Rethinking the motifs and images of Dante's poetry in P. Valery's sonnet “Beatrice”

This article examines the interpretation that the French poet P. Valery gives to the motifs and images of Dante’s poetry in the sonnet “Beatrice”. The allusion to the works of the Italian author is introduced by the title of the poem, which initially sets up the link between the sonnet and the works of Dante and forms certain reading expectations, which, however, are violated on a cursory reading, since the reference to the works of Alighieri within the text of the 20th century poet is not quite obvious. Nevertheless, there is a direct textual borrowing from the Divine Comedy: Valery relies on lines 91-93 from the XXXI Song of “Paradise”. At the same time, we suggest that the poet appeals not only to this fragment of Dante’s work, but also attracts a number of images, referring to the French medieval literature, primarily to the “Romance of the Rose”, as well as to ancient mythology - the myth of Narcissus, significant for the entire Valery poetry, to which the author repeatedly referred at different stages of creativity. Thus, a complex combination of associations is created, where each gives birth to subsequent ones, closely intertwined with them. However, borrowing a number of images and motifs from the previous traditions, the poet interprets them subjectively, sometimes in a completely opposite way, and one of our objectives is to identify the specifics of Valery’s reinterpretation of the material on which he relies. We also hypothesise that the link with medieval works is made not only on the level of meaning, but also on the level of text composition. The author breaks the strict sonnet form, which requires the alignment of the rhyme in couplets, thus possibly introducing an allusion to the form of the French twelve-stitch ballad. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that this poem has not previously been analysed by Russian philologists. The text was studied by E. Durant, and P-O. Walzer wrote about the image of Beatrice in Valery’s essays.