Playing Identity Politics: Political Uses of Dante in the Invention of Argentina

MARIANO PÉREZ CARRASCO

Boston

Congreso; Dante for the Americas; 2021

Harvard University - Dante Society of America

The paper explores the political uses of Dante in the creation of Argentine national identity from the mid-19th- to the mid-20th centuries. The Romantic myth of Dante as father of the Italian nation?a poet that would have foreseen in his verses not only the political, but also the linguistic unity of Italy?was unexpectedly adopted by Argentine intellectuals to build the cultural identity of the new nation. The political dimension of Dante?s reception in Argentina is a hardly studied and nonetheless fascinating topic. After a brief introduction to the political and cultural context of Argentina in that period, the paper focuses on three major moments in the history of Dante?s reception in that country: i) the debate between Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre (two remarkable intellectuals that would later become presidents of the republic) on the civic value of poetry, in which Dante?s example played a central role?this discussion would indeed lead to the first Latin American translation of the Divine comedy by the then former president of Argentina, Bartolomé Mitre, in the last decade of the 19th century; ii) Leopoldo Lugones?s interpretation of Dante as a distant origin of the Argentine ?race? within the framework of a Latin American adaptation of the medieval theory of the translatio studii et imperii in his 1916 masterpiece El payador (The Troubadour); iii) and, finally, Victoria Ocampo?s and Jorge Luis Borges?s autobiographical and political readings of Dante?s poem, in which the identity and the destiny of the Argentine nation is seen as part of the biography of the reader. The paper traces thereby the evolution of Dante?s reception in Argentina from an openly Romantic interpretation that emphasized the figure of Dante as a political fighter for freedom and the father of a new nation, to a more subjectivist reading, that sees in Dante?s poem an occasion for the building of a new personal and literary identity that would eventually be presented as the epitome of an already consolidated national identity. All the interpretations examined have in common that they use Dante as a myth?tantamount to the myth of the Dante risorgimentale?apt to answer the question about the meaning of being Argentine.