| Summary: | Mandelstam’s essay Conversation about Dante was written in the summer of 1933. Today, some Dante scholars and translators consider Conversation “perhaps the most profound and original Dante essay of the 20th century” (Corrado Bologna, 2012), “a world event”, the result of “an encounter with a real, authentic Dante” (Olga Sedakova, 2007). At the same time, the essay is regarded by many contemporary scholars as an expression of Mandelstam’s own poetics, with Mandelstam seeing in Dante the ideal model of the European poet. In this perspective, the study of the citations from the Commedia in Conversation may be of particular interest. While testifying to the Russian’s profound knowledge of all three canticles, these citations, partially translated by Mandelstam, gave rise to an original interpretation of Dante’s text, based on the reading of philosophers and scientists who were contemporary to the author of the essay. In this contribution, I focus on a number of citations that illustrate Mandelstam’s reflection on Dante’s metaphors, which, according to him, are rooted “not in the word ‘how’, but in the word ‘when’”. Indeed, in the Russian poet’s vision, Dante’s metaphors describe all the phenomena of the universe in their “fluidity”, that is, in their becoming in the course of time. In particular, I attempt to show how these citations enabled Mandelstam to formulate his own ideas on poetic language, which were inspired by Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice [Creative Evolution], which, as we know from the testimony of his wife Nadezhda, the poet read in the spring of 1933.
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