Prof Piero Boitani
Episodes from Plato’s Poem
Abstract: I offer my own work, composed in English last year, Plato’s Poem, as an example of ‘dramatised word’. The poem recounts the story of the Timaeus, one of Plato’s most important works and the only one known in the Middle Ages, through a series of songs, chants, and dialogues. It ‘dramatizes’ Plato’s own words and builds a sequence which reaches the Renaissance. What I will read out are only some episodes, beginning with Plato’s own song and the song of Longinus (now called Pseudo-Longinus, the author of the treatise On the Sublime), and going on to Jacob’s song for Rachel and Jesus’ words on the lilies of the field, Dante, and the Conclusion. For the poem is a dramatized history of European thought, and particularly a history of conceptions about beauty. Listeners will, I hope, forgive the presumption.
Piero Boitani is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Rome “Sapienza” and at the University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano. A Fellow of, amongst others, the British Academy, the Medieval Academy of America, the Accademia dei Lincei, and the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, in 2016 he received the Balzan Prize for Comparative Literature. He is chairman of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla and general editor of its series of Greek and Latin Writers.
His most recent books include Looking Upwards: Stars in Ancient and Medieval Cultures and The Machine of the World: the Modern Cosmos (New York, Nova, 2017 and 2018), A New Sublime. Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics (New York, Europa, 2020), Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature (Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2021), In cerca di Amleto (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2022), Timeo in Paradiso (Rome, Donzelli, 2023). Next year Plato’s Poem, a composition in English verses with facing Italian translation, will be published by Elliot.