I had no theory at that point—only a feeling. And I still have no theory I can securely defend. The rest was trial and error: something like learning to walk a tightrope: if one can only manage to grab the rope when he falls, and if he can then manage to get back up, and if he falls only forward, there is always the possibility that he will make it to the other side. To let a single example do for all, the process can be illustrated in the following passage from Canto VIII of the Purgatorio which reads, in the original:Ben discerneva in lor la testa bionda;
Ma nella faccia l’occhio si smarria
Come virtù ch’a troppo si confonda.
The passage is part of the description of two angels that descend to Dante and his companions in the Valley of the Negligent Rulers. It is a simple enough passage as Dante goes, and almost any man with a sense of Latin roots can puzzle out most of the meaning. Virtù (virtue) in the Latin sense of “faculty/power/ability/generative force” (cf. “by virtue of the power invested in me”) is perhaps the one word that might trip the unwary. How is one to render such a passage?
In Pidgin-Literal it might read:Well was I discerning in them the head blond
But in the face the eye dazed itself
Like a virtue that at too much confounds itself.
Obviously no rendering into any known language has taken place. A more idiomatic literal rendering might read:Well did I discern the blondness of their heads
but in their faces my eye was dazed
like a faculty which is overcome by excess.
But though such a rendering is idiomatic enough, phrase by phrase, the sequence of phrases is not really intelligible as a communication in English. The passage is still in no spoken tongue but, rather, in an unspeakable hodgepodge neither Italian nor English. So one might work toward a more speakable, which is to say, communicable equivalent:I saw clearly that their heads were blond,
but looking into their faces my eyes grew dazed
like an overstimulated faculty of the senses.
That begins to be closer, but now one runs into a peculiarity of the way Dante describes the workings of his senses. If one has been reading from the beginning of the Divine Comedy he is used to this way Dante has of describing such matters. By this point in my rendering I have had occasion to supply a number of footnotes on this usage. It is, in fact, a small stylistical formality: Dante often describes the workings of his eyes as if he could focus on, say, the forehead of a distant figure, seeing nothing else, and as if he then had deliberately to move his eyes downward in order to focus on the figure’s nose. It is some such thing he is saying here: staring at the angels he can see that their hair is blond, but when he looks down from their hair to their faces, his eyes grow dazzled, overstimulated by the light that shines from them. Obviously, it would be impossible, at any distance, not to be entirely blinded by such light, and the literalist has firm grounds for arguing that Dante could not have seen the hair of the angels. Such a device must be accepted as a well-established mannerism.
With that much understood, then, the passage may be simplified. Were one simply communicating Dante’s thought in an English prose paraphrase it might be stated: “I could make out clearly that their hair was blond, but when I focused on their faces, my eyes were dazzled by the excess of light they gave forth.”
Let the rendering remain ragged: it contains the essential intent. But the passage is written as poetry and it must be rendered within meter, rhyme, and in a language sufficient to its emotional intent. And after much scratching and scrambling for a rhyme (and it sometimes happens that the very rhyme you want has been used in the preceding tercet and may not, therefore, be repeated so soon) I came up with the following:I could distinctly see their golden hair,
but my eyes drew back defeated from their faces
like a sense perceiving more than it can bear.
Such a rendering covers the law perhaps, and at times I have been forced to leave some of Dante in no better state than that, but certainly it is nothing to be satisfied with. I especially do not like the feel of that last line in English. As nearly as I can say it, the English word choice is being forced from Dante’s Italian rather than being developed in sequence by the normal flow of English.
Whereupon, after more floundering I came to rest on:I could see clearly that their hair was gold,
but my eyes drew back bedazzled from their faces,
defeated by more light than they could hold.
It is simple enough to see that there are all sorts of things literally wrong with such a passage. The original says “the head” and the passage says “hair.” There is nothing, at least explicitly, in the original that says the eye “drew back.” Virtù has disappeared, and “defeated” is certainly not the same thing as “confounded.”
And when the charge is put in those terms I have no defense and very little, if any, theory on which to base a defense. Nor any hope of arguing that I have achieved a perfect rendering. All I can really argue, as lamely as need be, is that within the essential failure, this final version feels enough like the original, and feels enough like English poetry (or at least verse) to allow me to conclude that I have probably caught it as well as I shall be able to. There must be some theory of translation implicit in these feelings, but in practice I suspect any translation turns out to be a long series of such individual cases, each met on its own grounds, and that each is finally settled by feel. What has any poet to trust more than that feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down, but when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately conditioned by all his past itching and twitching, and by all his past theorizing about them.
I should be an ingrate were I to omit my thanks to Professor Giorgio de Santillana and to Professor Archibald MacAllister, both of whom read the manuscript of this text and made detailed comments. Their learning has guarded me time and again from the pitfalls of my own ignorance.
—JOHN CIARDI
THE INFERNO
To Judith
Cosi n’andammo infino alla lumiera,
parlando cose, che il tacere è bello,
sì com’ era il parlar colà dov’ era.
INTRODUCTION
The Divine Comedy is one of the few literary works which have enjoyed a fame that was both immediate and enduring. Fame might indeed be said not to have awaited its completion, shortly before the author’s death in 1321, for the first two parts, including the Inferno here presented, had already in a very few years achieved a reputation tinged with supernatural awe. Within two decades a half-dozen commentaries had been written, and fifty years later it was accorded the honor of public readings and exposition—an almost unheard-of tribute to a work written in the humble vernacular.
The six centuries through which the poem has come to us have not lessened its appeal nor obscured its fame. All of them have not, of course, been unanimous in their appreciation: for a fifteenth-century Latinist, Dante was a poet “fit for cobblers”; eighteenth-century worshipers of Reason could not be wholly sympathetic to a poet who insisted on the limitations of reason and philosophy. It was the effete mid-sixteenth century which in spite of certain reservations, first proclaimed “divine” the work its author had called simply his “Comedy.” The significant fact is that the Divine Comedy has demanded critical consideration of each successive age and every great writer; and the nature of their reaction could well serve as a barometer of taste and a measure of their greatness.
By that standard the present age should prove truly great, for its interest in the Comedy has rarely been matched. Credit for the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Dante in the English-speaking world belongs to Coleridge, who was ably seconded in this country by Longfellow and Nor-ton. Contemporary enthusiasm was touched off by T. S. Eliot’s Essay on Dante and has grown, in some quarters, to the proportions of a cult.
What is this work w
hich has displayed such persistent vitality? It is a narrative poem whose greatest strength lies in the fact that it does not so much narrate as dramatize its episodes. Dante had doubtless learned from experience how soporific a long narrative could be. He also firmly believed that the senses were the avenues to the mind and that sight was the most powerful (“noblest,” he would have said) of these. Hence his art is predominantly visual. He believed also that the mind must be moved in order to grasp what the senses present to it; therefore he combines sight, sound, hearing, smell and touch with fear, pity, anger, horror and other appropriate emotions to involve his reader to the point of seeming actually to experience his situations and not merely to read about them. It is really a three-dimensional art.
The Divine Comedy is also an allegory. But it is fortunately that special type of allegory wherein every element must first correspond to a literal reality, every episode must exist coherently in itself. Allegoric interpretation does not detract from the story as told but is rather an added significance which one may take or leave. Many readers, indeed, have been thrilled by the Inferno’s power with hardly an awareness of further meanings. Dante represents mankind, he represents the “Noble Soul,” but first and always he is Dante Alighieri, born in thirteenth-century Florence; Virgil represents human reason, but only after he has been accepted as the poet of ancient Rome. The whole poem purports to be a vision of the three realms of the Catholic otherworld, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and a description of “the state of the soul after death”; yet it is peopled with Dante’s contemporaries and, particularly in the materialistic realism of the Inferno, it is torn by issues and feuds of the day, political, religious and personal. It treats of the most universal values—good and evil, man’s responsibility, free will and predestination; yet it is intensely personal and political, for it was written out of the anguish of a man who saw his life blighted by the injustice and corruption of his times.
The Divine Comedy is classically referred to as the epitome, the supreme expression of the Middle Ages. If by this is meant that many typically medieval attitudes are to be found in it, it is true: the reasoning is scholastic, the learning, the mysticism are those of the author’s time. But if from such a statement one is to infer (as is frequently done) that the poem is a hymn to its times, a celebration and glorification of them, as Virgil’s Aeneid was of Rome, then nothing could be more misleading. The Comedy is a glorification of the ways of God, but it is also a sharp and great-minded protest at the ways in which men have thwarted the divine plan. This plan, as Dante conceived it, was very different from the typically medieval view, which saw the earthly life as a “vale of tears,” a period of trial and suffering, an unpleasant but necessary preparation for the after-life where alone man could expect to enjoy happiness. To Dante such an idea was totally repugnant. He gloried in his God-given talent, his well-disciplined faculties, and it seemed inconceivable to him that he and mankind in general should not have been intended to develop to the fullest their specifically human potential. The whole Comedy is pervaded by his conviction that man should seek earthly immortality by his worthy actions here, as well as prepare to merit the life everlasting. His theory is stated explicitly in his Latin treatise, De Monarchia:“Ineffable Providence has thus designed two ends to be contemplated of man: first, the happiness of this life, which consists in the activity of his natural powers, and is prefigured by the Earthly Paradise; and then the blessedness of life everlasting. . . . which may be symbolized by the Celestial Paradise.”
To us, reading his masterpiece at the comfortable distance of six hundred years, it may well seem that few men have better realized their potential than Dante; to him, a penniless exile convicted of a felony, separated under pain of death from home, family and friends, his life seemed to have been cut off in the middle.
It was Dante’s pride—and the root of his misfortune—to have been born in the free commune of Florence, located near the center of the Italian peninsula, during the turbulent thirteenth century. It is important that we remember to think of it, not as an Italian city, but as a sovereign country, a power in the peninsula and of growing importance internationally. It had its own army, its flag, its ambassadors, its foreign trade, its own coinage; the florin, in fact, was on its way to becoming the standard of international exchange, the pound sterling or dollar of its day. Its control was a prize worth fighting for, and the Florentines were nothing loth to fight, especially among themselves. Internal strife had begun long before, as the weakening of the Empire had left its robber-baron representatives increasingly vulnerable to attack and eventual subjection by the townsfolk. They had become unruly citizens at best in their fortress-like houses, and constituted a higher nobility whose arrogance stirred the resentment of the lesser nobility, the merchants and artisans. The history of the republic for many years is the story of the bloody struggle among these groups, with the gradual triumph of the lower classes as flourishing trade brought them unheard-of prosperity. Early in Dante’s century the struggle acquired color and new ferocity. In 1215 the jilting of an Amidei girl was avenged by the murder of the offending member of the Buondelmonti family, which, according to the chronicler Villani, originated the infamous Guelph-Ghibelline factions. But the lines had already long been drawn on the deeper issues, with the Ghibellines representing the old Imperial aristocracy and the Guelphs the burghers, who, in international politics, favored the Pope. In 1248, with the aid of Frederick II, the Ghibellines expelled the Guelphs; in 1251 the latter returned and drove out the Ghibellines, who were again defeated in 1258. In 1260 the Ghibellines amassed a formidable army under the leadership of Farinata degli Uberti and overwhelmed the Guelphs at Montaperti, where the Arbia ran red with the blood of the six thousand slain, and sixteen thousand were taken prisoner. The very existence of Florence hung momentarily in the balance as the triumphant Ghibellines listened to the urgings of their allies from neighboring Siena that they wipe out the city; only Farinata’s resolute opposition saved it. Gradually the Guelphs recovered, and in 1266 they completely and finally crushed their enemies at Benevento. Thus ended the worst of this partisan strife from which, as Machiavelli was to write, “there resulted more murders, banishments and destruction of families than ever in any city known to history.”
Dante Alighieri had been born the preceding year, 1265, toward the end of May; he was a year old when his family (a typically Guelph mixture of lesser nobility and burgher) must have joined in the celebration of their party’s victory. His whole impressionable childhood was undoubtedly filled with stories of the struggle so recently ended. The fascination it had for him is evident in the Comedy, where it is an important factor in the Inferno and the lower, “material” portion of the Purgatorio.
Our actual knowledge of Dante’s life is disappointingly small, limited to a few documents of record. The biographies, beginning with Boccaccio’s about fifty years after his death, are largely hearsay, legend and deductions based on his works and the meager references scattered through them. We know that his mother died when he was very young, that his father remarried, and that Dante was completely orphaned in adolescence. This is thought to account for a certain hunger for parental affection which can be noted in the Comedy. He doubtless received the normal education of the day for his class, and perhaps more, for his bent must have been clearly intellectual and literary. That he took an early interest in the vernacular lyric only recently borrowed from the Provençal is demonstrated by poems dating from his middle or late teens. It was through this activity that he made his closest friendship, that with Guido Cavalcanti, who was a gifted poet some years Dante’s senior.
Most of our impressions about his youth are gleaned from his first work, in the planning of which Cavalcanti had a part. Called La Vita Nuova (“The New Life”), it was deliberately written in the vernacular in 1292 to celebrate the most important influence in Dante’s life, his love for Beatrice Portinari. It is made up of sonnets and longer lyrics interspersed with prose passages which exp
lain and narrate the circumstances under which the poems had been composed years earlier. An astonishing feature of the book is the careful symmetry of its arrangement where the balance of three, nine and ten foreshadows the elaborate design which will be worked out in the Comedy. Very briefly, it is the story of a boy of nine suddenly awaking to love at the sight of a girl of almost the same age; of a second encounter at the age of 18 when a greeting is exchanged; of tribulations and misunderstandings leading to her disapproval; of her sudden death when the poet was 25, his grief and attempted consolation by another girl; finally of a “marvelous vision” of his Beatrice when he was 27, thus completing the trinity of “nines” and determining him to write no more of her until he could do so worthily. Although it is autobiographical, the Vita Nuova is not an autobiography; it is a delicate and sensitive analysis of emotions. Such facts as enter into it assume an air of strange unreality.
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