celeritas), which he describes as “a short and precise summing up or enumerating and combining of several things and words at the same time” (§76); he gives a few examples of this and they do seem to move the narrative forward at a very lively pace.

He gives some oddly specific advice on what things a historian should write about, and in what order (§79–84) — oddly specific in that it seems to assume that you're Sallust or Livy and are writing about ancient Roman politics and warfare :) When reporting on speeches made by generals before battle, you should include “not only the things reported to have been said by commanders but also what they might have said” (§82) — a bit too speculative for my taste, but unsurprising if you remember that they saw history as almost a branch of literature.

But what I found even more disappointing is that Pontano specifically enjoins the historian to “assume the role of a judge, to praise, condemn, admire, disparage, pity” (§85) — but surely that is precisely the last thing I want a historian to do. Passing judgment is cheap and easy and I can do it myself if I want to; what I expect from the historian is the part that I can't do myself, namely to figure out what really happened.

§89–94: an interesting comparison of the different goals of poetry and rhetoric. The orator, Pontano says, may be satisfied even if he does merely a solid job; but a poet seeks to win admiration, and will be a failure if he produces a work of merely average quality. Historians borrow some elements of a poetic style to make their writing more elegant (§93). “[O]f all learned men it was the poets who appeared first” (§94), and the earliest ancient philosophers and lawgivers followed their example by writing in verse.

Aegidius

This dialogue is named after Egidio (or Giles) of Viterbo, a learned monk who however does not appear in it directly and is only mentioned briefly near the beginning and end (§6–11, 66–7).

§1–5: the dialogue opens with two visitors, Suardino and Peto, who come to Naples to meet Pontano and attend some meetings of his circle. Later a number of Pontano's friends will also appear in the conversation, though the details of their arrival are left unspecified.

After some preliminary chitchat, the conversation turns to a recently deceased preacher, friar Mariano, and his successor, Egidio (§6). Pontano recounts a short sermon by Egidio (§7–11). This sermon confirmed my impression that I just don't like sermons as a genre. It proceeded mostly by blind assertion, free association, and vigorous gesticulation, never gave any real arguments for its claims, and obviously relied on the assumption that the audience already agrees with everything in it. This makes sense, of course — sermons are meant to be heard by a congregation in a church, after all. It just means that there's not much point in a non-believer like me reading them.

§12–16: on the immortality of the soul; Pontano claims that the belief in it was the original and more or less universal state of affairs, while the idea that the soul might be mortal is a comparatively recent innovation by a few foolish philosophical schools.

§17–18: on the recent death of Gabriele Altilio, who then appeared in a vision to a certain monk, enjoining Pontano and his friends to use their learning for good religious purposes rather than for “trifles and silly stories”. Later we also hear Altilio's last words (§37).

§19–23: Pontano talks about the origin of oracles: “heavenly powers know what things they will set in motion in the future” (§21).

§26–29: a discussion on where a didactic poet should begin his instruction. For example, Virgil, in a section about beekeeping, starts by teaching how to choose a site for your bee-hive; but in a section about farming, he starts not by teaching how to choose a location of your field, but jumps straight to ploughing. Pontano's discussion of this apparent inconsistency struck me as rather pointless — as if there was any need to justify a poet's random choices in matters like this. He observes, reasonably enough, that where the poet begins depends on what he assumes the audience to know already (e.g. how to choose the location of your field; §28).

§30–34: an interesting comparison of the pagan ideas about Elysium and christian ideas about heaven. Except for the presence of god in the latter (§34), Pontano describes them in such a way that they appear quite similar. In both systems there was the idea that the soul is a sort of prisoner in the body (§30), is released after death, and goes to a better place if the person took good care of it in life.

§35–6: they briefly remember their friend Actius (Jacopo Sannazaro), who has followed his employer, King Federico, into exile in France. Pontano includes a poem composed by Actius on his departure.

§38–43: Pontano's friend Cariteo announces that he now follows Hermes Trismegistus rather than Plato (§38) — in other words, his fondness for mystical neoplatonic arglebargle has intensified :)) Somewhat more seriously: his reason seems to be that Hermes is even better compatible with christianity. Discussing how god was able to create the universe from nothing, Cariteo's explanation is that it wasn't really from nothing, since everything was already encompassed in the “Word of God”... (§41).

§44–45: an interesting if somewhat hair-splitting terminological discussion about two closely related words, carentia (lack) and privatio (privation), both of which were previously used in §40. Poliziano says that some philosophers inappropriately use the latter one instead of the former, and that privatio is suitable only when something has been actively deprived of something, rather than when it already lacked that something to begin with. It was interesting to see that English has borrowed so many Latin words that much of this discussion almost makes sense in English as well :) Incidentally, it seems that the word private is also from the same root (p. 77).

§46–57: a discussion on the validity of astrology. Pontano tries to strike a middle course between total credulity (like that of Marsilio Ficino) and total skepticism (like that of Pico della Mirandola). He suggests that the stars do have some influence, especially over the material world, the elements and humours in the human body — but at the same time people still have free will and it would be foolish to expect that astrology can predict the future exactly.

§58–65: more terminological discussions. Pontano complains that people inappropriately use dispositio (“arrangement” or disposition) to refer to a person's natural inclinations or aptitudes, but in his view that word is only appropriate for something that has been deliberately arranged in some order, not for a natural aptitude (§59); he suggests the word habilitas (“ability”) instead (§60). I think his complaints, both here and earlier, make a lot of sense, but I wonder how successful he was with them. Unfortunately, when enough people misuse language in a certain way, their misuse becomes the new standard. It seems that even a dead language wasn't entirely immune to this problem.

Asinus

This dialogue is quite unlike the previous ones, and felt like a breath of fresh air. There is very little of the pedantic monologues on obscure philological subjects here, and a lot more actual dialogue. If the previous ‘dialogues’ read more like thinly-veiled academic treatises, this one felt more like actual fiction, so that I'm almost wondering if I should put a spoiler warning here before I summarize its contents. And if the previous dialogues are somewhat strait-laced, this one is just plain bizarre, as if the author had kissed all sense and sanity goodbye and embarked for one last voyage aboard the good ship Fancy.

§1–10: news comes to Naples that the war between the king of Naples and the pope is over, to which it seems that Pontano's work as a diplomat had also contributed very substantially (§4). But Pontano does not appear directly in this part of the dialogue; we see things from the perspective of unnamed random people, a traveller and an innkeeper, the latter of which is of course very happy because the peace will be good for his business (§2, 5–6). A group of Irish pilgrims also appears in the inn (§7, 10), though they don't participate in the dialogue. This all feels fairly whimsical, as does the whole dialogue — random unexpected things keep happening out of nowhere, for no obvious reason and without developing into anything obviously significant for the story as a whole. I'm sure there are people who like that sort of fiction, but I'm not really one of them.

Incidentally, it seems that, despite his efforts as a diplomat, Pontano couldn't resist one last barb at the pope's expense, and, pointing out that the pope himself has a son and a daughter, suggests mischievously that this is “a miraculous proof of the Christian religion”: “Indeed, if little grandchildren are born from God, doesn't it perhaps follow that Christ himself also came forth from a woman's womb?” (§10) I expected that the pope in question would be Rodrigo Borgia, but it turns out to be his immediate predecessor Innocent VIII (n. 26 on p. 206).

§11–18: the dialogue now finally switches to its main subject. Asinus, of course, is the Latin word for an ass or donkey, and it turns out that Pontano has evidently gone mad in his dotage, he now has a pet ass, decks it out in all sorts of finery and rides it around the town (§11). Three of his friends, whom we already encountered in earlier dialogues, hear about this and decide to visit Pontano at his villa, about one hour's walk uphill from Naples, to see if they can bring him to his senses. He had still been sane during his recent time as a diplomat in Rome, at any rate (§16–17).

§19–20: a short scene between Pontano and his steward Faselius (a ‘speaking name’, as often with minor characters in Pontano's dialogues: it's from phaselus, ‘bean’; n. 42 on p. 208). They discuss the grafting of plants and disagree on how much importance the phase of the moon has on it — another example of a whimsical, unexpected change of topic.

§22–26: things are getting increasingly ridiculous. In this scene, Pontano and his stableboy are brushing and petting the ass and listening, with rapt delight, to the animal's braying and farting... and more: “after great thunderclaps, great showers of rain; could it have been done mor egracefully and more to the rhythm? O Arabian wares, perfumes of Saba!” (§22). But the ass proves to have a bad temper, it kicks the boy (§24) and eventually Pontano as well (§26). This is what finally brings him to his senses and makes him realize how foolish he has been.

§27–29: the steward announces he is going to get married, and he and Pontano quite happily come to an arrangement whereby, in exchange for money and various gifts, Pontano will be a... third party to their marriage. The bride is apparently young enough that her pubic hair doesn't grow yet (§29), which sounds like it would raise a few eyebrows in some quarters nowadays (and other things in other quarters perhaps :]). But I don't judge, and I think we can all be glad that at any rate the frisky old devil hasn't tried to screw the donkey :)

§30–32: Pontano's friends, having observed the last several scenes from hiding, now emerge and make no allusion to his recent madness, being apparently content just to see that he is cured of it. Indeed Pontano himself acts as if nothing had happened (“I have recently contemplated affairs of the heavens in this solitude”, §32), and the dialogue thus ends on a happy if somewhat sudden note.

Well, this was certainly a wild ride. I'm not sure what to make of the whole thing. The translator's introduction suggests (vol. 3, p. x) that this dialogue might be “an allegory in which Pontano uses the ass to inveigh against some ungrateful and powerful person”, but it's not clear who that might be. And even if this were true, there's still so many other things in the dialogue that make no sense at all (e.g. the sudden shifts of topic, lurching whimsically into all sorts of random directions) and that show Pontano in a bad light (his insane infatuation with the ass, not to mention his indecent arrangement with the steward and his wife). The dialogue was written late in Pontano's life, and perhaps by then he had simply decided that he had, to put it in a vigorous modern idiom, run out of fucks to give.

In any case, the zaniness of this last dialogue helps conclude the whole series on a pleasant note, after the middle three dialogues which could sometimes be a little on the boring side. But from a certain perspective, all these dialogues are interesting to read, because they are quite unlike anything we usually encounter today. Nobody mixes fiction with academic elements in their writings nowadays, or writes philological treatises in the form of dialogues. I'm not saying that they should, of course — clearly this is the sort of thing that is only viable when an academic discipline is in its infancy. So Pontano's dialogues are an example of something that we probably won't see any more of today, and reading them is a little like visiting a museum to see a fossil skeleton of some extinct animal that you won't see in nature any more; something new and different, even if not super exciting.

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These two volumes also mark a little milestone for me: for the first time since the ITRL series was started almost 20 years ago, I have caught up with it, and read all the volumes that have been published so far. Woo hoo :) Now I plan to go back and re-read three early volumes that don't have their posts on this blog yet, because I had initially read them before starting the blog. So, stay tuned.