Divine Comedy, The: translation
(Commedia)
by Dante Alighieri
(1307–1321)
Italian poet DANTE ALIGHIERI’s Divine Comedy is one of the seminal works of Western culture and the unrivaled greatest literary text of the European Middle Ages. The poem is epic in scope, telling the story of a lost traveler who, to find his way back to his true home, must journey through the three realms of the medieval Christian afterlife—Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The pilgrim Dante’s trek is also an ALLEGORY of the soul journeying toward God, and of the political Everyman groping toward social stability and peace. Dante called the work the Commedia, a reference to its happy ending as well as to its use of the Tuscan vernacular as opposed to Latin, the language his contemporaries would have expected in a text dealing with such weighty issues and demanding a sublime style. Dante’s deliberate choice of the vernacular made the bold declaration that classic literary art could be composed in the everyday languages of Europe. It was Dante’s disciple BOCCACCIO who first called the Commedia “Divine,” and it has been known by that epithet ever since.
Born in Florence in 1265, Dante began his poetic career under the influence of his friend Guido CAVALCANTI as a love poet in the school of the DOLCE STIL NOVO (“sweet new style”).Most of his love poetry was intended for a woman he called Beatrice (“bringer of blessings”) who, beyond his reach and married to another, was the perfect object of the idealized form of love characteristic of the stilnovist lyric.When Beatrice died young, in 1290, Dante composed the VITA NUOVA in her memory, poetically tracing the progress of his love from the purely sensual to, after her death, the purely spiritual. In this way, the heavenly Beatrice was positioned to become Dante’s guide through Paradise in his Commedia.In the years after Beatrice’s death, Dante became embroiled in the political life of Florence, a life characterized by bitter civil struggles between Dante’s White party and the rival Blacks. In 1301, while Dante was away from the city on a diplomatic mission, the Blacks staged a coup assisted by Pope Boniface VIII and his ally, Charles of Anjou. In his absence, Dante was charged with political graft and exiled for life from his native city. He never returned, spending his last 20 years wandering among the cities of Italy, staying with various nobles willing to shelter him, and finally dying in Ravenna in 1321. The theme of the lost wanderer trying to get home that frames the Commedia poignantly mirrors Dante’s own situation. Perhaps the first remarkable aspect of the poem is its structure. Sometimes compared to a Gothic cathedral or an elaborate scholastic system like that of Thomas AQUINAS, the structure of the Commedia is both vast in its conception and intricate in its detail. In effect a celebration of the ordered harmony of the universe as well as a reflection of the mystery of the holy Trinity, the entire poem is built on the numbers 3 and 1, and the number 9 (the square of 3). The poem is divided into three large sections or canticles—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each canticle contains 33 cantos, except the first, which contains an introductory canto, bringing the total number of cantos in the poem to a perfect 100. This same numerological concern is reflected in the verse form Dante created for the poem, called terza rima (“third rhyme”), which rhymes aba bcb cdc and so on, so that each tercet (three-line stanza) is interlocked with the preceding and succeeding group. Each line of the tercet contains 11 syllables, for a total of 33—thus the number of syllables in each tercet is the same as the number of cantos in each canticle. Further, the inner structure of each canticle is based on the number 9: There are nine circles of sinners in the Inferno; nine sites in Purgatory, including ledges for each of the Seven
Deadly Sins in addition to an ante-Purgatory and, at the summit, the earthly Paradise; and nine spheres in Heaven representing the spheres of the planets and fixed stars of medieval astronomy. But within these structures, each canticle is also organized according to a threefold pattern. In Hell, the sins represented in the nine circles are of three types, symbolized by the three beasts who threaten the pilgrim narrator in the first canto: sins of the She-wolf (representing incontinence), sins of the Lion (representing violence), and sins of the leopard (representing fraud and malice). Purgatory, as Dante’s guide Virgil explains in Canto XVII, is divided according to three ways in which love (the motivating force for all human actions, including sin) can be defective—thus love may be misdirected (in the case of lust, gluttony, and greed), insufficient (in the case of sloth), or perverted (into self-love, in the case of wrath, envy, and pride). In Heaven the blessed souls participate in a vision of God according to their own qualities or limitations, so that their vision may be incomplete, it may come through obtaining the four cardinal virtues, or it may be perfect like that of the angels. The whole structure of the Commedia strives to embody the textual equivalent of the Holy Trinity. Dante’s geography is conventionally medieval: He depicts Hell as a great funnel-shaped cavern created when Lucifer fell from heaven. The land displaced as a result of the formation of Hell became Mount Purgatory, rising from the otherwise landless southern hemisphere. The earthly Paradise, humankind’s original home, is at the top of Mount Purgatory, and from there Dante ascends into the interlocked spheres of the astronomers’ heavens. Thus on one level Dante presents a journey through what his contemporaries would have conceived of as the literal world of the afterlife, specifically dated from Good Friday to Easter Sunday of the year 1300. On another level, however, the journey is the allegorical journey of the human soul to moral perfection. In the beginning, the pilgrim Dante has wandered from the path of virtue into a dark wood of sin. Just as the sacrament of penance involves a three-step process—confession, penance, and absolution— so the pilgrim Dante moves through the Inferno (suggesting Prevenient Grace, or the conviction of sin), Purgatory (Justifying Grace, or the assurance of forgiveness), and Paradise (Sanctifying Grace, or the movement toward holy living). This is only one level of the allegory Dante invites his readers to discover in his text. In a famous letter to one of his patrons, Can Grande Della Scalla of Verona (a letter of uncertain authenticity), Dante encouraged readers to interpret his Commedia in three different allegorical senses in addition to the literal sense. Thus people and events in the text all have several meanings. Dante’s guide Virgil is the literal Latin poet who described the underworld in Book VI of his Aeneid, but he also suggests human reason, and therefore can take Dante only through Purgatory and not into Heaven. For a guide in Paradise Dante must rely on Beatrice, who is not only Dante’s historical lover but also the divine love and grace that has saved him. The punishments of the Inferno are ordered according to the retributive justice of the Old Testament “eye for an eye” ethic and are often admired for their perfect contrapasso or “counterpenalty,” so that the lustful are blown about by winds, as in life they were at the mercy of their own tumultuous passions. But the individual sinners also represent allegorically the sin itself. And on another level the reader ultimately becomes aware that morally, the sinners are in hell merely what they were on earth: They still engage in the sin that damned them, and, in fact, the sin is ultimately to be seen as its own punishment.Morally, sin and hell are identical. One may read The Divine Comedy for a variety of reasons: Politically, Dante develops a theme throughout the Commedia of the need for the Holy Roman Emperor to restore order to the ravaged cities of Italy and for the Popes to cease their interference in the internal secular affairs of the Italian states. Morally, one can trace the spiritual development of the pilgrim narrator from seeing things with worldly eyes to understanding, in the end, God’s moral vision. But most readers find most memorable the variety of characters—biblical, classical, historical, and contemporary—with whom Dante peoples his afterlife. Paolo and Francesca’s moving defense of their adultery (Inferno V), BERTRAN DE BORN’s appearance holding his severed head like a lantern (Inferno XXVIII), Ugolino’s pathetic tale of starvation and the cannibalization of his children (Inferno XXXIII), these and many other individuals have become indelible images in the European consciousness. The Divine Comedy was vastly popular in the 14th century and continued to be so in subsequent generations. Twelve commentaries on the poem appeared by 1400, and Boccaccio gave public lectures on the poem in Florence in 1373–74. The poem influenced poets from PETRARCH and CHAUCER to Pound and Eliot, went through more than 400 editions in the centuries after the printing press arrived in Italy, and has been translated into dozens of languages, including numerous English translations in recent years. Clearly the poem, in its infinite variety, still speaks to contemporary readers.
Bibliography
■ Bergin, Thomas G. Perspectives on the Divine Comedy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967.
■ Bloom,Harold, ed.Dante’s Divine Comedy. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
■ De Gennaro, Angelo A. The Reader’s Companion to Dante’s Divine Comedy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1986.
■ Gallagher, Joseph. To Hell and Back with Dante: A Modern Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy. Liguori,Mo.: Triumph Books, 1996.
■ Jacoff, Rachel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
■ Mandelbaum, Allen, trans. The Divine Comedy.With an introduction by Eugenio Montale and notes by Peter Armour. New York: Knopf, 1995.
■ Musa,Mark, ed. and trans. The Divine Comedy. 3 vols. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984–1986.
■ Grandgent, C. H., commentary. Companion to the Divine Comedy. Edited by Charles S. Singleton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.