Book Review
Dante Alighieri: Monarchia. Edited by Prue Shaw for the Società Dantesca Italiana, 2009

More valuable than all of mine, your book
Is neatly kept like everything you do:
So clearly worth the twenty years it took,
It sparkles. Fonts well chosen, margins true,
Its every creamy page exhales the sense
Of learned judgment, tact and permanence.

If Dante waited seven centuries
To see his Latin tract receive such care
He can't complain, though being hard to please
No doubt he did while he was lying there
Still exiled in Ravenna, still annoyed
That so much effort has to be employed

In re-establishing what he first wrote.
But what could he expect? He worked by hand,
And other hands, on skins of sheep and goat,
Made copies, and those went to every land
In Europe, and were copied once again,
And soon for every error there were ten.

Tracing the manuscripts back to the first
Few spin-offs is as good as you can get.
Often you don't get that, and at the worst
A copy's copy's copy's the best bet,
And so the scholar must compare, contrast,
And from the past deduce a deeper past.

It takes far more than sweat. It takes a mind
That can connect with the great poet's heart,
Knowing his sweet new style was spare, refined,
Tough, difficult, precise in every part,
And therefore apt to be fudged in its gist
By scribes half qualified and some half pissed.

Such minds are rare, and often in disguise
They come into the world. My only role
In your brave saga is that I was wise
Enough to see the brilliant scholar's soul
Shine through her beauty in the lecture hall
Even before we met. I guessed it all.

How could that be? Well, here is how it can:
You took notes at the same speed that I ate,
With an eye for truth unknown to mortal man,
Especially this man. It was my fate
To fish the surface but my luck to see
You hungered for a deeper clarity.