La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language

by Dianne Hales

  Not even today’s cinematic wizards could top Dante’s gruesome depiction of the Pisan Count Ugolino, sentenced to the ninth circle of hell for betraying his city. What you do not know, he tells Dante, who recognizes his name, “is how cruel my death was.” In words that seem torn from his very soul, Ugolino describes being locked in a tower with his young sons. One morning they hear the little door through which they received food being hammered shut.

  I bit both of my hands in desperate grief,

  And they, thinking I acted out of hunger,

  All of a sudden stood straight up and wailed,

  “Father, the pain for us would be far less

  If you ate us! You put this wretched flesh

  Upon us and now you may strip it off!”

  Canto 33, lines 58–63, www.italianstudies.org/comedy/index.htm

  Slowly, agonizingly, on the fourth day, the boys begin to starve to death. One collapses at Ugolino’s feet, croaking, “Father, why don’t you help me?” with his last breath. Weak, blind, half mad, Ugolino holds out for two days more and then crosses a point of desperation “when fasting did what grief had failed to do.” Dante doesn’t spell out what Ugolino does, but we find him in the depths of hell standing in a frozen lake, gnawing ferociously—his teeth as “strong on the bone as a dog’s”—on the head of the archbishop of Pisa, who had ordered his cruel punishment.

  The cannibal eternally cannibalizing his executioner epitomizes Dante’s genius for contrappasso, the law of retribution in which every punishment perfectly suits the sin. Flatterers and pandering sycophants, “full of shit,” so to speak, on earth, wade in their own excrement. Sorcerers and false prophets have their heads twisted around facing backward so they can only see behind, not ahead. Nimrod, the giant who defied God to build the Tower of Babel, jabbers ceaselessly in gibberish only he can understand.

  Most grotesque, submerged in hell’s deepest cavern, is three-headed Lucifer, the stone cold heart of darkness. Dante cannot even describe how “faint and frozen” he became at the sight of him. The flapping of Lucifer’s bat wings freezes the river of tears shed as he eternally chews the three greatest sinners—Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, traitors of God and Rome—in his three rapacious mouths.

  With six eyes he wept, and from his three chins

  Dripped down the teardrops and a bloody froth.

  In each mouth he mashed up a separate sinner

  With his sharp teeth, as if they were a grinder,

  And in this way he put the three through torture.

  Canto 34, lines 53–57, www.italianstudies.org/comedy/index.htm

  To escape from hell, Dante and Virgil slide down Lucifer’s hairy shank past “the point, at which the thigh revolves, right where the hip widens out.” Following a subterranean path, they climb until through a small opening they glimpse “some of the lovely things the heavens hold. From there we came out to see once more the stars.”

  But the pilgrim’s journey isn’t over. Before him looms Mount Purgatory, an enormous island rising out of the ocean in what people of Dante’s time thought was the Southern Hemisphere. In its antechambers negligent princes, excommunicants, and last-minute repenters linger before beginning the process of cleansing their unworthy souls.

  In Purgatory sinners move at their own pace through seven terraces to cleanse themselves of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust (in descending order of seriousness). The proud bend low under the weight of giant stones; the envious have their eyes sewn shut; the slothful must run continually. Dante greets fellow poets, including the troubadour Arnaut Daniel (who speaks in Provençal—Dante’s way of acknowledging the worthiness of another nation’s dialect) and the Bolognese poet Guido Guinizelli, who initiated the “sweet new style” that Dante perfected. To reach his beloved muse Beatrice, Dante must pass through a wall of flames—the punishment for all who lust. As he finds a brief respite in the Garden of Eden, lost through the sin of Adam and Eve, the pilgrim beholds a spectacular procession representing the history of the church.

  When Beatrice finally makes a triumphant entrance on a chariot, she bitterly reproves Dante for unfaithfulness to her memory after her death. Not only did he allow worldly distractions to imperil his soul, she reproaches him, but his thoughts may have strayed to another woman—something Dante conveniently forgets. Like any guy who knows he’s screwed up with the woman he loves, he lets her know he’s really, really sorry. And like any woman who loves an imperfect man, Beatrice forgives him. Dante leaves Purgatory “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars.”

  Beatrice’s radiant eyes raise the pilgrim through the spheres of Paradise. Along the way he meets his crusader great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, a martyr for the faith who describes the miseries of exile in lines that provide our best insight into the bitterness Dante felt about his life on the lam: “You shall discover how salty is the savor of someone else’s bread” (a reference to the Tuscan preference for unsalted bread) and “how hard the way to come down and climb up another’s stairs.”

  In the last canto, Dante struggles to convey the inexpressible nature of God. He chooses the literary metaphor of a book bringing together all forms of knowledge, truth, and beauty scattered like loose pages throughout the universe. Dante’s own book ends with a canto that T. S. Eliot described as “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or can ever reach.” Its final line acclaims “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

  The Inferno began to circulate in 1313 or 1314, at a time when books were becoming smaller and more portable. The first editions were about ten inches high, probably copied by paid-for-hire scribes on cheap paper made from old undergarments, animal parts, and hemp, boiled in a huge cauldron and then dried—a fitting medium for this earthy, often brutal masterpiece.

  According to Boccaccio, his first biographer, Dante would finish six to eight cantos at a time and send them to his publisher to make copies. But at the time of his unanticipated death from malaria, he hadn’t sent in all the cantos of Paradiso. His sons searched for them for months, then one, Jacopo, had a dream in which Dante appeared to say he was alive with a true life—not one of this world. He also gave precise directions as to where he had left the cantos: in a wall niche behind the stove in his bedroom. That’s exactly where they found them.

  Dante’s epic was an instant sensation, with its fame spreading quickly throughout the peninsula and beyond. Its appeal was universal. Dante peopled his otherworldly realms with contemporaries (a few still living at the time), as well as classical and historical figures. Despite their atrocious suffering and barbarous nastiness, these sinners remain timelessly human—as vain, churlish, stingy, lazy, greedy, corrupt, deceitful, and immediately recognizable as the citizens of our world today. But just as compelling and vital is Dante’s language.

  Like a painter mixing pigments to create new colors and experimenting with different techniques, Dante, intoxicated by words, splashed his vast canvas with terms from every realm of human thought and experience. In addition to choice Tuscan-isms, Dante mixes in smatterings from thirty-six (by his count) of Italy’s dialects, along with Latin and a dash of Greek. Homey terms such as mamma and babbo (daddy) appear in his Commedia, as do words from late and medieval Latin. Classical allusions and ornate phrases rub against coarse expletives. Scientific terms clash against the sounds of street and stable. In one line Dante poetically describes people ruled by wrath on earth as “sullen in the sweet air gladdened by the sun.” In another, he crudely pictures the filthy Greek prostitute Thais scratching herself “with cacky fingernails.”

  The richness and range of Dante’s words served as testimony that the new vernacular (which he never named) could match if not outdo Latin or any other tongue as a poetic language. With La Commedia, the first major literary work in Italian, written barely a century after Francesco of Assisi’s radiant canticle, the vernacular came of age.

  More than seven centuries after his birth, Dante still rocks—literally. Bru
ce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and bands such as Radiohead and Nirvana cite him as an inspiration. They join an exalted chorus of famous fans, including William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, and Sigmund Freud. No other single piece of literature has generated more research, analysis, commentary, interpretations, or adaptations—all of which keep proliferating “at an alarming rate,” clucks the Cambridge History of Italian Literature.

  It wasn’t until I spent considerable time in Italy that I realized that Dante had profoundly influenced not just literature but also Italian and Italians. Almost every day I heard echoes of his words. A Roman described the frenetic bustle of the city at Christmas as a bolgia infernale, using Dante’s term for one of the “rotten pockets” within the depths of hell, filled with rogues such as rabble-rousers, hypocrites, and thieves. “Who are you to look so ugly?” I heard one brother tease another at a friend’s home with a paraphrase of a line from canto 8 of the Inferno: “Ma tu chi se’, che sì se’ tanto brutto”?

  The better acquainted I became with Italians, the more Dante elbowed his way into our conversations. Describing the two passions of his life—for medicine and for his beautiful wife—my friend Roberto quoted Dante’s description of love so strong that it permits “no loved one not to love.” When I didn’t recognize the allusion, he wrote the line—amor, che nullo amato amar perdona—on a card I keep on my desk. My tutor Alessandra’s first suitor in Rome used the same line from canto 5 of the Inferno when she was thirteen.

  “What was your Galeotto?” our friend Mario asked my husband and me one evening at dinner. Seeing our confusion, off he dashed to retrieve a dog-eared copy of La Divina Commedia from his car and read the full story of Francesca da Rimini, a beautiful young woman forced or tricked into marriage with the brutish Gianciotto Malatesta. When her husband left her in the care of his handsome brother Paolo, the two “charmed the hours away” by reading the romantic tale of the knight Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, wife of King Arthur. Just as Lancelot’s friend Galeotto (Gallehaute in the French version) originally brought together those two ill-fated lovers, the book served as Paolo and Francesca’s Galeotto. As they read of the first kiss Lancelot and Guinevere shared, Paolo breathed “the tremor of his kiss” on Francesca’s welcoming lips. To this day a Galeotto signifies a pander, go-between, or seductive ploy.

  In another famous canto, Dante describes Ulysses rallying his men to journey beyond what seemed the utmost limit of human voyaging by reminding them of their noble origins: “You were not formed to live like beasts.” Mussolini appropriated this phrase—fatti non foste a viver come bruti—in his bombastic exhortations to restore the glory that was Rome. I’ve heard teachers use it to answer their weary students’ questions of why they had to slog through yet another museum—and friends to justify an impetuous escape to Ponza or Capri to restore the soul.

  The reason these words sound so natural in the mouths of Italians is that Dante meant them to be spoken. “The Divine Comedy was not written to be read in the sense of scanning the pages and deciphering what was written on them,” says the dantista Steven Botterill of the University of California, Berkeley. “It was written to be read aloud for a culture in which the overwhelming majority of people were functionally illiterate.” By choosing the vernacular, Dante deliberately targeted the masses—women, masons, craftsmen, farmers, bakers, millers—who didn’t know Latin and might not have been able to read Italian.

  Writing for the ear as well as the eye, Dante had to craft a saga so spellbinding that it would hold listeners in its thrall. And so he did. Throughout Italy’s villages people gathered in the central piazza for readings of the Divine Comedy. Peasants memorized melodic lines and shared them as they worked the fields. In 1371, Florence, the town that had so ignominiously expelled its native son, hired Boccaccio as its first expert commentator on and reader of Dante’s work.

  The long tradition of listening to Dante continues to this day. As many as one in five Italians tuned in recently to hear the actor Roberto Benigni, who has performed La Divina Commedia for decades, read selected cantos on national television. “Can you imagine fifty or sixty million Americans glued to their TVs as Woody Allen reads Shakespeare?” asks an Italian transplanted to the United States.

  Convinced that I had to hear Dante to grasp his full power, I listened to audiotapes and online translations, but these media couldn’t capture the magic. And so I decided to listen to Dante as Italians do—in Italy, in the company of Italians. On a misty April evening in Rome, I managed to buy a ticket to an almost sold-out performance of Benigni’s popular one-man show TuttoDante.

  The presentation, under a gigantic navy blue tent erected in a piazza in a quiet Roman neighborhood, was a wholly Italian experience. The crowd was an eclectic mix of students, politicians, celebrities, young couples on Dante dates, and entire families—mothers, fathers, grandparents, and grade-schoolers. If nationals of other countries were in the crowd, they must have been speaking Italian. It was the only language I heard all night.

  “If you don’t come,” the billboards advertising the show declared, “you’re a coglione,” a common vulgarity that literally translates into “testicle” but more generally means a loser or fool. This should have prepared me for Benigni’s stand-up routine, peppered with obscenities that shot over my head at bullet speed. The lines I did get—“I knew a guy who was so lazy, he married a pregnant woman”—sounded like borscht belt shtick. I cursed myself for the waste of an evening. I had expected Dante and seemed to be stuck with an Italian Jackie Mason.

  Then the hyperactive Benigni settled down to deliver an uplifting language lesson, a terzina-by-terzina commentary on canto 5, the now familiar tale of Francesca da Rimini. “Listen to how Dante describes the darkness of hell,” he exclaimed. “The light is mute, silent—che bello!” He lingered over Francesca’s wistful comment that there is no greater sorrow than remembering joy in a time of wretchedness, noting how her lovely words moved Dante almost to tears. “But what am I doing?” Benigni eventually asked. “Talking about Dante in my words is like holding a flashlight to the sun.”

  Pausing to shift gears once more, he began a straight dramatic reading of the incandescent canto. At its end, the audience sat for a few seconds, silent except for the sound of sniffling. I looked at the teenage couple to my left. Both had tears running down their cheeks. I peeked at the family to my right. The eyes of husband and wife brimmed with tears. The grandmother was noisily blowing her nose. Every person in the theater rose to give Benigni a standing ovation.

  Dante can evoke strong emotions in foreigners as well as Italians. Mary Anne Evans, better known by her pen name of George Eliot, studied Dante with her twenty-years-younger husband on their honeymoon in Venice. According to some accounts, after reading of Paolo and Francesca’s passion, Evans, sixty and homely, suggested that the two take their marriage, initially a platonic arrangement, to a physical level. Her startled groom reportedly leapt from their balcony—although he and their union survived.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) didn’t fare as well. In 1817 Dante inspired the British poet to leave London and walk in the footsteps of the exiled poet. For the sea leg to Lerici, he chartered a boat. Despite high seas and warnings from other sailors, Shelley insisted that the captain steer the boat, in full sail, into the storm. The boat sank, and Shelley’s body floated to an Italian beach, where a friend cut out his heart and kept it for months in a mahogany chest in the British consul’s wine cellar. (Dante, no doubt, would have appreciated this detail.)

  How does Dante infiltrate his fans’ very souls? “If La Commedia were a piece of music, Dante would have written commosso (movingly) instead of maestoso (majestically) or animato (spirited) across the top of each canto,” says Benigni, who laughs and cries during performances along with his audiences. “Dante’s genius is that he can find and create poetry in everything, even excrement. He doesn’t say you should avoid evil in life—which is imp
ossible—but you should confront it every day, because in that struggle every single human being has the potential of becoming something magnificent, a wonder of the universe.”

  Dante, unlike other great writers such as Shakespeare or Cervantes, is not just a literary giant but Italy’s foremost national hero. No one can claim a greater hold on the Italian soul. “In countries like England and Spain, the nation came first, then the culture developed,” explains Benigni, who describes La Divina Commedia as a great gift to Italians. Just as Americans celebrate George Washington as the father of our country, Italians cherish Dante for giving them both the foundation of their culture and the dream of a united nation.

  Yet everything about Dante’s ornate tomb in Florence’s Santa Croce, the final resting place for Italy’s grandi, its greatest artists and authors, strikes me as specious. First and foremost, not a speck of Dante’s mortal remains lies there. Even the church’s official guidebook describes the memorial as “an unpleasant work” completed in 1829 by Stefano Ricci. Dante’s own words, taken from the Divine Comedy, serve as his eulogy: Onorate l’altissimo poeta (Honor the greatest poet). Atop the faux tomb sits a cenotaph, a monument erected to honor someone buried elsewhere, depicted as a brooding, bare-chested hunk. To his left, the disconsolate figure of “Poetry” mourns the loss of “the great bard,” the supreme master of Italian, as the guidebook puts it.

  Dante, buried in the Church of the Frati Minori in Ravenna, where he had been living, did not rest in peace. Florence, which sometimes seems to love its citizens best once they’re dead, immediately asked for his corpse. Ravenna declared that by protecting and feeding the acclaimed poet in life, its citizens had earned the right to claim him in death.

  A century and a half later a scion of the first family of Florence, the Medici, ascended to the papal throne as Pope Leo X and demanded that Ravenna surrender Dante’s bones. “Just come get them,” the city (more or less) replied. When the Florentine envoys arrived, the burial recess was empty. Ravenna’s town fathers declared that either the remains had been stolen or Dante himself had reclaimed them so as to continue his roaming after death.