‘The Last Miracle of World Poetry’

Dante, according to John Ruskin, was “the central man of all the world,” one in whom “the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties” of man could be seen at their highest. The words are splendidly apt, but by “world,” Ruskin, writing in the early 1850s, meant the Western world, primarily England and the European continent. Today, Dante is unmistakably a worldwide presence. With Shakespeare, he is a universal poet, universally cherished and translated and drawn upon. In Ravenna on the Adriatic coast, where he died in 1321, there is a Dante Center (Centro Dantesco) that holds regular readings from Dante in all the globe’s languages. In the last few years alone, there have been readings in Romanian, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and English, as well as in Italian.

Dante in the modern epoch has exerted a special influence on the American literary imagination and scholarly energy. New American translations of the “Inferno,” if not of the entire “Divina Commedia,” seem to come along almost annually. In the wake of Allen Mandelbaum’s strong, occasionally rhyming (and nicely illustrated) verse translation in 1980, we have Robert Pinsky’s brisk vernacular versifying in 1994; Mark Musa’s more relaxed verse version in 1984, in a “critical edition” of the “Inferno,” which includes 10 well-wrought essays by various scholars on successive aspects of the canticle; Robert M. Durling’s rendering--in “prose as literal as possible,” with a new paragraph for each tercet--in 1996; and now another verse translation by Robert and Jean Hollander, with the promise of the “Purgatorio” and the “Paradiso” by 2002.

Not one of these versions begins with an apology for offering “yet another translation of the ‘Inferno.”’ Nor should they. The answer to the question “Why attempt another Englishing of all or any part of the Comedy?” must be the same as that to the question “Why does anyone want to climb Mt. Everest?” Because it’s there. “The Divine Comedy” is there, overwhelmingly there. It is rich in poetry and drama, and far-reaching in its visionary enactment of human behavior.

In the “Inferno,” the narrative carries us down through the nine circles of Hell, confronting us with souls like Paolo and Francesca, and others far wickeder than they, undergoing eternal punishment. We voyage down past the carnal sinners, the gluttonous and the heretics; past those guilty of differing acts of violence; past the usurers (the loan sharks, as we would call them); past fearful figures guilty of fraud (Americans can note, with approval, the appearance of “barrators,” those guilty of “campaign finance corruption” lying in filthy pitch while horned demons tear them apart); until we arrive at the treacherous, culminating in Judas Iscariot.

The reader, following the travelers Dante and Virgil, is then led out of the infernal darkness into the starlight, and, in increasing brightness, up the successive terraces of Mount Purgatory: “that second realm,” as Dante calls it, at the start of the “Purgatorio,” ’where the human spirit purges itself and becomes worthy to ascend to heaven.” Here we meet examples of pride (Dante’s own vanity as a poet is gradually purged), of excessive anger, of lesser and redeemable forms of gluttony and lust. We arrive at the Earthly Paradise, atop Mount Purgatory, and here Dante’s beloved Beatrice appears amid a divine pageant representing the Old and New Testaments and the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. With Beatrice now as guide and mentor, Dante and the reader are whisked upwards into Paradise, ascending through the seven planets, from the Moon to Saturn, and then into the realm of the Fixed Stars and, finally, into the presence of God. On the rapid journey upwards, we meet theologians--St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican, who speaks movingly about St. Francis of Assisi; and St. Bonaventure, the Franciscan who eulogizes Dominic, the founder of the Dominicans; warrior saints, including Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida, who has a good deal of Alighieri family lore to give us; and just rulers of earthly kingdoms.

What we realize as we conclude the epic journey is the absolute coherence of the cultural cosmos described, and the poem that describes it. Eugenio Montale, the greatest Italian poet of the last century, and the Nobel laureate in 1975, spoke of the “Comedy” as “the last miracle of world poetry.” It does indeed create an entire world, and it is miraculous in its clarity and rationality. It makes sense every step of the way: in its moral judgments, its observations on the drift of human history, its theological explanations. It is artistically coherent to an unparalleled degree: Images in “Paradiso” portraying blessedness, for example, carefully reverse images in the “Inferno” portraying torment. In a culture like ours, which thrives on the contradictory, the incomplete, the absurd, “The Divine Comedy” is the place to go to, when you want to find yourself.

For all these reasons, the poem, for certain brave linguistic souls, provides an irresistible challenge. And among the new versions of “Inferno,” that of the Hollanders is probably the most finely accomplished and may well prove the most enduring. What Robert and Jean Hollander did, as we learn in the introduction, is essentially to draw on the prose translation by John D. Sinclair--published in 1939, and still the version that many English-speaking newcomers to Dante feel most comfortable with--dusting off its lingering Victorianisms (“thee” and “thou”), absorbing corrections in it made by Charles Singleton in his 1970 edition and taking note of recent textual emendations. As best one can gather, Robert Hollander (professor of comparative literature at Princeton and a prolific scholar in early Italian writing) did the bulk of the translating; his wife, Jean Hollander (a poet and a college teacher), then turned the text into verse. The result is a kind of model of the contemporary English re-voicing of the high medieval Tuscan.

A hint of the Hollanders’ achievement may be found in a comparison of their version of the opening lines of Canto III, with the deadly message over the entrance into Hell, and the earlier one by John Sinclair. Sinclair:

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE WOEFUL CITY,

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,

THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE...

ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YE THAT ENTER.

These words I saw inscribed in dark characters over a gateway; therefore I said: “Master, their sense is dreadful to me.” And he said to me, “ ... We are come to the place where I told thee thou shouldst see the woeful people who have lost the good of the intellect.”

And the Hollanders:

Through me the way to the city of woe,

through me the way to eternal pain,

through me the way among the lost ...

... Abandon all hope, you who enter here.

These words, dark in hue, I saw inscribed

over an archway. And then I said,

‘Master, for me their meaning is hard.”

And he...

‘We have come to where I said

you would see the miserable sinners,

who have lost the good of the intellect.”

Apart from modernizing Virgil’s way of addressing Dante, the Hollanders’ version may be a trifle more precise than is Sinclair’s: “dark in hue” is closer to Dante’s colore oscuro than Sinclair’s “dark in character.” But above all, the Hollanders clothe the entire passage in three-line stanzas, with a distinct recurring rhythmic beat, one that will grow more distinct and then fainter throughout the canticle, as occasion requires. That beat is, one might say, the beat of the poem’s heart.

We may descend with Dante and his guide Virgil into the Second Circle in Canto V. Here sinners are brought before Minos, the horrific judge, who, acting as God’s agent, dictates where each shall be sent for eternal punishment. The first batch of them are the carnal sinners, and Dante beseeches two of them, who move close together, to approach him. They do, and one speaks. She is Francesca da Polenta, who married the lord of Rimini and then fell in love with his brother Paolo; the husband came upon them making love and stabbed them both to death.

Francesca sings of the love that overpowered them in what is almost a formal ballad, three tercets, each beginning with the word amor. In the Hollander version:

Love, quick to kindle in the gentle heart ...

Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving,

seized me so strongly with his charm that

as you see, it has not left me yet,

Love brought us to one death.

Here is Mandelbaum in 1980:

Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart ...

Love, that releases no beloved from loving,

took hold of me so strongly through his beauty

that, as you see, it has not left me yet.

Love led the two of us unto one death.

Thoroughly admirable, though the Hollander version is perhaps a shade more intimate with the Dantean text.

Francesca then lapses into a more personal and anguished form of speech, as she tells of the moment of their downfall. The famous lines will always bear requoting (from the Hollanders):

There is not greater sorrow

than to recall our time of joy

in wretchedness ...

One day to pass the time in pleasure,

we read of Lancelot, how love enthralled him.

We were alone, without the least misgiving ...

When we read how the longed-for smile

Was kissed by so renowned a lover, this man,

Who never shall be parted from me,

all trembling kissed me on my mouth.

A Galeotto was the book, and he who wrote it.

That day we read no further.

Galeotto is the equivalent of the English “pander,” a go-between in an illicit relationship. Re-inhaling these lines, one is inclined to say that Dante and the Hollanders are likewise Galeotti.

Dante’s Canto V is an extraordinary performance. The first line of the Amor ballad--amor ch’al cor gentil ratto si rende--ripples with echoes from his earlier love poems to Beatrice and in praise of the “gentle heart.” Indeed, in offering so touching an image of Francesca da Rimini, Dante is to an extent exonerating himself for his own erotic straying--though when he at last kneels before Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise (‘Purgatorio “), she berates him unmercifully for his repeated misconduct.

I have listened several times recently to a tape of the canto, in an album given me by the director of the Centro Dantesco. And I have been struck by the range of poetical effects: The professorial tone of Virgil, as he identifies some of the other carnal sinners floating about--Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Tristan; the flurry of internal rhymes--di qua, di la, di gu di su (‘here and there, up and down”) for example--as fleeting as the doves to which the lovers are compared; the hard consonants, D’s and G’s, that elsewhere seem to collide and to suggest a bruising beneath the love sentiment; the radical shift in tone from Francesca’s first speech to her second; and the intensity of Dante’s compassion as he listens, until finally it robs him of his sense, so that he falls to the ground “as a dead body falls.” End of canto. No translation could hope to reproduce all or even most of these effects. The Hollander text comes as close as the contemporary English language allows.

But if the translation deserves the highest rating, the annotation is sometimes debatable. It is crowded with useful insights and bits of information and keeps us abreast of scholarly opinion across the ages. But it is also severely moralistic and wants the reader to adopt the same attitude. In the introduction, Hollander seems to include Francesca among those who tell their story “in a distorted, self-serving way, seeking a better reputation, whether in Dante’s eyes or in the view of posterity.” And in a notation, he says that Francesca’s “chief strategy is to remove as much blame from herself as she is able, finding other forces at fault whenever possible.”

The position here and throughout is recognizably Calvinistic. But if such a posture be possible, it is a sort of good-natured Calvinism, an unyielding moralism expressed in a way so amiable that one does not so much argue with Hollander as converse with him, exchange opinions. And my opinion (ironclad, of course) is that Dante simultaneously accepts the divine verdict on each and every sinner in the afterworld, yet feels and expresses genuine sympathy for many of them. The theme of acceptance reaches its climax early in the “Paradiso,” with the breath-stopping line of Piccarda Donati: “In his will is our peace.” Dante has asked Piccarda, the younger sister of his sportive friend Forese Donati, how it is that she is so content to reside forever on one of the lowest of the heavenly spheres. In reply, Piccarda discourses on the absolute justice of God’s judgments and concludes: “In his will is our peace.”

Robert Penn Warren put the case perfectly in a letter to his friend Cleanth Brooks in 1941, explaining why he was rejecting an article on Dante submitted to the Southern Review. The author had cited but had completely failed to suggest the importance of Piccarda’s remark. “Its effect,” Warren wrote, “grows out of a very complicated and ... ironical context. It might be said that the whole Comedy is filled with preparation for such a view, and the preparation is frequently accomplished by tension--the giving of full human value to a situation or person ... in contrast to the divine judgment.”

As examples of this theme, Warren names, in addition to Paolo and Francesca, Brunetto Latini, Dante’s old mentor whom the poet encounters in the Seventh Circle, (somewhat unaccountably) in the chasm reserved for homosexuals and whom he greets with reverence; and Ulysses, far down in the Eighth Circle, his body wrapped in flames (Canto XXVI) because of his “evil counselling” that got the Wooden Horse inside the walls of Troy, and who, in the most riveting tale in the “Inferno,” tells of his final voyage to the ends of the Earth and to total destruction in a violent tempest.

The cultural view described by Warren is anything but a premature mode of Calvinism. It might better be called Thomism, a mode that took a far kindlier view of human nature than that of the other major tradition, which runs from St. Augustine through Calvin to the American Puritans.

Warren, it might be noted, was the most complete Dantean of his generation in America. The Eighth Circle of the “Inferno,” Warren has said, provided the “moral scheme and metaphor” for his early novel, “At Heaven’s Gate,” and a quotation from the “Purgatorio” serves as the epigraph and moral guide to “All the King’s Men” (with its theme of unquenchable hopefulness about human possibility). The protagonist of Warren’s last novel, “A Place to Come To,” is a professional Dante scholar, and Warren’s late poem, “True Love,” is a 36-line Kentucky-accented version of Dante’s early masterpiece “La Vita Nuova,” phrase by amorous phrase, passing like its model from the first glimpse of the captivating young girl through and beyond her early disappearance, to the assured beatitude. Dante’s Beatrice dies and is taken to heaven at 24. Warren’s Kentucky girl marries and moves away: “But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives/In a beautiful house, far away.”

One aspect of the “Inferno” worth emphasizing is Dante’s clear sense of the relative degree of culpability among the sinners. All are subject to eternal punishment, but while Paolo and Francesca and the other carnal sinners are being blown about by the winds, the heretics, further down, are stretched out in fiery tombs, and the seducers and panders are being scourged without stop by horned demons.

Far from castigating Francesca like some medieval Puritan, for her sexual delinquency, Dante makes a point of insisting on the lesser nature of her sin (and by implication, of his own erotic straying with young Florentine damsels). In the Eighth Circle, where the variously violent are being punished, Virgil, speaking of “incontinence, malice and mad brutishness,” states firmly that “incontinence offends God less and merits a lesser blame” (Hollander translation). And alluding to the carnal ones, he continues:

” ... you’ll understand why they are set apart

from these wicked spirits and why God’s vengeance

smites them with a lesser wrath”

Dante makes a similar point dramatically and graphically. In the lowest depth of the Inferno, in the final circle, reserved for the treacherous (those guilty of betraying friends or relatives or rightful rulers), are two beings eternally bound together by hatred, even as Paolo and Francesca are by love. They are Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, both of Pisa, the former gnawing forever on the skull of the latter, as Paolo kissed Francesca on that fateful day. Ugolino and Ruggieri had betrayed Ugolino’s grandson, Nino Visconti, the Pisan ruler, and forced him into exile; then Ruggieri had betrayed Ugolino, having him locked up in prison with two sons and two grandsons and all are left to starve. Ugolino eventually devours the bodies of the dead young ones and dies himself.

In Canto V, we seem to hear the soft murmur of doves and the rustling of winds. Here is a deadly silence. After Francesca finishes her tale, Dante swoons from compassion. Here Dante launches into a diatribe against Pisa for harboring such scoundrels and invites the Arno River to destroy the city. This is the closing sequence, from Ugolino’s last chilling words, to the image of the two heads meeting together, to Dante’s outburst:

“Then fasting had more power than grief.”

Having said this, with maddened eyes he seized

that wretched skull again between his teeth

and clenched them on the bone just like a dog.

Ah Pisa ...

may the islands of Capraia and Gorgona

move in to block the Arno at its mouth

and so drown every living soul in you!

The sheer versatility of the Hollanders’ translation is especially notable here: the Count’s barely audible utterance; the hideous physicality of the ensuing image; the voice of Dante the poet-prophet invoking a curse. We have immense literary pleasure to look forward to in these translators’ upcoming “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso.”

R.W.B. Lewis is professor emeritus of English and American studies at Yale University, and is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for “Edith Wharton: A Biography.” He is the author of “Dante,” forthcoming in the Penguin Lives series from Lipper/Viking.