George Steiner notes that likely it is only music and mathematics which can begin to reflect the expansive majesty of thought. Philosophy pursues such but an inclination to systems and other ordered orientation tempers the vigor. He then states that it is the aphoristic thinkers who come closest and it is from that vantage that one can revel in the grandeur of poetry. Valery and Heidegger understood this. It is a vision of the cosmos which likely extends back to the pre-socratics. I’m not sure if this exclusive project was the ambition of Dante, but who else could carry the torch from Virgil and Ovid, who else could synthesize the disparate of both Grace and what exists Beyond Good and Evil?

Predictably I loved the Inferno, liked Purgatory (especially Virgil and the poets) and pondered the implications of this Green Zone, I mean Paradise. Negotiating the strictures and commandments is tricky. I didn’t find any overt abatement of beer drinking. Unfortunately local politics mar this endeavor. History and Tom Eliot appear to have given the Florentine a pass.

This was an encouraging instance of literary fidelity, one where I read the Commedia from beginning to end, with no distraction, dalliance or pursuit of anything else.

This is one of the best epic poems ever! I highly recommend everyone reads this, Homer's works, and Virgil's works. This was a great translation and a wonder forward and glossery.
5 huge stars!
Enjoy and Be Blessed.
Diamond

I've re-read it one more time. I forget that the journey is not outside of us, but is within us. Dante is not talking about others who are in hell, or purgatory, or Paradise, since we are all exile (out-side of our islands). For each of us the pieces of ourselves are fragmented . Unlike most people, I prefer the Paradise section most of all, each step in paradise shows the different intelligibility that we need to find meaning in what seems to be a meaningless life.

I read Dante for the first time three years ago, then again, a year ago, and then again, last week, and then I reread it this week. In addition, I watched the Yale course, Dante in Translation for the third time last week, while concurrently reading Virgil’s Aeneid, and read Dante’s de Monarachia, and recently I just finished reading the Old Testament and Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplex. Also, about a week ago I listened to the course by Sr. Mary Clement Davlin on the Divine Comedy (I want to note that her course was the best overall resource for me in order to understand The Comedy). There’s a reason why Dante’s worth all this trouble. Simply put, in order to understand the Medieval age and it’s beginning of the end and the start of Humanism one must understand The Comedy, and without understanding history one cannot understand who we are today.

Of all the books ever written there is no stronger evidence for the likelihood that the author is a time traveler from the future than this book if one assumes that the time traveler is forced to explain only within the paradigms of his time period while subtly overturning the given worldview by explaining everything the current generation thought they knew about themselves within their own parameters while laying a foundation for a new way of understanding the world.

Scholasticism is best demolished by a scholastic by using its own language. Dante summarizes Medieval history with his encyclopedic rendering of how the Medieval mind thought of itself as itself allowing for the beginning of the ending of the predomination of scholastic thought while setting the stage for what will soon come to pass while explaining the world in terms of the human rather than the divine by using the divine as a way to bring humans back into the world and thus becoming arguably the first Humanist.

Dante doesn’t mention Maimonides or his Guide for the Perplex, but he does mention Avicenna and Averroes and embraces Aristotle as they both think in Aristotelian terms. Aquinas, who is prominently placed in Paradise, synthesizes Aristotle with Augustine and respects Avicenna so much he just refers to him as the commentator for his ability in explaining Aristotle. (I want to note that Plotinus is not in Dante at least I don’t think he was, but pseudo-Dionisius is, and Aquinas relies heavily on both. I just find that an interesting oversight by Dante. It might not be clear to you, but Augustine synthesizes Plotinus with Cicero giving us his Christianity and Augustine is a major character within Dante).

Aquinas puts reason before faith, Bonaventure will put faith before reason. Each are in paradise as is St. Francis who will marry Lady Poverty so that love, that is the primo mobile, will shake the universe into existence since our will of our will gives us our freedom to choose beyond our nature and forces us to own ourselves and actualize our own authenticity. Those who make no choice are making a choice and will be outside of the Gates of Inferno and must remain in limbo forever and a day.

All of wisdom (according to the Count of Monte Cristo) is contained in these two words: wait and hope. Hope is a verb of the future. It is always an expectation of something to come. The ontological difference between knowledge and faith is hope at least according to Dante. I would like to note that Pandora released all of the evils into the world except for one, namely hope. The Greeks were suspicious of hope and made hope a vice as they would make pride a virtue. Dante makes hope a virtue and pride a vice. Heidegger will shake the foundations of Philosophy in 1927 with his Being and Time and he makes care his foundation for human being, care is another verb of the future.

The ultimate good is a contemplation of the divine and the consideration of justice while in Dante’s Paradise. We live in a world such that the thinking and the doing, the mind and the body, the action and the thought do not ever meet. Hegel will try to reconcile sense certainty with the truth outside of us and often would appeal to Dante in his expositions. Dante knows the problem with contingency and necessity while trying to preserve freewill in the face of human nature and our choices within an uncertain world.

All of this is also within Dante and he’ll tell you through his musical rhetoric and will always tell you what he is trying to tell you but sometimes reveals the reasons slowly. It’s not important to know all the characters he introduces because he’ll tell you why they are in his story but sometimes he doesn’t let you know until the last line of the Canto or sometimes not even until the next Canto. By all means, read the Clive James translation first since he will integrate what others have said in footnotes seamlessly into his translation.

All of Kant’s antinomies are laid out within Purgatory within the different Cantos. Hegel’s dialectic approach is too. All of philosophy until Kant and shortly after as modified by Hegel would say that ‘the truth is out there’, Dante is a partial exception to that rule about philosophers who came before Kant. He knows that Leah will act while Rachel must think and that the supreme good is an infinite that the finite will struggle with before fully grasping that certainty remains elusive. Yes, Dante is writing a poem (music with rhetoric) but he definitely lays a foundation for what will be coming, and, oh yeah, one really needs to read Vico’s New Science in order to see some of Dante’s influence, both realize that we exist in a Bayesian world because our memories evolve as our imagination overcomes the now.

One of my favorite sentences from a recent book I read is ‘most Enlightenment thinkers were Pelagians’. You can bet that Dante was too. He makes a point that prayer makes a difference. Augustine would not; Pelagius would. Augustine would say God’s grace is freely given and that there are two separate magisterial that don’t intersect, the City of God and the City of Man; Pelagius would not. Dante does lay this out clumsily in his de Monarachia which makes what he is saying in The Comedy all the more understandable, though he doesn’t acknowledge Pelagius.

Dante would even hint that those from the Ganges, who believe nature is God and God is nature (as he believed the Hindus did, and how Spinoza will later) and those who believe love is all you need as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Bonaventure did, or those who make God outside of the world and not knowable by mortals such as the Saracens are just as worthy as those who believe God came to earth as a man and was more than just an apparition as the heterodox belief of a Roman Emperor who saw the errors of his way. Yes, Dante will place the unbaptized infants and the pagans not in Paradise, but Dante similarly to Pelagius would like to reconsider their status if given a chance. The Venerable Bede is mentioned multiple times in The Comedy, but without a doubt, Bede’s Pelagius is nothing but a heterodoxic villain and Dante knows better than to acknowledge Pelagius as worthy of Paradise.

There is appearance and a reality hidden which can be revealed by art, poetry, music, sculptures, puzzles and seeing with our eyes and hearing with our hearts which remains hidden as we look at everything while seeing nothing and distract ourselves with our idle chatter while we don’t allow ourselves to square the circle because the transcendental deduction (Kant concept) obscures reality. Virgil will scoff at Dante when he vicariously participates in the schadenfreude of watching others bicker while he was in Inferno.

An exile, as Dante was, is not only outside of his own island (ex + ile=island), he is also alienated from themself. The key for me in understanding The Comedy was not to think it is a religious allegory, but more of an allegory about our own life. That clue came to me from Sr. Mary Devlin’s course which I referenced above. Aristotle made pride a virtue while Dante makes it foundational to all of the cardinal sins.

The Comedy is not an easy read. It is a necessary read for understanding Medieval thought and for what will come later. Will Durant made Dante his pivotal character in the ‘Age of Faith’ Volume 4 of ‘Story of Civilization’ for a reason. To understand The Comedy is to understand the Medieval age and what will come after. Oddly, Gibbons’ made Petrarch his final and most important character within his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I know Dante is a mystic. I know he definitely prefers the Franciscans over the Dominicans. He’ll make the most mystic of the mystics St. Bernard the final guide in his journey for a reason, but, even with all of that, I think it’s possible to read The Comedy as our individual journey in this life where we must reconcile the ontological difference with our own transcendental deduction and own our own authenticity.

Dante doesn’t find himself in the middle of his personal journey, he finds himself in the middle of ‘our’ journey. The Comedy is not about others it is about ourselves. Every experience is relevant for the individual. Much of modern-day philosophy is hidden within this book from the first page onward to the last. From the get go, we are shrouded in greed, pride, and jealousy, and a little bit of ourselves is revealed along each step in the book and a whole lot of what is to be revealed latter by brilliant philosophers to come are also within these pages. I’ll end these ramblings by ‘walking away with a trumpet of the arse’ (otherwords: a fart!).

the afterlife sounds fucking exhausting

Inferno ---> *****+
Purgatorio ---> ****
Paradiso ---> ***1/2

Che posso dire su La Divina Commedia, alle scuole superiori mi aveva fatto penare e non poco, la parafrasi era il mio incubo quotidiano, semplicemente ne capivo poco o niente... Ora a molti anni di distanza ci riprovo, dopo una prova di una decina di anni fa, andata così così, il Paradiso lo avevo abbandonato.
Così, insieme ad un GdL, mi ci r'imbatto. Il viaggio è lungo e tortuoso, la selva mi è sempre stata "amica", l'avrò letta decine di volte, le porte dell'Inferno mi dicono (ancora) "lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate". Scendo con Dante e Virgilio attraverso i gironi infernali, il caldo incomincia ad esser soffocante. Fortunatamente dopo aver salutato Lucifero, arrivo...

L'inferno è sempre una scoperta, c'è tanto da scoprire, tanto da conoscere, tanto da riflettere. Ci troviamo molta mitologia e storia. Il Purgatorio è interessante, invece il Paradiso mi risulta troppo religioso (ma questo è un mio personale problema). Comunque è e rimane un'opera imponente e ineguagliabile!

Five stars is not enough. Many stars for this poet of stellar dimensions.

UPDATE

https://publicdomainreview.org/collec...


UPDATE

https://www.ancient-origins.net/histo...


UPDATE

https://europeanconservative.com/arti...

Having a surfeit of time with which to listen to audiobooks since starting my new job, I decided that I might as well revisit this old classic. The recording was a good one—featuring musical interludes in between each canto—and so I prepared myself for some Christian epicness. But now, having finished, I’m somewhat disappointed.

I know that the fault is not Dante’s (well, at least not mainly his fault), since I liked the poem so much the first time. I would suggest that it was because I listened to it rather than read it, but that hasn’t prevented my enjoyment of anything else. It could be the translation. The version used in the audiobook was decidedly inferior to the Longfellow translation I originally read—being more prosaic and modern. But the strange thing was that Dante, stripped of his poetic trappings and presented as a story, became petty.

Yes: there is a current of extraordinary pettiness that runs through The Divine Comedy. With the bitterness of an exile, Dante puts all of his political enemies in Hell, all of his allies in Purgatory or Heaven. To a modern reader this may seem merely natural. But consider: he is attempting a narrative that seeks to integrate all human and divine knowledge—to integrate both pagan and Christian art forms—and Dante still can’t help taking jabs at his foes.

Also stunning is his arrogance. Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven notwithstanding, the only thing supernatural about this poem is Dante’s ego. He could have made anyone the hero: St. Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne, St. Augustine. But he chose himself. Dante is Dante’s own hero. How could the man—who had never done anything extraordinary in his life—venture to portray himself as such a favorite of God that he would be led up to the highest sphere of Heaven itself? What’s more, he sets Beatrice—the woman he lusted after—nearly on a level with the Virgin Mary! Just think about that for a second. Throughout the entire poem Dante is presuming to know the Mind of God. What profounder blasphemy can be committed by a poet? It’s absurd, really.

But I bet I would have a similarly disappointed reaction to a modernized and simplified version of Shakespeare. Poetry without the poetry is paltry. And who am I—who is writing an internet book review on one of the greatest poems of all time—to judge another for being arrogant?

[Clive James translation]

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found
Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound
I still make shows how hard it is to say
How harsh and bitter that place felt to me—
Merely to think of it renews the fear—
So bad that death by only a degree
Could possibly be worse. As you shall hear,
It led to good things too, eventually,
But there and then I saw no sign of those,
And can’t say even now how I had come
To be there, stunned and following my nose
Away from the straight path.

I'd just got round to having a look through this new translation. After reading the above how could I not keep going? It was near enough the perfect time for me to read it, and I bolted the thing whole in 24 hours. Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious - a modern existential novel unfortunately mis-jacketed as chicklit, which I read earlier this year - took "Dante's mid-point of life", half threescore years and ten, as its starting point. Without that accidental prequel, I may not have been so primed. (And as long as I can remember I'd seen 35 as the big crunch in the way that most people seem to see 30. Possibly the fault of Martin Amis, whom I read in my teens and who makes it a pivotal age for some characters - perhaps he took it from Dante.)

Best of all, this doesn't feel like a translation: this is so good it feels like poetry itself. I've read quite a bit of translated poetry this year and the only other edition that had this effect was Edna St. Vincent Millay's Fleurs du Mal. Perhaps neither is the closest to the original; that's not, perhaps, the point: as a reading experience rather than an academic crib-sheet, each is wonderful. Of course there's the occasional off-note here - how could there not be in 500 pages? - but this really is a virtuoso work, and I think the fuss is justified.

It was for a long while impossible to correlate this beautiful poetry with that loud, sarky Australian bloke off the telly. (Who also had the temerity to write multiple volumes of memoirs - a practice which, as I remembered when I read Maya Angelou's Caged Bird recently, as a kid I seem to have been brought up to look down on; egotism should not be so overt.) That perceived incongruity, the sense of "does not compute", is a compliment, really: he's able to assume different registers so completely that I could have thought he was two separate people. However! Many translators or classic authors include innuendo which appears to be unintentional. (In an interview, the ubiquitous Pevear & Volokhonsky even referred to being confronted about this by an editor and insisting on retaining it although - IMO - it's distracting.) In Clive James' Divine Comedy there are occasional pieces of innuendo, subtly associated words and sensuality which look much too carefully placed to be anything but deliberate. A writer who was mischievously grinning at it too and who understands the skill of it - wonderful!

Readers who appreciate that sort of thing will probably also enjoy the little references the translator includes. Sort-of anachronistic, but not so in terms of producing a stunningly erudite epic poem which communicates with its readers. (In any case, there was no Divine Comedy translation into English until the late 18th century - if that's the only language you read well enough, it's futile to pretend towards the entirely authentick.) A few favourites I spotted: marvellous boy (Thomas Chatterton), misshapes, Bedazzled (with a capital), the fault in our stars, pale fire, late and soon (Wordsworth), the bit that put 'The Fool on the Hill' in my head though it's probably not close enough to the lyrics to quote. And, I've no idea if Clive James has any acquaintance with contemporary superhero comics, but: the sheer abundance of their flying - marvel, now – .

My previous experience of reading Dante was also a little unconventional, though not in terms of reading speed: about 15 years ago I read the Penguin Mark Musa Inferno and about half of Purgatorio, mostly in stonkingly unconducive settings like a music festival and working in a nightclub cloakroom. (My powers of concentration were never as good as you might infer from this. After all, I did give up.) I don't have the Musa editions to hand; whilst I do remember them being more interesting than expected, there wasn't this scale of wow. Whether that's because of me changing, or a better book, or both - dunno. Though of course after this, I'd recommend the Clive James to others who've previously abandoned Dante and wouldn't mind another go.

The Picador edition of the Clive James also has no notes. (Though some extra background info is incorporated into the text of the poem.) It's so wonderfully freeing and immediate*. I nearly always opt for notes but - and I'd hardly let anyone get away with this - I loved being told that for once I couldn't really have them. That's all very well for you to say, you're an ex-Catholic who's studied medieval history. True, but I am quite rusty and the history is a bit earlier than the stuff I know best; this was more a case of recognising lots of names whilst not being sure what they did. Anyway, on the subject of the Italian Wars (15th-16th century version, but not dissimilar to the delightfully named Guelphs and Ghibellines) I never met a tutor who didn't acknowledge that they were just a dull and fiddly background to more interesting things. Much of the time I simply let the poetry flow; poetry does that. It's straight into the vein; felt rather than thought; for me reading poetry is like being on an escalator where prose is climbing a staircase.

When I wanted to look up things behind the book's back, the Wikipedia list of cultural references in The Divine Comedy covered nearly everything I wanted to know. (With the exception of: William Longsword who was kept in a cage - and none of the chaps so named elsewhere on Wiki have this in their biogs; some saints mentioned in Paradiso - perhaps the Wikipedian gave up near the end; and one that you need abstruse knowledge to query in the first place, Dante saying Aquarius is near the beginning of the year - the English year began on 25th March.)

So, in brief (!), the three parts.

Inferno
This is why some people tag TDC as Fantasy! It is so much like all those adventure-film journeys into molten pits with monsters. And often it made me think about how lucky I was as a child to be told in religious contexts "nobody really believes in hell any more". (Ranting old Irish priests were irrelevant and could be safely ignored). I've since known people who, in childhood, did live in constant terror of hell when they did the smallest thing wrong, experiences which make understandable Hitchens' ostensibly hyperbolic description of religion as child abuse. Dante's Inferno makes me understand anew, more deeply than ever, why and what you might be terrified of. I was hit full-on by the idea that millions of people lived their whole lives feeling that this was all true and certain, and how horrific that was - most of all that they felt there was no escape, that death may well not be an end to suffering, that extreme suffering may never end. The medieval mindset: so much trauma and brutality and loss all around. And that formed such bizarre logic, was so unforgiving and vengeful in an Old Testament style. Not what plenty of people would colloquially call "Christian" now: eternal torture for torturers, as well as for plenty of people who by many modern standards had done (practically) nothing wrong at all. (My theological history is rusty and generalised.)

Purgatorio
At first it perhaps doesn't seem so exciting, or so visual, as Inferno, and the groups of residents aren't quite so clearly labelled; the poetry, though, especially the beginnings of most cantos, is noticeably beautiful. It is evident that this was a civilisation which for the most part believed in learning and change through fear and punishment:
The sin of envy meets its scourge
In this round, and of that scourge every thong
Flaying that disposition must emerge
From love. And thus the curb that speaks against
The sin must sing the virtue.
Feel sad for medieval people spending their whole lives that way with no choice. (Also that I'm being patronising and imposing values of l.C20th western psychology.) Wonder if many of them would seem wildly disruptive or severe, and violent and fearful if they materialised now; Genghis Khan in Bill and Ted was kind of an extreme example - like that but a bit less.

Whilst its main theme is almost as universal as Christianity, a lot of TDC is about Dante's mates or people who'd have been on the medieval equivalent of the regional news in his area. (A re-read after revising some of the history would be interesting.) Clive James' introduction mentions that even soon after publication many readers needed glosses because they didn't know who all these folk were either. In this respect, Dante is much like (the bawdier, briefer, Frencher, later) Francois Villon - and both big their own talent up in their verses almost as much as the average rapper. Later medieval european poet schtick? I'd have to read more to find out. The range of references recalls the smallness of even an educated person's world before printing: the local, the Biblical, the Classical; other countries are represented only by renowned kings, warriors and saints, or vague stereotypes.

Paradiso
Reading The Divine Comedy was also a journey upward in mood (surely intended to inspire the original audience to greater religiosity). The horrors of hell by now seemed quite far away, in another world. The final section was also a blast from the past, personally - not just because the story of a journey into the underworld is one of the oldest around, Gilgamesh and Orpheus to name but two predecessors. As I may have mentioned before - or perhaps it's only in the mega-posts about God is not Great that I never finish or actually post - I had a voluntary phase of being quite strongly religious, aged about 7-9. (Its main focus was obsessive re-reading of Sixty Saints for Girls by Joan Windham.) During this time I would experience a sort of high from thoughts of religious devotion and aspiration, or from solitary prayer and chosen small self-denials, and regardless of actual belief, that high is occasionally re-awakened now by works of art about Christian worship. They don't even have to mean it - one of the strongest effects I can recall was from Luis Buñuel's satirical Simón del desierto . I experienced it again whilst reading Paradiso: buzzy calm, a liking for certain mild asceticisms, a background sense of safety and devotion, breathing changes and all. The poetry was still beautiful but I wasn't reading it as quite the same nitpicky person, more beatific. What I did notice was how effectively the verse conveyed someone trying to describe something too amazing to describe: it really was as if he'd seen it, not only imagined it. The last third of Paradiso, though not so much the very end cantos, is really lots of ways of saying "WOW". I couldn't help but be charmed by it; it's nice to see someone made truly happy by a thing even if I disagree with it.

Perhaps the most distinctively medieval-European part of Dante's Paradise (and a bizarre one to many readers, probably) is courtly love and Beatrice herself, that the loved one is ranked with saints and silently worshipped like one - and that that's absolutely fine. No cries of "idolatry!", or "unhealthy!". I for one find it very sweet, because, most importantly he never bothers her about it. And having had somewhat similar tendencies of my own towards a few lovers (a pattern almost certainly rooted in the relationship of those girl saints to Jesus in the aforementioned book), it was just nice to see someone else on that narrow little wavelength for once.

Another aspect of Catholicism I very rarely think or hear about now is the geekiness: lots of names of things to learn and remember. There are plenty of saints mentioned in Paradiso (really??), some of whom I'd not heard of for a long time, and I recalled for the first time in ages how saints were, in childhood, another thing with neatly categorisable attributes to learn, and spot (on pictures in different churches, for example)- in much the same way as birds, animals and cars were. (I used to be such a geek about cars; it's easy to do when you're a kid because you're nearer the height of the badges, model names, and engine capacity labels, and once you've started remembering those hooks it's easy to stick things on them.) Anyway, unfortunately none of these lesser-known saints were on the Wikipedia list and they needed separate searches.

This ability to understand parts of religion from the inside is one of the reasons I have difficulties with stricter parts of atheist doctrine. I find this understanding useful as a way of empathising with or just not much minding the devout, (who, let's face it, are not disappearing from the world any time soon) and it was probably good training for life in general to spend an hour or two a week being patiently bored with people I disagreed with in RE lessons and church services, once I'd decided, aged 10, that religion wasn't for me after all.

Obviously The Divine Comedy, even if it made me emotionally re-experience some of the sensations of religion, didn't convert me back. The triumphal feeling though, of "Yessss! I've actually finished that" (dizzying and surreal because it was unplanned and so swift) was tempered with something calmer and more benevolent. This is a lovely and astoundingly skilful translation simply as poetry, and I look forward to looking back through it.

*Another reviewer put it better: " the freedom and luxury of just reading the damn thing as a narrative is so exhilarating".

Everything it is to be a human being is brought to form and consequence within a single structure that makes The Divine Comedy the most massive metaphor of western culture." —From the Introduction

"Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood . . ."
—Inferno, Canto I, 1-3

I first heard those words from Don Draper in the trailer for the opening episode of Mad Men*'s sixth Season, when it first aired in 2013 . . .

Fast forward 4 years.

I'd been putting off reading The Divine Comedy because I knew that I would have to spend a couple of hours deciding on a translation †. When I finally decided to, I had that rendering of the first Canto in mind that I had heard on Mad Men, but I didn't know if it actually existed, or if someone on the show had taken an artistic liberty and changed an existing translation.

I began comparing: I found Longfellow hard to follow; Mendelbaum flat. Finally, I came across Ciardi's translation. I loved it. Not just the opening of the first Canto, but the whole of the first Canto, and some other parts that I compared. For me, it strikes a perfect balance between readability and poetic melody.

__________
The edition that I read includes an Introduction, 13 diagrams, a short summary of the Canto at the start of each one, and 1-5 pages of Ciardi's extremely helpful, insightful, and at times, humorous notes‡, at the end of each Canto.

I had read that Dante's magnum opus was very dense, and included lots of references, and use of literary techniques such as symbolism, allegory &c., but I didn't think to check if various editions included notes when I was ordering a copy.

I was lucky.

In my opinion, even if you know your scripture, church doctrine &c. inside out, know the topography of Italy better than your home country, and have a good knowledge of ancient history, you will still want a copy with notes for your first reading.

The density is astounding, definitely the densest poem that I have read, and could definitely contend with, for example, Ulysses & The Sound and The Fury on this front.

But Ciardi guides you through with a gentle hand, unravelling this masterwork with precision, diligence, and detail.

When I was reading, I read the helpful summary (which includes some details like scene, and characters) first, then the actual Canto, then browsed the notes at my leisure. I didn't have a meticulous interest in the biblical references, so I only read enough of those notes to get a general understanding of the Canto in terms of the biblical references, and I also got a bit burned-out with the topological & historical Italian references that Dante was making, so again I didn't read all of these. But I read fully most of the other notes. These include textual information, notes on the translation (such as liberties he took), and literary explanations.

The notes were detailed, and helped me to appreciate the complete genius of Dante infinitely more than if I had not consulted any notes. And again, this is something that I would absolutely recommend a first-time reader should do if they don't want to get lost and confused, and risk lack of understanding and boredom on Dante's divine journey.

__________
Like most people. I enjoyed the Inferno the most. Purgatory and Paradise I did enjoy, but to a lesser extent. But this mainly comes down to the subject matter. I do have a small interest in, but am not familiar with, church doctrine, scripture &c. at all. But you don't need this knowledge to appreciate Dante's literary genius on all fronts.

n  "Dante must be read attentively: mind will reveal itself only to mind. But Dante is not difficult to read. It is true that he writes in depth and on many simultaneous levels. Yet his language is usually simple and straightforward. If the gold of Dante runs deep, it must also rise to the surface. A lifetime of reading cannot mine all that gold; yet enough lies on the surface, or only an inch below, to make a first reading a bonanza in itself. All one needs are some suggestions as to what to look for. Thereafter, one need only follow the vein as it goes deeper and deeper. One must, to begin with, think allegorically."n

__________

A few quotes:

There are always those
who measure worth by popular acclaim,
ignoring principles of art and reason
—Purgatory, XXVI 120-122

. . .within a cloud of flowers
that rose like fountains from the angel's hands
and fell about in showers
—Purgatory, XXX, 28

. . . and it lost Paradise by the same deed.
Nor could they be regained . . .
—Paradise, VII, 87

And now, that every wish be granted you
I turn back to explain a certain passage,
that you may understand it as I do.
—Paradise, VII, 121

Here I concede defeat. No poet known,
comic or tragic, challenged by his theme
to show his power, was ever more outdone
—Paradise, XXX, 22

That he may experience all while yet alive
—Inferno XXVIII, 48

The instant I had come upon the sill
of my second age and crossed and
changed my life
—Purgatory XXX 124-125

. . . with fruits of paradise.
—Paradise XI, 123

So many streams of happiness flow down
into my mind that it grows self-delighting
—Paradise XVI, 19-20

I have learned much that would, were it
retold,
offend the taste of many alive today.
—Paradise XVII, 116-117

. . . sees far beyond
the furthest limits
—Paradise XIX, 56-57

. . . for though he learns
the sweet life, he has known the bitter
way.
—Paradise XX, 47-48

The name of that Sweet Flower to which I pray
morning and night, seized all my soul and moved it
—Paradise XXIII, 88-89

Into the gold of that rose that blooms eternal
—Paradise XXX, 124

. . . the two eternal roots of this our rose
—Paradise XXXII, 120

. . . to this flower of timeless beauty.
—Paradise XXXII, 126

__________
* One of the best shows (part of my 'holy trinity') which, like Dante, is very dense, and uses lots of literary techniques which most viewers do not even realise, mistaking the show for a soap-opera with lots of adultery and nothing particularly deep to say. I have watched it multiple times, and have read multiple articles on each episode which delve fully into the literary techniques that Mad Men uses, and even after multiple viewings and reading multiple articles, I still have original views and insights on most episodes. Here is a website which links various reviews for each episode by season if I have piqued your interest. If you want to avoid information overload, Todd VanDerWerff, Alan Sepinwall, and Andrew Johnston are the most incisive and perceptive critics.
http://tiredandboredwithmyself.com/th...

† Personally, when it comes to poetry, I think that the poetic form of the author should be preserved as much as possible, and so I did not consider any literal translations.

This short article discusses and compares four different translations by Zapulla, Mendelbaum, Hollander, and Ciardi.
http://poems.com/special_features/pro...

‡ Here are some excerpts from Ciardi's notes to Paradise:

"Few readers will have remembered the point Dante left open in those lines, but Dante seems never to forget. To read him is to experience mind in extraordinary order."
-Note to XX

". . . though had he done so he would have found himself prophesying the end of the world within fairly tight limits, a prophecy Dante wisely chose not to utter. Poetry is, among other things, the art of knowing what to leave out."
-Note to XX

"The art of juxtaposing details in a way that constantly gives scale to an all-containing system of values is one of the marvels of Dante's genius."
-Note to XXIII

"The Muses gave suck to the poets, thereby transmitting to them the powers of song. How these virgin sisters maintained their milk supply is one more item to be filed among the sacred mysteries."
-Note to XXIII

"Adam declares that his whole sojourn in the Terrestrial Paradise was six hours (and perhaps part of the seventh). . . . Half an allegorical day is about as long as any man can stay innocent."
-Note to XXVI

But even Ciardi, one or twice, has to bow before the Genius of Dante:

n  ". . . Such questions must be referred to a quality of revelation unknown to footnotes."n

THE DARING, somewhat COMIC, and also DIVINE, INVENTIO


It is very difficult not to be lured by the highly intelligent craft of Durante degli Aliguieri (DA). And may be it is not a coincidence that he was the exact contemporary of Giotto, his fellow Florentine. For if Giotto planted the seed for a pictorial representation of the world in which man, at the center, and through a window, delivers to us a naturalistic depiction of divine stories, Dante also used his writing to posit himself as the Author who through his fictional persona or Alter-Ego, gives us the viewpoint to contemplate the full cosmos. His cosmos, but for us to share.

Still, we modern readers, in spite of Modernist and PostModernist awareness, are still fooled by DA’s handling of illusion, and easily become pilgrims and start on a literary trip more than ready to absorb everything that DA wants us to see, and think, and believe.

POLITICS

So, for example, we will learn his political views. DA was exiled in 1301 and led a peripatetic life, outside Florence, until his death in 1321. He wrote the Commedia during the exile, from 1309 and finished it in time. By masterfully welding the fact and mythologized fiction of the world of Antiquity, he cloths himself with the full robes of Auctoritas, and presents us the complex development of European politics during the thirteenth century. He summons his views repeatedly either by the succession of visits to the traitors or in fully developed historical pageants.

Of course, Hell is populated by DA’s enemies, with the very pope responsible for his exile, Boniface VIII, holding stardom in Circle 8th. In this Inferno DA is the very Minos. He is the one who with his pen of many tails wraps around his enemies and throws them down the pit to the Circle that DA believes the chosen sinners deserve. Even if this spectacle horrifies his ingenuous Pilgrim.

The ranking of the Inferno Circles reflect also DA’s values. Lust is the least damaging while Treason, in particular political treason and the betrayal of friends, is the most despicable. In comparison even Lucifer, a rendition that remains faithful to the medieval tradition, is not much more than a grotesque, and not particularly hateful, monster.

Politics continue in Purgatory. DA’s audacity is again proved by the way he exploits to its fullest what was still a relatively new concept in Christian dogma (1274). If DA had been Minos in Inferno, he now is the discerning Cato of Purgatory. He is the one holding the Silver and Gold keys, and who claims to know the very intimate thought of those who had the luck to repent the instance just before dying. He awards then the transit ticket to Paradise. Can we be surprised if some of the awardees had some relation to those figures who had welcomed DA during his exile?

DA’s authorial knowledge is supplemented by the granting his protagonist with the role of Messenger of Hope. The Pilgrim, as the only human in Purgatory, can bid for more prayers to the still living relatives when he goes back to Earth. He can effect a change in the duration that any purging sinner is to spend in the transitional stage, the only one of the three realms in which the clock is ticking.

Could one expect DA to finally drop the political discourse in Heaven? No, of course not. There it even acquires greater strength since the discourse is cloaked with a divine mantle. In Paradiso it will be no other than Saint Peter himself who will denounce the path of degeneration that the Papacy had taken in recent years. And if Boniface VIII (died in 1303) had been repeatedly identified as the culprit for the evil in earth, now it is his succeeding popes, --and contemporary to the writing of Commedia--, who are selected by DA’s saintly mouthpiece. Pope Clement V was responsible for the transfer of the papacy to Avignon, and the cupidity of John XXII was for everyone to see.

Indeed, a secluded Apocalyptical 666 attests that politics forms a triptych in Commedia. In agreement with the intricate framework of parallels, symmetries and balances in this work, DA devoted the three chapters 6 in each book to political diatribes.

Apart from his relying on Ancient Auctoritas, DA also accorded the full weight of history to his views, and it is mostly in a couple of major pageants and in the Valley of the Kings that he exposes the political disaster that the withdrawal from the Italian peninsula by the Empire had on the various city states. It was left to the corrupt papacy and to the corrupt smaller kingdoms to spread crime along the full Europe. His solution was clear. The papacy had to govern only religious matters, and he extolled the Emperor Henry VII to hold the political reins of Europe. It is DA’s canonized Beatrice who has a reserved seat for this Emperor in God’s White Flower if he does succeed in exerting his salvific political role.






DOGMA

But the Commedia is not just about politics. This extremely complex work is also soaking in Christian Dogma. Of course politics and dogma were inextricably joined during the Middle Ages, and that was part of DA’s very complaint. And what is to me extraordinary about the immediate reception of Commedia, is that it was treated like Scripture. Even the early editions were illustrated like illuminated manuscripts—which in a way is most befitting if we remember that it is about the progress of a Pilgrim’s as he approaches Light and gains a 20/20 vision elevated tho the Trinitarian power.

In his appeal to religious dogma DA was extraordinarily successful, even if some of his claims were shockingly daring. He modified or added realms to the Christian Cosmos, with the peculiar understanding of the Limbo to accommodate revered figures from Ancient Antiquity, or added the Pre-Purgatory for the unabsolved Rulers. He designed his own ranking of the Sins, both for Hell and Purgatory. But most importantly he proposed his understanding of Free Will and its conflicting relationship to Predetermination and God’s vision. Not by chance did he place the discussion of Free Will at the very center of the work, in Canto 16 of Purgatory.

But the most dangerous proposition, for him, was his vehement defense of the limitations of the Papacy on Earth. He started writing in 1307 just a few years after the Papal Bull of Unam Sanctam the very controversial claim of papal infallibility. Not this book, but Dante’s Monarchia, in which he strongly attacked official tenet, was burned soon after Dante’s death and was included in the list of forbidden books during the 16th century.





NARRATIVE SCHEMES

To us, however, it is not his proclamations on Dogma, and not even his political views (except for historians), which offer the greatest interest. What is most remarkable for literature addicts is how DA, the author, develops all these themes, and succeeds in weighing with the gravest authority his poetic treatise. And this he does through his masterful manipulation of the power of fiction and the sophisticated uses of voices.

For a start, there is the protagonist: DA’s Alter Ego, and the only human in the full work. His humanity, and his being in the middle of the moral mess in which he has placed himself is the perfect mirror for the reader. But we can trust him to embody us because Virgil, the greatest Roman poet and chronologist of the foundation of Rome, will guide us. We can trust him also because Christian Divinity has selected him as the, temporary, guide. It is only when Virgil’s powers have reached his limits, two thirds into the full work, that the pilgrim’s identity is revealed to us. He is Dante himself, or Dante the Pilgrim (DP). With his revealed identity he can say goodbye to the pagan guide who cannot, alas, have a place in Heaven.


Dante, however, will.





The spoiler provided by our general culture has damaged the way we read the work. The astounding pretention of DA in assigning himself the powers in deciding who goes where in his system of divine retributions has been blurred to some naive readers. Some of them try to excuse Dante precisely because they have been entirely convinced by his acting puppet. The highly successful Dante the Pilgrim (DP) as a candid personality with the qualities of kindness, fear, anger and similar emotions, distracts our attention away from the real Dante, the Author.

The Pilgrim is an alibi mechanism for his creator. He shows pity for the people DA condemns. He can go beyond the Terrace of Pride, in which the rather proud DA may be still spending some of his time. And he becomes the anointed messenger from the Heavens to deliver to us what DA is writing. But we would also be mistaken if we did not recognized that not always him, but many other characters voice DA’s opinion. His brilliant dramatization with innumerable personages constitutes the choir of a ventriloquist.

In the sophisticated Narrative technique, the handling of time is also magisterial. Apart from the symbolic unfolding of the action during Holy Week of the year 1300, and the references to eternal cosmic time, it is the numerous voices of this clever ventriloquist who continually foretell what is to happen to the sinners.

Most outstandingly the voices predict the eternal condemnation of DA’s particular enemies. Some of these were not yet dead at the time of the pilgrimage, but had already passed away when DA was writing his poem. Such an example is the premonition that the most hated pope Boniface VIII will be damned. He died three years later. But there is also the shocking case of the soul that is already in penance while his body is still living on earth. This personality died even after Dante.

Finally it is DP himself, once he has entered Heaven, who engages in this foretelling, and of course, it had to be in his warning to the Popes that were about to be in power in the years after the voyage of the Commedia, reminding them to stay out of politics and to forget material wealth.

The suitability of DP as our Alter-egos to reach salvation is certified by his examinations on the Theological Virtues by the the Apostles Peter, James and John. He passes them with flying colors, because DP acknowledges that his knowledge is based on the Holy Text.

And it is also with Text, and DA was very well versed in exploiting its four levels of interpretation (Literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical), that is, with this new poetry that Dante Aliguieri is proposing a plan for his, and our, salvation. Because after such a heavenly Graduation who can deny the Commedia its status as Prophetic and Scriptural? May be we saw it coming, when the still anonymous Pilgrim posited himself, at the very beginning of the poem, as the 6th greatest poet after the likes of Homer, Ovid, Virgil etc. So, may be it is not by chance that his identity as Dante is revealed until Virgil is used and expensed.

Several other poets also populate the triptychal poem: representatives of the two pioneering schools of Provençal and Sicilian schools, as well as by those Florentines who with or just before DA, started formulating the sweet new style (dolce still novo) and exploring the literary possibilities of the still vernacular Tuscan tongue. But if DA has been exploiting his abilities as ventriloquist, it is with his own voice as a poet that he makes a presence in Commedia. A few of his fictional characters quote some of Dante’s earlier verses.

Having reached the Empirium of the poem, we can stop and think about where Dante Alighieri has taken us. Because, even if not eternal salvation, he has delivered us a most extraordinary feat of literature that we cannot but qualify as divine. Furthermore, he has done so in a newly coined language, to which he added some words of his own invention, and, most outstanding of all, he positioned the Author at the very center of that literary White Rose of fiction.

And this flower continued to exude its rich scent until, in a similar process to the displacement of Giotto’s viewer, Roland Barthes, plucked it in the declaration formulated in his 1967 Essay The Death of the Author.


But before that, it had a long life.

n  

”THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.”

n

n  n
Botticelli’s vision of Satan. There are 92 illustrations by Botticelli, inspired by The Divine Comedy, of which this edition contains a selection.

I read Inferno while in college and had always intended to go back and read Purgatorio and Paradiso, but somehow the years passed and I never returned to Dante’s masterpiece. When my son went off to college and asked to borrow some classics to read, I sent him, along with my copy of The Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Utopia, Paradise Lost, and several other important works of literature. The rule with books, of course, is that there is no such thing as lending and returning. The lending part goes fine, but the returning is usually the tricky part. When I decided it was time to return to Dante, I didn’t ask for my copy back from my son, though he would be one of the few people who would return a book. I feel that giving a book to either of my children is an investment in all of our futures.

Since I decided to descend into hell with Dante, I was frequently glad to have Virgil as our guide. He explained the explainable. He provided a protective wing from the many monstrosities that we encounter.

n  ”Gross hailstones, water gray with filth, and snow
Come streaking down across the shadowed air;
The earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.
Over the souls of those submerged beneath
That mess, is an outlandish, vicious beast,
His three throats barking, doglike: Cerberus.
His eyes are bloodred; greasy, black, his beard;
His belly bugles, and his hands are claws;
His talons tear and flay and rend the shades.”n

As I was reading Dante’s descriptions of various horrendous beasts, it reminded me of the fantastical medieval expressions of imagination that I’ve encountered numerous times in the margins of holy books. These early monk illustrators displayed such a vivid creativity in how they depicted their fears. I can only wonder how terrifying their nightmares were and for them to believe that these terrors were real would only add wings and claws to their trepidation. They were infected with these fears by Christianity, while being dangled the balm and possibility of heaven.

How about this for a living nightmare?

”As I kept my eyes fixed upon those sinners,
A serpent with six feet springs out against
One of the three, and clutches him completely.
It gripped his belly with its middle feet,
And with its forefeet grappled his two arms;
And then it sank its teeth in both his cheeks;
It stretched its rear feet out along his thighs
And ran its tail along between the two,
Then straightened it again behind his loins.
No ivy ever gripped a tree so fast
As when that horrifying monster clasped
And intertwined the other’s limbs with its.
Then just as if their substance were warm wax,
They stuck together and they mixed their colors,
So neither seemed what he had been before.”

After seeing some of the horrors awaiting us in hell, which has proved to be a much better scare tactic for considering improving my heavenly resume than Death on the Highway or Red Asphalt II were for improving my driving skills, we encountered the pantheon of classical writers Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. Dante was so proud (we will deal with pride in Purgatory) that they accepted him as a member of their club. I was starting to wonder if Dante may have already resigning himself to a life in hell. Are great writers who don’t use their gifts glorifying God doomed to hell?

One of the wonderful things about writing, to paraphrase Chaucer, is that you can eviscerate your enemies forever in print, and certainly the people who had most offended Dante in life were experiencing the tortures of everlasting hell. Writers do play God. Because of the fame of The Divine Comedy, their names will always be associated with a list of famous sinners. I would say that Dante’s revenge was served cold, but really it was rather warmly given.

We also meet some sinners who led pious lives worthy of heaven, but because they were never baptised for the reason they lived before Christianity existed, or fell under the catchall phrase ”did not worship God in fitting ways,” and were all, every one of them, consigned to hell. God does seem to be very particular about all of his children fearing him, loving him above all else, and most importantly of all worshipping him. So it wasn’t about whether these people were good people, but that they showed proper reverence to his worshipness. Later, when I visited heaven, I didn’t see any issues with overcrowding, so I’m not sure why a few get out of hell free cards couldn’t have been surreptitiously handed out to those bereft of sin who didn’t completely conform to his will. How about even just a leg up to purgatory, where eventually one might after thousands of years of suffering earn a pair of wings?

It was with some relief, my deodorant was starting to give way, we ascended to Purgatory and confronted the seven terraced mountain, representing the seven deadly sins. For those in need of a recap, there are the malicious uses of love, such as wrath, envy, and pride, and those where love is too strong, such as lust, gluttony, and greed. Sloth is the only sin not based on excesses, but on a lack of enough self-love or energy to be a contributing member of society. As I weigh myself on these scales, I can honestly say that sloth and greed have never been sins of mine. Pride, I will admit, was a struggle when I was younger, but life has a way of knocking the piss out of us and reminding us constantly that we are only half as smart as we think we are. I’ve had a few wrathful moments in my life, but being around human beings for too long will test the patience of the most sainted among us. Lust I will plead the fifth, and gluttony . . well, food has never been an issue, but one could make a case that I do suffer from a serious case of book gluttony.

I did check out some of the real estate pricing while in Purgatory. *sigh*

It was with some relief that we discovered some angels in purgatory, bedraggled ones to be sure, but still ones doing what we want angels to do, which is protect us from marauding beasts.

”I saw the company of noble spirits,
silent and looking upward, pale and humble,
as if in expectation; and I saw,
emerging and descending from above,
two angels bearing flaming swords, of which
the blades were broken off, without their tips.”

Angels are badass warriors, and there have been several television shows in recent years that has depicted them as soft and warm cuddle buddies, but really angels aren’t for clinking beers with, but for us to stand behind when winged, fire spitting beasts are attempting to turn us into crispy critters.

Dante shared an epiphany with me while in Purgatory that left me thinking about the creation of dreams and how important it is for all of us to continue to build new dreams as we leap the final hurdles of achieving a dream or find that other dreams may no longer suit us.

”A new thought arose inside of me and, from
that thought, still others--many and diverse--
were born: I was so drawn from random thought
to thought that, wandering in mind, I shut
my eyes, transforming thought on thought to dream.”

Virgil was replaced as our guide by Beatrice as we were about three-quarters of the way through Purgatory. I was sorry to see Virgil go, but I must admit I’ve always wanted to meet Beatrice, just to see what type of woman would inspire such a lifetime of devotion from a man like Dante. She was the daughter of a banker, married a banker, and with her premature death at 25 remained forever the very vision of beauty. According to Dante, he only met her twice, but those sightings must have been magical because they left him with a permanent love hangover. I wanted to ask Dante if he had ever even talked to the lass or if he just projected all of his visions of her from glimpses of her outer beauty, but then the fact that she is here in Paradise may answer that question for me.

”In ascent, her eyes--
All beauty’s living seals--gain force, and notes
that I had not yet turned to them in Mars,
can then excuse me--just as I accuse
myself , thus to excuse myself--and see
that I speak truly: here her holy beauty
is not denied--ascent makes it more perfect.”

Heaven light, as it turns out, is even better than bar light. We all look our best.

If you are considering reading Dante, I would recommend for sure reading Inferno. Most likely when you encounter Dante references appearing in your reading, they will probably be from the Inferno. This Allen Mandelbaum translation is wonderful and so easy to read, and there are copious notes in the back to help guide you if Virgil loses you in a flaming forest. This is one of the classic works which I have felt for some time I’ve needed to read. There will be many more this year, including but not limited to War and Peace, Magic Mountain, and Les Miserables.

If a bit of flayed skin flies out from between the pages once in a while, don’t be afraid; it’s just part of the adventure. A word of caution though, be sure to buy some SPF1000 before you take this scenic walk with Dante.

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Dante invented his own rhyme scheme, terza rima, for The Divine Comedy. It was adapted into English by Chaucer.

https://poets.org/glossary/terza-rima