Este magno poema concebido por Dante es no sólo el texto más importante de la literatura italiana sino uno de los más emblemáticos a nivel universal. Habiéndolo concluido me es fácil comprender porqué. Dividido en tres grandes partes: infierno, purgatorio y paraíso, cada uno integrado por 33 cantos más uno adicional que funciona como introducción, este poema es un despliegue de belleza y estilo, de compromiso con el equilibro y una inimitable proeza de espíritu creativo.

La divina comedia nos sumerge en los círculos más hondos y retorcidos del infierno y nos propone, junto a Dante, su protagonista, y los aliados que este halla en el viaje, un ascenso fascinante, retorcido y lírico hacia lo más alto del paraíso. Ayudado en primera instancia por Virgilio y en las secciones más divinas por Beatriz, Dante recorre los destinos que aguardan a las almas mortales una vez concluido su paso por la tierra y el lugar que les corresponde de acuerdo a las vidas adoptadas y los pecados cometidos. El infierno es, con diferencia, el punto más corrupto, oscuro y formidablemente creativo de la comedia.

Algo que me fascinó profundamente, además del estilo lírico y cuán amena me resultó la lectura, es la constante sucesión de grandes nombres que Dante despliega, desde importantes figuras políticas, pasando por grandes pensadores y enfrentándose a extraordinarios artistas, su viaje por los distintos estratos del infierno, purgatorio y paraíso no está plagado de espíritus anónimos sino que se topa una y otra vez con seres reales, famosos por su corrupción moral, su genio o su sacrificio. Este hecho enriquece en términos incalculables una lectura de por sí extraordinaria.

Me rehúso a profundizar más porque no quiero condicionar al lector con excesiva información, además, difícilmente mis palabras podrían genuinamente capturar la grandeza de lo conquistado por el autor.

Dante > Shakespeare

(Using this as a placeholder cover as there is no compiled Sayers translation. My second read of this will be Ciardi's, so this can patiently wait until then.)

n  “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”n



excellent fanfiction.


it's obviously an excellent poem BUT i guess i just did not enjoy it as much as u all did. last year we talked about this shit a lot in uni so i finally decided to read the whole thing.
i did not really like Paradiso so there's that.
Dante is such a name dropper.


i'm too lazy to write a review *let's be honest, no one cares about my opinion on this* so look at these:

Me gustó mucho más de lo que esperaba, porque cuando lo empecé creí que me ganaría y lo odiaría. Es una lectura ardua e intensa que merece la pena, siempre y cuando uno esté algo acostumbrado a esta clase de libros. Al empezar a leerlo ya induce a pensar que no será fácil, que hay detalles que uno lee y pierde al mismo tiempo y que Dante Alighieri no tenía ganas de que entendiéramos ni un pedacito del libro. Pero poder, se puede.

Dante se construye como protagonista en este recorrido por el Infierno, el Purgatorio y el Paraíso. El motivo por el cual está en el umbral (no es el “umbral”, sólo lo uso a modo ilustrativo) del Infierno abre interpretaciones y hay que buscarlo en su biografía real, aunque dentro del libro se desliza varias veces. Y Virgilio, el autor de La Eneida, es quien aparece para guiarlo (enviado por Beatriz, personaje que particularmente me encanta). Los tres lugares tienen estructuras propias en donde hay personas cumpliendo con su condena o con su premio (otra vez hago un uso ilustrativo, es un poco más complejo de explicar). Dante erige la biografía de varias de ellas, hayan sido contemporáneas a él o no.

Si ya se me hizo difícil intentar reponer el argumento de una forma sencilla pero un poco más detallada que la que se podría hallar en alguna contratapa, hablar de qué me gustó (y qué no) es una tarea aparte. Me fascinó bastante la idea de contar la vida de otros (y, en varias ocasiones, dejar que la cuenten con una voz propia) desde una perspectiva tan personal, al punto de incurrir en ciertos errores en el intento. Alighieri se puso en un lugar bastante elevado para discernir, desde su punto de vista, quién va a dónde, en una suerte de clasificación subjetiva. Es muy interesante recorrer las biografías e intentar descubrir (o, al menos, tratar de esclarecer un poco) la razón de sus decisiones, aunque muchas veces el mismo personaje se encargue de aclararlo. Me sorprendieron las denuncias a la corrupción de la Iglesia y del poder. Italia, en los tiempos en los que Alighieri vivió, era bastante tormentosa. Alighieri siempre tiene la vista en su Florencia y mantiene una relación de amor-odio con esa ciudad, así que también la menciona.

Dante, Virgilio y Beatriz son los personajes que más se desarrollan en la Comedia. Lo curioso es que los tres fueron reales (bueno, quizá la existencia de Beatriz se haya puesto en duda más de una vez), uno de ellos es una representación del libro, el otro es un poeta latino a quien Alighieri admiraba y Beatriz era el amor de su vida, idealizado a la quinta potencia. Una locura. Lejos de asemejarse a los libros plagados de personajes que no tienen ninguna función aparente, estos tres simbolizan distintas cosas e intervienen bastante, incluso cuando los cantos parecen estar protagonizados por otros.

En cuanto a la escritura, Alighieri es muy poético (de hecho, él es parte de una escuela poética, con características particulares), cada canto tiene un tono distinto. Algunos son horrorosos por la clase de condena que describe y otros, como los del Paraíso, están cargados de luz. Los simbolismos son habituales y hay una gran cantidad de referencias religiosas. Por suerte, existen las ediciones anotadas. Son tan molestas como necesarias. Si no fuera por ellas, también pasarían desapercibidas las referencias a hechos de público conocimiento en el 1300, así que uno termina aprendiendo algo de Historia en el camino. Nada que no pueda investigarse, mucho más con Internet a mano, pero requeriría un tiempo considerable hacerlo con cada dato nuevo. Eso es lo único malo: que Alighieri da cosas como sabidas, pero no es así. Si bien uno podría leer los versos e igual comprender el libro, no sería una lectura profunda. Si es para entretenimiento, tal vez el lector no se haga problema, pero si existen otros fines La Divina Comedia se vuelve todo un desafío rodeado de otros libros inspiradores y de alegorías que surgen de la propia sabiduría del autor.

Se nota muchísimo que Alighieri le dedicó mucha energía (y talento, por supuesto) a este poema. Por eso es imposible entenderlo o captar todos los detalles en su totalidad con una sola lectura (al menos, esa es la impresión que me causó). Más allá de los obstáculos, es un gran libro y tiene pasajes e historias muy bellos, además de interesantes. Es una de las lecturas “pesadas” que más disfruté. A grandes rasgos, eso es lo que puedo decir del libro… aunque al cerrarlo uno se quede sin palabras.

Nota enero 2016: una profesora (que no es la misma que la que me recomendó esta edición) me desaconsejó esta traducción porque no es de quien dice ser. Un caso muy curioso.


Reseña en Clásico desorden

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

In Falling Towards England, the second volume of his memoirs, Clive James recalls making an ill-prepared trip to Florence as a young man in order to meet up with a girlfriend. Seeing him deeply frustrated by his inability to speak the language, she made what turned out to be a fateful intervention:

That same night, Françoise sat down beside me with a volume of Dante and construed a few lines of the Inferno to begin showing me how the language worked. Per me si va tra la perduta gente. Through me you go among the lost people. A line that crushed the heart, but in the middle of it you could say tra la. It was music.

He was lucky in his teacher: ‘Françoise’ is James's pseudonym for Prue Shaw, who is now about the most famous Dantista working in English. (For many years she was also his wife, and this book is dedicated to her.) So anyone who has read much of James before will know to what extent this translation of Dante is a life's work for him, and it was indeed the last major work he finished before his death in 2019. I came to it completely fresh, never having read Dante before. As a fan of James's poetry, I wish I could say I loved it more than I did; but the truth is I found it a mixed bag, with some moments of brilliance alongside some moments of awkwardness and bewilderment.


Henry Fuseli, Dante and Virgil on the Ice of Kocythos, 1770s

Apart from his vivid imagery (especially in the Inferno), Dante is revered for the beauty of his poetry. At the risk of stating the obvious, that is a damn hard thing to recreate in another language. James makes the sensible choice to turn Dante's terza rima into rhyming quatrains, which he rightly says are a more natural form for English. But there is sometimes a sense of padding in his verses where you feel that three lines have been expanded into four, especially when interpolations have been used to make his rhyme scheme work. The famous opening runs:

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…

That curious ‘keening sound’ is not in the Italian at all – and it's a very specific invention to reach for, which does make it seem a bit of a laboured way to make the metre and the rhyme fit.

In terza rima, the middle line of every tercet rhymes with the first and third lines of the subsequent tercet – whose middle line rhymes with the next tercet, and so on in perpetuity. To complete the rhyme, you always have to read one more tercet. This gives the original a propulsive forward motion, which is obvious even if your Italian is as rubbish as mine is. James achieves a similar effect with heavy enjambment (which you can see something of already in that opening), although the drawback here is that it smothers his rhymes almost to the point of snuffing them out. Look at a passage like Adam's speech in the Paradiso:

                       “What was it, the first sin?
What language did I shape and use? These were
Your thoughts, my son. Hear me as I begin
To answer them. The tasting of the tree
Was not, alone, the cause of my exile
For so long. No, we crossed a boundary
Of pride, for that fell serpent had the guile
To say: ‘The day you eat this, you will be
Like Gods.’ ”

It rhymes, but you'd be forgiven for not noticing. If you read through the line breaks the rhymes are elided; if you stress them, in many cases, there is a real danger of losing track of the syntax, which can sometimes be labyrinthine. Yet in fact, it's when James leans into his rhymes that his poetry comes most alive for me, and when it connects most thrillingly with the aesthetics of the original (‘for an Italian poet,’ James comments in his introduction, ‘it's not rhyming that's hard’). I loved Beatrice's descriptions of the divine light in heaven, where the rhyme scheme conveys a due sense of her awe, but tempers it with a Jamesian directness:

                              “Look at how it glows,
The height, the width of the Eternal Good:
So many mirrors where it breaks and goes
On breaking, yet remains the one thing. Could
One and the many show more harmony?
It stuns you, doesn't it? It still stuns me.”

This is at the end of a canto, where James allows himself a rhyming couplet, often to terrific effect: these are frequently the most striking bits of writing. But that distinctive tone comes through in all kinds of unexpected places – there is reference, for instance, to Pompey, whose ‘last grief came to a head. The head was his’. Or felicitously colloquial passages like this, from Hell:

But all those naked souls unhinged by fate
Changed colour when they heard that speech so harsh.
Clicking their bared, chipped teeth in hymns of hate,
They cursed their parents, God, the human race,
The time, the temperature, their place of birth,
Their mother's father's brother's stupid face…

Overall, then, James's verse often helped me connect with Dante, but sometimes felt like it was getting in the way. And there was a lot I wanted to connect with, because this is one of those texts that you ‘know’ in various ways before you get to it, by cultural osmosis. All the chat with Dante is really about the Inferno, and one of the things that surprised me in the Divine Comedy was how little, relatively speaking, I enjoyed the scenes in Hell and how much more, relatively speaking, I found myself interested in Purgatory and Heaven. Hell was less grotesque and fantastic than I had been led to expect, whereas Purgatory deals with much more relatable moral situations and Heaven turns out to be a crazed attempt to describe things that are literally indescribable, like moving beyond time and space.


Henry Fuseli, Dante Observing the Souls of Paolo and Francesca, 1770s

Most of all, I was increasingly awestruck by the sense of having an entire medieval worldview laid out in detail before me. Dante does his best to ground his journey in a solid physical or cosmogonic reality – so the descent to hell is basically rappelling down a tunnel into the earth; purgatory is a climb up several terraces to the Garden of Eden at the top of a mountain; and heaven involves ascending through the seven medieval ‘planets’ to the divine Empyrean beyond. Most of these realms turn out to be peopled by religious or political figures from Florence, of varying levels of obscurity. James tries to soften the blow here by making explicit some references which are usually only explained in footnotes – but I found that I still needed to take in some secondary commentary as I went, checking in fairly regularly with the annotated John Sinclair translation.

Of more lasting interest are Dante's attempts to wrestle with the moral implications of his religious vision. Virgil, famously, is his guide through Hell and Purgatory, but Virgil can't go any further because in the final analysis he is damned for being born too early. Dante loved and respected the Classical writers; but he cannot save them. They're stuck in Limbo – an antechamber of hell – for all eternity. To his credit, Dante does at least struggle with this issue:

                          ‘What good does it do
For some man born in India who's taught
Nothing of Christ by speech or text, and yet
All his desires and deeds, with virtue filled,
In life or speech show nothing to upset
Our human reason. With not one sin willed,
Outside the faith and unbaptized he dies.
Where is the justice that condemns him? Where
Is this man's fault?’

But the answer is staggeringly inadequate: ‘Good is itself, draws from itself all worth: / Whatever meets that mark can do no ill / And must be just.’ In other words, it's fair because it happens, and whatever happens has been willed by God and is therefore fair by definition. To a modern reader, this might well point up the moral inadequacy of medieval Catholicism in particular, and of religion in general. But Dante's inability to comprehend it does feel modern, and he feels modern in other ways too. There is a protoscientific insistence on rational observation and grounded realities here that surprised me, and that feels almost geeky. (Colin Burrow has said that if Dante were alive today, ‘he might be a writer of metaphysical SF, with a beard and high principles, who spends his evenings debugging freeware for Linux’.) ‘Blessedness,’ he is told, ‘comes from the power of sight, / And not of love, which follows.’ First make observations of the world, and religious faith will flow from there.

I particularly enjoyed his linguistic nerdiness. In Paradise, a prominent place is given to Donatus, as the first grammarian, and Dante's first question on meeting Adam is about what language he spoke! One of the most moving things about the whole long poem for me (and for which I had to keep looking back to the original, however little I understood its subtleties) is the fact that Dante chose to write it in Tuscan dialect. A friend wrote to him near the end of his life to say that if he could write it instead in Latin, the university at Bologna would make him a laureate. But Dante had been writing about vernacular languages for years, and was deeply invested in his idea that they could be a vehicle for great literature, however much the avoidance of Latin might restrict his audience. That makes him a hero as far as I'm concerned, and it had a decisive effect on other European writers like Chaucer, who took the lesson to heart.

I found some parts of the Divine Comedy quite hard going, but it lingers. For all the things that bothered me about this translation, it does have me wanting to go back to Dante and triangulate his style through other translators. There is something thrilling about how well it still speaks through time – down the long years of Clive James's life and across the space of seven centuries, and, ultimately, ahead to spans of time well beyond that:

                    and when
A thousand years have passed, which is no more
Than one blink to the universe, what then?
The slowest wheeling stars move one degree
From west to east in every hundred years—
The merest moment of eternity—
And fame we measure by our falling tears,
That flow for just a while, and then run dry.

What can one say about The Divine Comedy that hasn't been said? An analysis? Many scholars have already done that — and quite outstandingly, I must say, to a degree that I would never achieve. A funny meta review of sorts? It's already been done. So I guess it's like Solomon said and there's no new thing under the sun about this masterpiece: it needs no explanations about its grandeur and it does itself justice.

My only remaining words would be an endorsement upon this edition published by Oxford University Press, translated by C. H. Sisson. Regardless of the translation's unpopularity, it's absolutely well done, in blank verse, and the explanatory notes were completely helpful for me, since even though I knew many of the works to which Dante makes reference throughout the cantos (such as Ovid's Metamorphoses or Virgil's Aeneid or even The Bible), there were many other authors, political and pontifical personages, and works that I didn't. Furthermore, Dante, besides his undeniable mastery as a poet, was also somewhat of an astronomer, a theologian, a philosopher; so some of his verses can be quite obscure without proper guidance. For me, this edition provided me with everything I needed to know in a 200-paged section of explanatory notes. As I read a canto, I read the corresponding notes: a technique I took from one of Borges's stories. Then as I moved forward in the book I understood that Dante was a virtuoso in poetry, but as I read the notes and came to understand some lines that seemed as nothing more than metaphors that were part of the poem, I knew every single one of them is there for a reason, written by an author who was a genius indeed.

The Devine Comedy, a classic/poetry book, was a 5+ star read.
This epic poem centers around main character Dante and his travels through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The Divine Comedy is a work of art and I’m truly glad I read it- that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a difficult read and I did some heavy research before tackling it. I honestly wanted to understand what I was reading and who the characters mentioned were. Dante’s journey through Hell (Inferno) was the most exciting and interesting part of the book because of the dark and creepy atmosphere, followed closely by Paradiso. I struggled to get through Purgatorio and though not as captivating as Inferno, I did manage to finish it.
Just a side note about the book itself. I bought a Barnes and Noble leather bound copy and anyone wanting to read this should definitely take a look-with the gilded edges, larger size and beautiful pictures throughout, it makes the reading of The Divine Comedy much more pleasurable. Highly recommend!

Mein Fazit: Eine Bildungslücke geschlossen, aber ein Vergnügen war es nicht. Ohne solide Kenntnisse der griechischen Mythologie, der römischen Dichtung und der politischen Verhältnisse in Florenz um 1300 gerät die Lektüre (trotz eines umfangreichen Kommentars) schnell zu einer zähen Angelegenheit. Das Inferno kann noch mit einigen interessanten Qualen aufwarten, Purgatorium und erst recht das Paradies sind dagegen die Langeweile pur.

Ενα από τα αριστουργήματα της παγκόσμιας λογοτεχνίας. Οχι εύκολο πλην όμως απαραίτητο να διαβαστεί από τον λάτρη του βιβλίου. Γιατί όπως και να το κάνουμε, Η Θεία Κωμωδία θεωρείται (και είναι), βιβλίο σταθμός.

Dante has just escaped death when he met Virgil, who takes him to the afterlife. to hell, to the mountain of purification and to paradise. in hell they climb the seven circles and meet countless sinners who tell them their story and their suffering. Until in the end they meet Lucifer. At the Purification Mountain, the singing relaxes and becomes brighter. It is also told that there are days and nights and Dante and Virgil are asleep, which is different from hell. The two climb the mountain and meet countless people, including some acquaintances, and they are told their stories. Dante is often asked to ask for redemption for them and to take it with him to earth. at the end of the Purification mountain he finally meets Beatrice, who now accompanies him and she reproaches him for his misdeeds. having drunk the Lethe potion, he forgets this situation and finally, he takes a bath in the Eunoë, which renews his good deeds. at the Lion Mount Dante goes even more into the Bible and plays with metaphors.
Dante travels further into paradise with Beatrice. paradise is different than I imagined. Beatrice explains to Dante the structure of heaven and the freedom of people to decide for themselves. In paradise, too, he continues to rise in the spheres and meets souls who tell him their story and answer his questions. paradise goes from planet to planet (mars, jupiter, saturn) and then to the fixed star sky, where dante realizes how small the earth actually is. he has to answer questions about religion, then he comes to the crystal sky. in the crystal sky he enters the celestial rose with the angelic choirs and the saints, where they all sit. Adam, Eve, Peter, John, Anna, Mary, etc. and God. When he has discovered the Trinity in man, he returns to earthly life.

Every moment of Dante's gruelling masterpiece is a Revelation of a Timeless Moment:

Timeless Moments of our own or another's Hellish Anger or Hellish Lust; Timeless moments of our own or other's stinging Purgatorial guilt over Sloth or Empty Vanity;: or Timeless Moments of Heavenly Peace and Freedom at last, at the apparent end of our journey.

Once we know the Way Up and the Way Down, our Work is Cut Out for Us!
***

Reading the Divine Comedy at seventeen was, for me, to see the world sub specie aeternitatis. Apparently that’s not okay in the World’s eyes.

Writing it, in the 14th Century, was not considered okay either.

So Dante was banished for life from Florence.

In the Comedy eternal flame is the just deserts of corrupt conformity.

That doesn’t seem quite right in the eyes of the comfortably politically correct, back then as now. And they, like it or not, always have the final say. And what they say, goes! And Dante had to go.

So reading this literary landmark for the first time, when I was seventeen, marked the inauguration of a colossal climacteric in my life.
***

The winds of change, back then, were howling all around me and - as if in reaction - Dante’s vertical landscapes, ascending and descending, morphed within my mind to become the central mythos of my world and my young spirit.

For Dante’s work states clearly - from his symbolic POV - that we CAN find lasting happiness and security: in spite of the majority’s comfortable perpetual nay-saying to the contrary.

What we have to do to find it is pacify our dark impulses, work out our emotional trauma with diligence and awareness, and then aspire to reach the gates of Real and Lasting Happiness.

The faith that Dante has finally received from God when he reaches the summit of Purgatory is contained in its ultimate vision - that of the Giant and the Whore being cast, by the Gryphon, into the Pit.

In our times, the Giant is, of course, the controlling robotic Big Brother of us moderns, and the Whore, its eternally driving Desire. The one feeds the other.

And at the End of Time they are both cast into Hell by the mythical Gryphon - the Avenging Lord.

And so dawns the new Heaven and Earth, inexorable and ultimately Victorious, as Dante attains Paradise.

That sums it up: Hell. Purgation. And Paradise. And it all takes place right here on the face of this unforgiving planet.
***

Now, here’s a key point that many have missed about the Comedia: while it is easy to fall through the cracks of life into an Infernal Reality, it’s next to impossible to maintain a decent attitude while falling.

The cthonic pull of the Inferno is just too intense!

But Dante did it. So, while enduring his cruel vision in the daily life of ruthlessly divided Florence, he kept his rational cool throughout.

It speaks volumes of his character. And it tells you EXACTLY the kind of virtue you need to get to Heaven...

In the era of my first reading of it, my grandmother had a beautifully bound edition of the Longfellow translation - with its wonderful nouveau Gothic plates by Gustave Doré - which I carried all around my parents’ house, absorbed in its mystical milieu.

By the next summer I had graduated to a library loan of the much less bulky-sized John Ciardi translation, in a limited edition with abstract modernistic illustrations.

You know, one or another edition has been with me all throughout the intervening 50+ years between then and now, my literal ‘sine qua non’ Vade Mecum in all of its multiple shapes and sizes!

At university, it was the must-own tiny Everyman Library dual-language edition, with its graceful Pre-Raphaelite line drawings - very easy to stick into my shirt pocket going to and from lectures...

And, do you know, I recently realized that in all my many, many readings of the poetic translations available, I’ve never been able to fully grasp the subtle complexities of Dante’s Aristotelian/Thomist philosophical arguments?

So I picked up Charles Eliot Norton’s eminently accessible PROSE translation for my Kindle.

So, as well as the print edition pictured above - another excellent translation - THAT is the story of my life... in One Book!
***

And now that the end of of my life is approaching Sooner - rather than Later (or that’s the impression I now get), I can look back at my life, and the world I’ve lived in, and agree with The Comedy’s author that, as is inscribed in bold letters on the glorious facade of the old San Francisco Public Library:

“La gloria di colui che tutto move
Per l’universo penetra, e risplende
In una parte piu e meno altrove.”

“The glory of The Prime Mover penetrates throughout the entire universe - in one part less, and another more!”

And He, the Prime Mover Himself, will guide us safely Home through the howling storms of this dark world if we’re alert to its dangers.

But knowing the dangers, how do we make that first step out of this City of Destruction and forever escape the maws of the ravenous Beasts that keep us from ascending out of its Dark Wood?

The answer is simple. It’s our own appetites that feed the power the beasts have over us. So we first have to “make perfect (our) Will.”

So for me, Dante’s words, being lapidary - meaning etched in stone - were a portent as well as a promise.

For, as we grow older, we must keep always moving, and ever watchful and contrite -

To avoid becoming - like those who dare to dream drunkenly in the face of the Gorgon, Death - Turned Ourselves to Stone:

And SINKING into the Depths!

Cave, lector.