Gli scienziati di Durs Grünbein: La (de)costruzione poetica di Galileo Galilei e René Descartes

Résumé 0

My paper focuses on the figure of the scientist in Durs Grünbein’s work and aims at analyzing it proceeding from the modalities of representation of Galileo Galilei and René Descartes in the following texts: the essay Galilei vermißt Dantes Hölle und bleibt an den Maßen hängen (1993), the lyric epos Vom Schnee oder Descartes in Deutschland (2003) and the ‘expository prose’ Der cartesische Taucher. Drei Meditationen (2008). I examine how the relation between poetry and natural sciences, which plays a central role in Grünbein’s so called «biological lyric», emerges in the representation of the scientist. Grünbein explores Galilei and Descartes especially in their relation to the poet working out semantic and linguistic analogies and dissimilarities between the poet and the scientist. Galilei is characterized in his limitations as a man who measured Dante’s hell just through geometrical rules and physical principles, without considering the importance of poetic imagination to understand the world. On the contrary, Descartes is represented as the one who believed not only in physical sciences, but also in the necessity of the spiritual activity of the ego and in the power of vision and imagination – which places him near the (contemporary) poet, who is a seeker of Erkenntnis, of ‘intuitional knowledge’.