소리내는 언어: 단테의 속어

Abstract

Latin had been losing its power and currencysince the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, and the so-called Romance languages insistently replaced it in the spoken as well as written languages. In Italy, such radical linguistic change yielded its first visible achievement in literary form in Federico’s court in Sicily in the 12thcentury, and along with the toscaneggiameto supported by the large scale of transcription the linguistic transition moved toward northern Italy to converge into the Dolce stil novo at the end of 13th century. Dante and his companionsin the Dolce stil novo were able to suggest a new form of Italian vernacular thanks to the economic and cultural development of Firenze. Dante was irresistibly located in the center of such a radical transition from Latin to Italian vernacular, which occurred as part of the big shift of the entire world and history from the Medieval to the modern era. Simply from his strong-willed response to the demand of his time, he considered such indispensable human concerns as salvation, justice, community, and love, and the issue of vernacular was undoubtedly one of the fundamental questions. He already seems to have felt the necessity of explaining how he dealt with the hot issue of the vernacular when he wrote hisfirst literary book Vita nova. Although he chose to use the Italian vernacular for this unique composition of poetry and prose, proposing a way of communicating human emotion by expressing his love toward Beatrice, he showed, as Gayatri Spivak points out in her feminist observation about Beatrice not understanding Latin language, a consciousness of the transition from Latin to the Italian vernacular. This work wasfollowed by a decade of new experiences of philosophy and politics, and more decisively, his lifelong exile after which he expressed his firm belief in the Italian vernacular in his extraordinary achievement La divina commedia, as well as discussing the issue of languages in his philosophical writing Convivio and his more serious book on language, De vulgari eloquentia. In so doing, he proposed, in theoretical and creative writings, that the Italian vernacular was the most crucial problem in his contemporary culture and successfully suggested its complete form. His choice of the Italian vernacular instead of Latin in his writings was mainly for the purpose of making his language a tool for communication with the world in which he was situated. What is crucial here is that we call this language of communication the literary vernacular language. Dante pursued writing in the literary vernacular through his experience of translation. Dante states that “the first one who started to write poetry inthe vernacular started to do so because he wanted to make his wordscomprehensible to women, who found it difficult to follow Latin verses.”(Vita nova. XXV.6) We may infer that his statement corroborates the idea that the first poets who used the Italian vernacular thought in the Latin; thus, for them, to write in the Italianvernacular was a sort of translation. Indeed the Italian vernacular took its complete form and usage only when they were no longer conscious of thinking in Latin or translating Latin into the Italian vernacular; at this very point, Italian as the mother tongue became their literary language. This observation is noteworthy in order to understand Dante’s challenge to form a new language because the vernacular he invented was converged into the literary language which was his ultimate perfection. His challenge was successful in that he didn’t forget that his vernacular includes traces of its origins, stemming from sound and thing (This is why we call his linguistic pursuit ‘experience’). Only in this way could hemake his vernacular a literary language and further it to make the different languages and cultures communicate. By creating the literary vernacular language as such Dante was able to prepare the platform on which he moves from the ‘dead memory’ of the center-language to the ‘living voice’ of the periphery-language. Dante’s vernacular leads him to learn Latin and acquire knowledge, so the vernacular for Dante is the fundamental basis andenergy for the creation of literary language. Positioning himself on the summitof Paradise the pilgrim loses the competence of human language and mentions theconcept of ‘ineffability’. This is, to borrow from Agamben, a poetic event whichderives from the distinction between the intellect and language; the intellectcannot grasp what language says and language does not completely follow what the intellect comprehends. What matters here is that that language indicates the vernacular; the vernacular is the language that composes that poetic event. Here while language speaks without comprehending, the intellect comprehends without being able to speak. The vernacular makes our soul listen to and feel itself; in this proposition, as the pilgrim Dante experiences, the intellect is pushed out and instead there remain language and soul. Now Dante’s vernacular relates itself to the soul no longer in the way in which he expresses what the soul sees, but in the way in which the soul listens to what the language says.Now the vernacular is neither a signifier that stands for something nor a medium to link one with another; rather it becomes a thing-language that transfigures into the sense. The sphere in which at the beginning of our universe, language was first created seems to be related to what Dante, as the pilgrim and the writer, experienced in the Paradiso/paradise under the name of ineffability. Dante declares that his usage of the vernacular “will be the new light, the new sun, which shall rise when the sun of this our day shall set, and shall give light to those who are in darkness and in gloom because the sun of this our day gives light to them no more.” (Conv. 1.13.12). His dream has been realized, particularly by virtue of translations of his writings into a lot of modern vernaculars.