Laudator Temporis Acti

Cristina Della Coletta, "In Memoriam: Tibor I. Wlassics (1936-1998)," Italica 76.2 (Summer, 1999) 267-269:

He founded Lectura Dantis, which he appropriately named a "forum for Dante's research and interpretation," wishing to promote scholarly dialogue between young Dante students and renowned critics, and to encourage intellectual exchange between different approaches and schools of thought. The journal's eclecticism and critical range remains unmatched and reflects Tibor's true sense of the "dialogical" as the intellectual practice that fosters debate and relishes subtlety, irony and wit, while shunning crass diatribe and animosity. It is this spirit of Lectura Dantis that he left as his legacy, and it will live on, synthesized in one of his many proverbial sayings: "Let's agree on disagreeing."

[....]

Wary of all forms of dogmatism, Tibor nevertheless advocated what he labeled "philologically correct" scholarship and remained, in life and letters, an independent if solitary thinker and a cultivated apostle of style. Humorously recalling his first meeting with Gianfranco Contini, Tibor described how that "very scholarly-looking scholar" had taken the cue from Tibor's last name to launch into a lecture on the evolution of the indoeuropean phoneme *vlah, which he interpreted as meaning "alien," "foreigner," "the one from elsewhere." Although Tibor had jokingly resisted the finality of Contini's categorization, he often mused about his existence caught, so to speak, between two continents. Asked whether he felt more Continental or American in his approach to Dante, he conjured up the image of a steamer, slowly feeling "its way through the thick vapors of the North Atlantic, foghorn ablaze" with the "shore beyond... too far to reach; too faraway... the old shores too."

Wlassics, "Endpaper," Lectura Dantis 7 (Fall, 1990):

It was in New York __ some conference. On the charter bus taking the congressisti to Long Island I found a seat next to this very scholarly-looking scholar in a long gray topcoat. He had no nametag, but I saw him studying mine with interest. __ «Ah but I proprio hoped to meet you... Your name has long puzzled me», he began; and then and there the Unknown Etymologist went on to deliver an hour-long lecture on the Indoeuropean phoneme *vlah (=«allogenous», «alien», «a foreigner») and its vagaries: its straying into the Slavic tongues; its penetration into Hungarian and its permanently assuming there the form olasz and the meaning (guardacaso) of «Italian», first applied to the good monks («people from elsewhere», from Italy in this case) who trekked to the plains of the Danube to convert, willy-nilly, those contented heathens... It was a lecture with paragraphs clearly marked, with clauses skillfully suspended and then caught up with again, with references, reminders, hints, quotes, notes, even footnotes __ a lecture, in sum, admirably conceived and amiably delivered. Truth to tell, I, its subject, felt a little like a rare lepidopter, still alive but already pierced and awaiting final fixing on the Unknown Entomologist's corkboard. I was looking for a lacuna to intervene: perhaps just to say how thrilled I was to know that the thirteen letters of my name will forever define me __ in Sanskrit or in Magyar, on this Earth or on Mars, in the vernacular of this Universe and in all dialects beyond it __ the «one who is from elsewhere», the «stranger», the «outsider». But whimsical Chance gave me no chance. The bus crossed Long Island Sound; we had arrived. __ «Say, who is the tizio there, in the long gray topcoat?», I later asked a friend, a colleague from Ca' Foscari. «But you don't know him?!», my friend quasi exclaimed. «He is Gianfranco Contini».

I don't see *vlah in Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985).

Hat tip: Ian Jackson†.