Arnaut Daniel was a Provençal poet, born in Ribérac in the bishopric of Périgord in the Dordogne. Writing between 1180 and 1210, he produced a sirventese with obscene subject matter and seventeen canzoni exclusively about love, but is remembered mainly as main exponent of the trobar clus, a hermetic kind of poetry characterized by extreme technical bravura and remarkable stylistic sophistication. He was thus an important precursor to Dante’s experimentation with language. Already in the De vulgari eloquentia (ii 2 9) Dante refers to him as the main exponent of erotic poetry in the language of oc. In Purg. XXVI, Guido Guinizzelli acknowledges him as the miglior fabbro del parlar materno / Versi d’amore e prose di romanzi / soverchiò tutti (“superior craftsman of the mother tongue, surpassing all others in verses of love and tales of romance”). An indicative confirmation of Arnaut’s extraordinary talent occurs in Purg., xxvi 140-47, where Dante entrusts to him the Commedia’s longest passage in another language: eight lines in Provençal hendecasyllables. Arnaut’s predominance within the canon of vernacular lyric poets is thus for Dante prevalently formal in character: as well as numerous intertextual echoes in Dante’s work, the marked sensuality and realism in some of his Rime and some parts of the Commedia owe much to Arnaut’s intense imaginative powers and use of metaphor. In Chapters 9 and 10 of Book II of his De vulgari eloquentia, he explicitly acknowledges Arnaut’s imaginative and metaphorical skills as the source of his own technique in the petrosa, Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra. This was in fact the first sestina lyric in the Italian poetry tradition, skilfully modelled on Lo ferm voler qu’ el cor m’intra, but significantly substituting the first octosyllabic line of each stanza with a hendecasyllable. A further example of Dante’s emulation of Arnaut’s metrical experimentation can be found in his complex petrosa, Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna, where the rhyming device is pushed to the limit.
Arnaut Daniel: il miglio fabbro del parlar materno
