The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

This is a review of the Divine Comedy, written as a summary.

I’m Italian. I’ve translated for fun about one sixth of the Divine Comedy into English (not my first language, so there might be the kind of weird mistakes second language speakers make).

I’ll shamelessly quote my own translation throughout this review. Some of it is in tercets, some of it is in couplets.

It’s not online, and very, very few people have seen it, so I might as well have written it specifically for this review.

It’s a loose translation, since I try to make it rhyme, but it’s good enough for this piece.

Whenever a quote doesn’t specify who the translator is, it’s my translation.

_________________________________________

Before we even begin, I must address a translation issue.

Let’s translate the first line of the Divine Comedy into English in the most natural possible way:

Halfway through the walk of our life, I awoke in a dark wood, for the straight path was lost.

(alternatively, “I found myself” instead of “I awoke”).

It’s short and sweet, so how come that in Mandelbaum’s version it becomes:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

See the problem?

On paper, that version is as long as the original, in terms of syllables and lines. But it doesn’t feel that way.

Every iambic pentameter translation I’ve seen has the same problem.

They’re never remotely like the original, for many, many reasons, and one reason is that they feel like… slow-motion.

I can’t tell if it’s because the Italian language is “spoken faster” in terms of syllable per second, or because English is inherently a more efficient language.

But what if we try and translate the tercet into a couplet?

I crossed the mid of life, and as I crossed,

I woke in a dark wood, the straight path lost.

I’m not saying it’s an ideal translation, or even a worthy one. But it’s… defensible.

It’s too fast, and drops some detail (such as “our”), but at least it’s not too slow. The couplet form also makes it much easier to rhyme every line.

_________________________________________

Halfway through life (that is, when he is 35, in the year 1300), Dante awakes in a dark wood, or realizes that he’s in one, having lost his way.

It’s a harsh place, terrifying, almost as much as death itself.

I crossed the mid of life, and as I crossed,

I found myself awake in a dark wood,

for the direct way forward had been lost.

I can’t describe it without pain, who could,

that wild so harsh and tangled! All the dread

returns as I remember the dark wood!

Almost as bitter as becoming dead;

but since I mean to tell the good found there,        

all else I’ve come across will too be said.

He sees a hilltop drenched in the early morning sunlight. He tries to climb his way there, but demonic beasts drive him back below.

Obviously, all of this is allegorical. Some of the meaning is intuitive. The dark wood is sin, or error. But not everything is. Dante describes in detail three beasts - a leopard or lynx, a lion, a wolf. What does each represent? Personally, I don’t care that much about allegorical interpretation beyond the obvious. The beasts are demonic, each comes to life in a poetic description setting it apart from the other two, and that’s enough to make me want to read on. That said, it’s interesting to know that everything in this book has multiple layers of meaning. In a letter, Dante lists four - literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. These are the same four layers of meaning that were ascribed to Scripture. I’ll come back to that.

As the beasts force Dante to retreat, he falls below, into the shadows.

I tumbled down below, where I faced - him:

there was a person, and a sweeping span

of silence made him seem unclear and dim.

I saw him in that nowhere and began:

“Take pity!” shouting loudly, “whether you

are just a ghost or are a living man!”

It’s Dante’s literary idol, Vergil, the author of the Aeneid.

“You’re Vergil? Truly Vergil? The great fount,

the spring of words that spreads so wide a stream?”        

I answered, and I blushed a great amount.

“The honor of all bards, the shining gleam!        

I hope it counts that back when I would pine

to find your volumes, it was love, esteem!        

It’s you, you teacher mine, you author mine!        

For you’re the one alone from whom I took

what brought me accolades, that style so fine.

Look at the beast that pushed me back, just look,

and help me from her, sage of fame and praise,

my wrists are shaking as they rarely shook!”        

Since the shortest path to salvation is barred by demonic beasts, Vergil explains, the only way out of the dark forest for Dante is to follow him on a journey through Hell and Purgatory. Then, another soul, a worthier one, will be able to guide him further.

And therefore here’s the deal, the matter’s kernel,        

you’d better follow me, I’ll lead you out,        

out of this wilderness, through realms eternal;

you’ll see the souls in pain, you’ll hear each shout

cried out by each despairing ancient crier,

and it’s a second death they scream about;

and then you’ll see the ones who’re in the fire

and are content; they’re hoping, in the end,

to join the blessed folk, to rise up higher.        

And should you wish to do the same, ascend,

one soul is better suited to that road;        

when we part ways I’ll leave you to that friend,

because the Caesar in that high abode

as long as I’m your guide, won’t let you fly

to him, for I rebelled against his code.

Caesar throughout, he’s King of just that sky,

his soaring capital, and happy those        

he chooses for that town and raises high!”        

I told him: “Poet, here my pleading goes:

by God, I mean the God you’ve never known,

so that I flee this woe, and darker woes,        

I ask you that you guide me through the zone

you named, so that I see Saint Peter’s door        

and the forlorn you tell me so much moan.

I followed him; he treaded at the fore.

So ends the first canto of Dante’s Hell.

Hell?

Hell. I can’t bring myself to call the first volume of this work “Inferno” in English, making it sound like it’s about a fire.

Italian “inferno” translates as English “hell” .The volume (or “canticle”) is called Hell.

There is so much phonetic beauty just in this canto. I didn’t put in this summary my whole translation of it, or else it wouldn’t be a summary, and anyways I didn’t try to replicate all the sounds. Vergil sounds like he’s from another dimension. The lion roars, the wolf growls, Dante loses his breath as he flees. Often this is only thanks to one syllable that is the loudest in the line.

Vergil may be allegorical, but he is also literally Vergil, the author of the Aeneid.

It may seem I’m stating the obvious, but google “Piers Plowman characters” to catch a glimpse of the kind of medieval allegory the Divine Comedy is not.

Likewise, Dante is literally Dante Alighieri. Literary critics are obsessed with distinguishing between Dante the character in the story and Dante the poet, and they throw in one or two more Dante’s for good measure, I’d rather say Dante because he’s literally meant to be Dante. Boccaccio tells an anecdote about women recognizing Dante (google translated) “Women, do you see him who goes to hell, and returns when he pleases, and up here brings news of those who are down there?” To which one of the others simply replied: "In truth, you must be telling the truth: don't you see how he has a frizzy beard and a brown color from the heat and the smoke down there?" Hearing these words said behind him, and knowing that they came from the pure belief of the women, he was pleased, and almost happy that they were of this opinion, smiling somewhat, he walked on.

I'll switch to couplets now. Thus begins the second canto:

The air was dimming in the fleeing sun,

lifting from toil all creatures but for one,

myself, who was preparing for two fights:

to walk and to bear pity for Hell’s plights.

Come help me, Muses, lofty wit of mine!

Mind that set down my visions, prove you’re fine!  

The Muses invoked by Dante, in the tradition of classical epic poetry, are for once NOT literal deities, but allegories. Don’t ask me what they represent, though.

Why is pity a fight (the battle of pity, guerra de la pietate)? I’ll come back to that.

The other fight is the walk. That it’s a fight it truly shows in the book. It’s a physical journey, not an abstract one. Dante walks, climbs, gets tired, is slowed by the roughness of the ground, must get past obstacles and find paths to take, faces dangers real or imagined, acknowledges the passage of time, sleeps at night…

The geography of the afterlife is minutely defined, down to the weather system and the river system. If this book had been first published today, the author would have drawn a map, in the manner of Tolkien.

So this is a meticulously constructed universe, in the manner of fantasy and sci-fi. One regular commenter on this website pointed out that there has not been any other in the span of time between Dante and Tolkien. But there is a key difference. Unlike all fantasy and sci - fi, it is intended to portray the world - the whole universe! - in which the author and the reader exist.

(yes, I know Middle Earth is the past of our earth, but come on. It has no connection to our age.)

It’s a physical, political, and spiritual portrait.

A 4D portrait. The souls in the afterlife know the past and the future. Dante was writing years after the time in which the story happens, so he can relate events that have happened as if they’re prophecies about the future.

But let’s go back to Dante and Vergil where we left them.

Dante still hesitates, so Vergil tells the story of what has prompted him to come to his rescue.

I was with those who hang. I heard a beauty,      

so saintly that I asked her: ‘what’s my duty?’

Her eyes were brighter than the stars aloft;

she spoke with voice angelical and soft:        

‘Onoble soul, whose fame has not yet passed,

and will not pass as long as Earth will last,

a friend of mine, alone and scared, is stuck

upon a slope; he’s not a friend of luck.        

It is Beatrice, Dante’s beloved friend in Paradise, who has descended all the way into Hell to recruit Vergil for the sake of Dante’s salvation, for Dante is nearly lost.

Hearing this melts away all doubt on Dante’s part.

“Compassionate was she who lent assistance!        

And noble you, who moved without resistance!    

My feelings on this task you’ve so reversed,        

they’re back to the same way they were at first.

Let’s go, my mentor, teacher, guide and lord,            

because my will and yours are in accord.”

Vergil leads Dante on a mysterious downward path through the wilderness. They reach a door, whose top bears this inscription in dark letters:

“By me you come to pain’s metropolis,

by me you come to pains that have no time,                                

by me you come to the lost populace.

Justice is key, for it’s the paradigm

that moved my high creator. I have been

conceived by might divine, peak wit, love prime.

No thing had its begin ere my begin,

except to last forever, as I last.

Abandon every hope, you who go in.

“Abandon”? It’s strange to use such a literary register, where the original word sounds so colloquial, even in today’s Italian.

Some alternatives: “leave every hope behind”, “give up on every hope”. But “abandon hope” has become proverbial.

Reading these ominous words, Dante hesitates again.

I think that this door and Dante’s hesitation are of special interest, and I promise I’ll come back to this topic.

Vergil reassures him.

“Ditch indecisiveness of any kind;

this is a place where cowardice must die.

We’re in the region that I have outlined,

so here you’re gonna see the aching folk,        

the ones who lost the goodness of the mind.”        

And then he joined his hand with mine, and broke        

a smile, which cheered me up, and I was led

into the world that mysteries so cloak.

There through the starless air a ringing spread,

of wails and howls and hollering and groaning!

The shock of it had caused my tears to shed.

Horrific voices raging out and moaning        

so loud and shrill and strident, oohs and eehs,

a blend of tongues, the din of clapping droning,

together all, like sand swirled up by breeze,

merge into tumult that forever runs

through timeless murk that’s everything one sees.        

(I admit that the last bit, “that’s everything one sees”, has no equivalent in the original and is there just to rhyme. These are far from perfectly faithful translations, but they’re good enough for our purpose).

Those souls are a special kind of damned.

Vergil explains:

“There dwell the wretched ones who since their birth    

existed without guilt and without worth,

commingled with the vile angelic horde    

that neither fought against nor for the Lord.

Paradise bars their lack of good; deep Hell

would gain no pride from them, and bars as well.”

You may call them the neutrals; those who never chose between good and evil. They are tortured, but they don’t get to enter the area known as Hell.

Usually, everything in an area is thematically connected, often in subtle ways. Dante is called upon to make a decision about the door (“ditch indecisiveness”), and the neutral are condemned for avoiding moral decisions.

An action game titled Dante’s Inferno exists, in which a warrior protagonist called “Dante” fights his way through demons in a Hell very loosely inspired by the Comedy. Obviously, it’s ridiculously unfaithful to the book, and that’s fine; the game isn’t trying to be an adaptation.

But I think that a similar game somewhat faithful to the Comedy is possible; all you have to do is make the main character not Dante, but Vergil.

Vergil is the one who walks ahead.

Vergil is the one who fights demons through Hell, demons who repeatedly try to thwart Dante’s journey. The demons are such a threat, that at one point, our heroes have to take a stealthy path, having angered a group of devils that is now on the hunt for them. Of course Vergil never fights them with weapons (although he does throw a handful of earth into the throat of Cerberus to distract it), but mostly by warning in a commanding voice that God wants Dante to proceed. You could make it a game mechanic, a shut-up-demons-by-invoking-God attack.

For example, here’s how the ferryman Charon addresses Dante only to get silenced by Vergil:

“And you, the person over there who’s living,

withdraw from them, they’re of the perished sort.”

Once seen that I was having no misgiving,        

he said: “Not by this way, not by this port,        

by other avenues you’ll reach your shore;         

a lighter ship awaits and will transport.”        

My guide addressed him: “Charon, don’t be sore;        

his trip’s been willed where will can all be done;

that’s everything you need; don’t ask for more.”        

And on the livid swamp the steering one        

shut up those cheeks of his all white and furred;

flames round his eyeballs spun around and spun.                

A little later, Dante has reached the edge of the pit of Hell.

So that is what Hell looks like - a gigantic well. It’s also a funnel, since it gets narrower and narrower as you climb down. The famous “circles” of Hell are great shelves in this pit, and are literally circular.

So dark and deep a void, there is no cutting        

across its mist with eyes; I stared but - nothing.

My guide: “We’ll climb this world, a world that’s blind.”        

He looked so pale. “I’m first and you’re behind.”        

“But how will I go on, when you, good shade,

who always soothe my doubts, you look afraid?”

“The gloom of those below, a gloom so near,

paints on my face compassion you think fear.

Let’s move, for it's a lengthy journey, this.”

We entered the first ring around the abyss.  

Dante looks into the pit and cannot see the bottom. One thing the Comedy does a lot is emphasize the limits of the hero’s senses. Everything that is reported is what he hears, sees, smells. And he can only sense so much, especially in such strange places. Or process. Sometimes, for example, he hears speech, but doesn’t understand it, just as he can see shapes in the distance that he can’t make out, until he later makes them out. This whole book is extremely first person. That’s why it feels so real. The same goes for the inner senses of Dante. We know everything he feels, thinks, fears, hopes. That’s why the character of Dante is so strong. It’s a first person psychological novel. Had there ever been something like this in the history of literature before?

Vergil’s sympathy is for the souls of Limbo, the first circle, where the virtuous unbaptized reside, such as Vergil himself. There is no punishment here, except the lack of hope of seeing God. That’s the gloom he’s referring to. People here are sighing, not crying out in pain. Dante encounters his pagan literary models here.

We journey on, to the second circle, the first region of Hell where sinners are tormented.

And here I feel whipped up by grim laments,

and I begin to hear what cries Hell vents.

These are the lustful. These shades are forever thrown around uncontrollably by a great windy storm. They scream as they’re thrashed against the cliff.

Two souls, in life adulterous lovers, are together in this torment. Extraordinarily, they are briefly spared by the wind, so Dante can converse with them. Only one speaks, Francesca.

That Love which latches swiftly onto noble, gentle hearts,

drew -him- to my fair form, now taken from me, and it hurts.

That Love which won’t forgive a creature loved from loving back,

so seized me for his looks, it hasn’t left, it hasn’t cracked.

That Love has ferried us together, to one single death.        

The land of Cain awaits the one who finished off our breath.

Dante is deeply moved.

I said at last: “such sweet desire, alas,

so many sighs have led them to a pained pass!”        

I turned to them: “Francesca, your ordeal

breaks hearts; you see the sorrow that I feel.        

When you were sighing, when you were suspiring,

how did you sense each other’s shy desiring?”        

“Nothing hurts more than joys recalled in pain,    

as to that guiding spirit must be plain.    

But if you want to hear of our first sighing,    

I’ll talk, and while I talk I will be crying.        

Alone one day, reading amusing script

the tale of Lancelot, whom love had gripped,

we felt the story/reading/pages, time and time again,

make our eyes meet and our cheeks pale, and when

the fabled lover kissed the longed for laughter,

the person bound to me forever after    

kissed me, trembling. That book, that pen, that Gallehot!

No longer on that day we read of Lancelot.”

Her mate was weeping without words at all;

deathly compassion made my senses stall,    

and down I fell the way dead bodies fall.

If you read this carefully, in my translation or any other, you’ll notice that Francesca insistently blames for her adultery:

• Love (which spares no creature loved from loving back, according to her, and has “ferried” them)
• her lover, Paolo, for initiating the affair.
• the romance they were reading.
• its author (whom she compares to Gallehot, facilitator of the love between Lancelot and Guinevere)

…anyone and anything but herself!

And yet, if she were innocent, she wouldn’t be here.

Note that in the Lancelot-Grail cycle (which seems to be what she refers to), it is Guinevere who kisses Lancelot, not the other way around.

The point I’m making here is - the damned aren’t reliable voices.

This will be made clear in Paradise, when we’re told:

Now talk to them, they’re souls you can believe,        

they’re sated by truth’s light which they won’t leave.

In other words, no one lies in Paradise, or even makes wrong statements.

Wait a minute - does that mean we must doubt everything people said in the the first two volumes?

Indeed, especially with Hell.

Note that the punishment for the lustful correspond to the characterization and words of Francesca and to the nature of the sin according to Dante. To let oneself be thrown around. This is what they mean when they say the Comedy has ironic punishments.

I don’t need to repeat myself - Francesca is literally Francesca da Rimni, who was famous for having been murdered for her adultery. As we’re told in Paradise, divine providence makes sure Dante meets famous people so his words about them can resonate better.

The souls we encounter in Hell are unique individuals. Nobody is like Francesca, or speaks like her. She speaks in the language of love poetry, and likewise the way characters speak is often a way to characterize them, some speak in everyday language, some more formally, or in a specific literary style. All this is lost in translation. I used her as an example of the encounters in Hell; I certainly won’t make many examples.

This was Lust, the first of a set of four circles where lack of self-control is punished.

A lot of readers find the organization of Hell confusing.

How come killers, suicides, gays, blasphemers and squanderers are all found in the same circle, and why is that circle said to be about “violence”? What’s the difference between violence and wrath? What’s the difference between the squanderers and the wasters? How come the gays in Hell are so far below the other lustful, but gays and straights share the same lust section of Purgatory? Why are thieves further down than murderers? What even is “treachery”?

Let’s clarify:

• The virtuous unbaptized are in Circle 1, Limbo, and aren’t punished.
• Sins of lack of self control (”incontinence”) are punished in Upper Hell, Circle 2 to 5. Counting the cricles makes this area sound as if it’s a big part of Hell. In fact it takes up a small part of the volume. There is this problem with the traditional division of Hell in nine circles, which poisons illustrations, summaries… the lower circles take up much more of the book, and comprise of many more areas. In Upper Hell, the lustful we’ve just seen them, the gluttons lie under a rain of mud, the hoarders and wasters push great rolling spheres, the wrathful fight each other in the swampy river Styx.
• Heresy is punished in Circle 6, a city of burning tombs in which the heretics are buried.
• Circle 7 is for the violent; so says Dante, but I think it would be helpful to say the malicious, or the violators in cold blood. These are people whose actions do not simply arise from lack of self control. For example, one person Dante names as a “squanderer” was rumored to have set his own house on fire for fun. That sets the squanderers apart from the wasters of upper hell. If Dante places gays here, I think it’s due to a definition of sodomy that implies a certain act, which can only be done in malice according to the author, even if he does acknowledge that same sex attraction exists. I don’t think he would have placed here two men who kiss while reading an Arthurian romance. On the other hand, none of these sinners were deceitful. The murderers here are tyrants and highwaymen, not Ted Bundy. In fact, although everyone calls them “murderers”, not all of them are; Vergil describes them as (Mandelbaum) “murderers and those who strike in malice, as well as plunderers and robbers” (Canto 11, 37). The punishments here are a river of boiling blood for those who hurt others, a forest where the souls of the suicides inhabit twisted trees tortured by harpies, and where the squanderers are hunted down by demonic beasts, and a rain of fire for blasphemers and sodomites.
• Circle 8 is for deceivers. The “thieves” here are ones who play the role of good citizen by day and rob you by night, so to speak. Honest robbers, such as highwaymen, belong to the river of blood of Circle 7. This is a huge area which takes up one third of the volume, and covers many distinct types of deceit. Deceivers of various types are whipped, buried in excrements, stuck upside down in the ground with feet on fire, have their heads twisted 180 degrees, are immersed in boiling tar, clad in a leaden cloak golden on the outside, bitten by snakes and transforming back and forth between snakes and human, enveloped in a personal flame, mutilated over and  over, and plagued with disfiguring diseases.
• Circle 9 is for traitors; so says Dante, but I think it would be helpful to say backstabbers. I’ll get to that.

Us modern people draw too stark a distinction between the ancient and the medieval world. As far as I can tell, there is no significant distinction in Dante between the demons drawn from classical sources and those drawn from Christian tradition. Medieval people generally believed that most stories were somewhat true, and if the creatures of classical literature had existed, they must have been either fallen angels or monstrous humans; it’s hard to tell one from the other in Dante’s hell. Some centaurs have a job as demonic guardians, but one is punished along with human sinners; are centaurs fallen angels or humans? It’s also hard to tell apart guardians from prisoners; some characters seem to be both, even Satan. While there is no distinction between pagan and Christian demons, the place in Hell for every creature matches what we know of that creature, or what it can symbolize. For example, Satan is the ultimate traitor, so he’s with the traitors. Centaurs were known to be murderous creatures, so they guard murderers.

In Circle 5, a shade whom Dante recognizes seeks out compassion: “Look, I’m a man who weeps!” But Dante knows that person to be evil, and tells him he should keep weeping. Vergil is overjoyed; immediately he hugs and kisses Dante. No compassion for the damned!

Further down, in Circle 8, Dante weeps at the sight of tortured sinners, and Vergil scolds him.

… Art thou, too, of the other fools ?

Here pity lives when it is wholly dead;
Who is a greater reprobate than he
Who feels compassion at the doom divine ? (Longfellow)

If you compare translations, you’ll notice that different translators interpret these lines differently.

By clever wordplay, the same words can be read as “feels compassion at” or “deem to be yielding”. The former meaning finishes the speech before, about pity. The latter starts the speech that follows, a tirade against magicians (the sinners in this area).

This stuff is *everywhere* in Dante. My problem with it is that, in every case, the critics who write the footnotes declare that one meaning is true, and those who interpret it the other way have gotten it wrong. But I believe that Dante was very careful with his words, that he thought of all possible ways his lines could be interpreted, and that when he’s ambiguous he’s intentionally saying many things at once. I’m fascinated by these multiple meanings, although it’s hard for me to make examples, since they’re lost in translation.

But let’s go back to “here pity lives when it is dead”.

Is that the true meaning of the “battle of pity” Dante was preparing for upon entering Hell?

A battle against misguided pity?

Dante and Vergil arrive at the frozen bottom of Hell, the ninth circle.

If I knew rhymes as bitter as this pit,                                

I’d draw more juice out of the thought of it,                

this hole weighed on by Hell’s whole architecture.

It’s such a daunting task; how can I picture

the bottom of the world, the place most bad,

in the same language that goes “mom” and “dad”?

It’s a great lake of ice.

Never has Danube turned to ice as stiff,

or Don under its glacial sky, and if

the highest and most massive alpine peak

fell into here, the edges wouldn’t creak.

The traitors trapped in the ice, the worst of all sinners, might as well be called the “backstabbers”. They didn’t merely deceive, they did so at the expense of someone with whom they had a special bond of trust. This might mean family, country, guests, or benefactors.

The heads of the traitors stick out from the ice, their teeth gnashing as storks do with their beak.

But these aren’t the ones who have it worst. Further on, other traitors are lying face up, so their own tears turn to ice within their eye sockets, until their eyes freeze over and can’t weep any more.

The most chilling episodes of the Divine Comedy take place as Dante and Vergil cross the lake of ice. There is no way I can narrate them in a summary, of course, so read the book.

One soul seeks out Dante’s attention. He will be the very last damned that Dante speaks to.

“O souls so cruel you’re sent to the worst place,        

remove the frozen layers from my face,

let me cry out my hurt till more tears harden”

called someone in the glacial spirits garden.

I: “Tell who’s asking, then I’ll clean that goo,        

or may my soul descend all the way through.”

So far, it’s been tough to get the shades of the frozen lake to reveal their name; everyone is too ashamed of having been sent here.

But in exchange for a promise of having the frost cleaned from his eyes, this one speaks.

He is so evil that a demon has taken over his body while he’s still alive, and his soul has been cast into Hell before death.

Now it’s time for Dante to keep his word.

“Reach out, open my eyes, let my tears flow."

I didn’t. It’s been noble to be low.        

It’s a betrayal, which is thematically appropriate here. But it also shows how cold to sinners Dante has become over the course of the journey.

What a difference between his attitude towards the first sinner he meets in Hell, and the last one!

Does it mean that he has taken Vergil’s advice, that he has won the battle against misguided pity, and that it is a good thing?

I suspect so. I know it’s not what people want to hear. People don’t like it when authors from the past have a morality that to us is off-putting.

But let’s move on.

Dante has been feeling a mysterious, chilling wind for a while. How is it possible, down here? Vergil promises that soon he’ll find out.

Later on, he speaks to Dante in solemn Latin:

“The banners of the king of Hell draw close,

look" said my guide, "look far, see if he shows.”

Dante looks far; what he sees is compared to a far off revolving windmill in a mist. But he can’t gaze for long. The unbearable cold wind forces him to hide behind Virgil.

They walk on. The surrounding shades appear entirely encased in ice.

I was where souls (fearful to write, alas),        

iced in, resemble straws trapped in the glass.

Some stand, some are arched up, feet near their face,

some lie, some are reversed, head at their base.

Eventually, Vergil steps aside, leaving Dante to face the king of Hell. “We’ve arrived; arm yourself with courage.”

Dante feels faint and almost “frozen”.

I wasn’t dead, I wasn’t living either;                            

imagine what I was, if I was neither.

All this sets the stage for the apparition of a colossal, weeping Satan, trapped at the center of the bottom of Hell, which is also the center of the Earth. It is the flapping of his six wings that stirs up the icy wind keeping Circle Nine frozen. He gnaws forever on the ultimate human traitors, the killers of Christ and of Caesar (I’ll come back to this).

I hope I’ve managed to convey how well Dante builds up anticipation.

But the descent is not over. Our heroes climb the fur covered hip of Satan, and pass “the point to which all weights are drawn”.

Vergil raises Dante through a hole, into a space where Satan’s gigantic legs are visible.

I thought I’d see the fiend when I looked up,    

but found its lower body, bottom-up.        

Let ignorants believe the vision fazed me,

if they don’t know the spot through which he raised me.

“Stand up” he said, “the path is long and dour,

the sun’s already halfway the third hour.”

No castle was the place, nothing to pave

the ugly, lightless flooring, nature’s cave.

I stood. “My guide, before we leave the gloom,

clear up my doubts, and then we can resume.    

Where is the ice? Has Lucifer reversed?                

The hour has gone from daytime’s last to first?”

“You think we’re on the side from which we flew

down the bad worm that stabs the planet through,

but when we flipped around and we climbed on,

we passed the point to which all weights are drawn.”

Something magical has just happened.

Dante’s universe, the medieval universe, is vertically arranged.

At the top, beyond the outer shell of the Ptolemaic cosmos, is God.

At the bottom, at the center of the Earth and the universe, is the devil.

The closer you get to God, the more blessedness, light, joy, harmony, virtue and all around goodness and perfection you find.

The closer you get to the devil, the more damnation, darkness, gloom, disharmony, vice and so on and so forth.

Up until now, we’ve plunged ever deeper into gradually increasing horror, and you could feel it.

But right when we cross the point to which all weights are drawn, right when our heroes turn upside down, the whole vibe of the poem turns upside down too.

From now on, it’s all cheerfulness!

Can you believe it, given the reputation of Dante’s Hell as a black metal book (as one Youtube book reviewer puts it)?

From now on, it’s a great ascent ever closer to God.

Our heroes journey through a long narrow tunnel, which gets them all the way to the surface of the Earth, at the antipode of Jerusalem (and of Hell, which is right under Jerusalem), far away from all continents inhabited by humanity (America doesn’t exist, not that it matters because the antipode of Jerusalem is in the middle of the Pacific).

and we came out to see again the stars.

After so much darkness and horror, Dante is under the blueness of the morning sky!

He can finally let his poetry soar as he invokes the Muses at the beginning of the second volume, Purgatory.

The time has come to raise from death our poetry!

O holy muses, I am yours! And show it me,

that backing tune, Calliope, so ardent,

it made the wretched Magpies despair pardon.

Ah sweetness of a sapphire of the Orient,

pure all the way to a limpid skyline, glorying

my pupils once again in the blue skies,

after an air so dead had grieved my eyes!

The Pisces seemed outshined while looking after

the star of love that lit the East with laughter.

When I turned right to face the southern pole,

I saw four stars, unseen since the first souls;

the quartet filled the sky with merry bliss;

poor widowed North, denied such joy as this!

Give me a break. I tried my best.

Also, is that the Southern Cross Dante sees? Apparently, medieval people didn’t know about it, and Dante himself claims that the four stars have never been seen except by the first people (Adam and Eve presumably). But it’s hard to believe it’s a coincidence.

We encounter Cato (the Younger). For some reason, he’s the guardian of Purgatory, despite having been a pagan in life.

He is amazed and suspicious, since our heroes have emerged from a tunnel that goes all the way to Hell.

“You broke the nether’s law? Sky changed its mind?

How can the damned have reached these crags of mine?”

I like the scene that follows. Vergil tries to convince Cato to let them in. He makes Dante show the guardian reverence, he gives a speech and draws a connection between Dante’s quest for “freedom” and Cato’s own life, he even brings up Cato’s love Martia who now dwells in Limbo where Vergil is from, promising that if Cato is nice to Dante, Vergil will tell her!

Cato is not moved by such tactics (which he calls flattery).

“Since one from heaven sends you, don’t you flatter;        

ask in her name and that will solve the matter.”

Some people seem to think Vergil in the Comedy is a flawless know-it-all Mary Sue. As you can see, this isn’t true. (examples from Hell)

It wasn’t even true in Hell (I could make several examples that show Vergil’s flaws).

In Hell, though, Vergil knew a lot because he had already been to the bottom (it’s part of his backstory). In Purgatory, even as he continues to act as Dante’s guide (and “mentor” which I think is the best translation for “maestro”), he doesn’t know the way, and needs to frequently ask for directions.

But now, let’s enjoy daybreak. Daybreak!

As daybreak overwhelms a fleeting twilight,        

the ocean’s far off tremble is the highlight.

As if to paths we’ve lost, we walk the plain;

until they’re found again it may seem vain.

Once reached a region always dampened, one                                

where wind is wet and dew fights back the sun,

my mentor spreads his hands over the grass,

and when I understand that gentle pass,        

I turn to him my visage full of tears,

and the complexion Hell has stained he clears.

Purgatory is a great mountain, with Eden at the top. The shades that reach it will climb it over time, shedding the weight of their sins along the way.

The special charm of Purgatory is that it’s the only part of the Comedy where Dante and Vergil are not alone in their journey. Almost everyone they meet is also ascending the purification mountain, even if for them the trip will take years instead of a couple days. Sometimes, a shade travels along our heroes for a stretch. There is a beautiful sense of collective direction. People gladly help one another.

This is literally Earth by the way. There is day and night. By night, our heroes find shelter, and Dante sleeps.

The first third or so of this volume is especially beautiful. We haven’t reached the part where people must undergo expiation torments, so the atmosphere is idyllic. Souls are compared to doves and sheep. There is singing.

The people we encounter here are those who repented close to death. They must spend a span of time here proportional to their lifetime, before they’re allowed to climb up, ultimately to reach Paradise.

One of the first shade we meet says, smiling:

“Horrible my iniquities had been”  (Longfellow)

which is stunning, because nobody in hell ever spoke like this.

Here, to meet a shade you personally know is a reason to rejoice.

Noble Judge Nino—what delight was mine
when I saw you were not among the damned!

There was no gracious greeting we neglected
before he asked me: “When did you arrive,
across long seas, beneath this mountainside?”

I told him, “Oh, by way of the sad regions,
I came this morning; I am still within
the first life—  (Mandelbaum)

Alas! translations are so, so unlike the original. Not that mine is necessarily better, mind you. Each translator tries to do something different. But this doesn’t convey at all -at all!- the joyfulness and straightforward colloquialness mixed with incredible poetic grace of the original. It’s so bad. It’s as bad as every translation of Shakespeare into Italian.

There is a central part of the Comedy that I’m not sure how to summarize - the invectives.

While we were in Hell, the main way for Dante to make accusations was to put examples among the damned, or to have the damned prophesy that a certain person would join them. In Purgatory and Paradise, the spirits themselves will often make accusations against the living. As the world of the saved is harmonious, so ours is bad. I assume that the same people who say that Dante “puts his enemies in Hell”, will say of Purgatory and Paradise that Dante has decided that everyone up there thinks his enemies suck. Dante was politically active, and it’s no surprise that he thinks the opposite political faction is particularly wicked. Think right-wingers and left-wingers today. But he fulminates all over the place; hardly any group is spared.

To enter Purgatory proper,  the area where expiatory torments happen, one must cross an elaborate allegorical door guarded by an angel.

The angel carves seven marks on Dante’s forehead.

Beyond the door of Purgatory, the rock is carved with relief sculptures, so divinely made, that as Dante contemplates them, they appear to speak, smell, tell stories, examples of the virtue of humility, even as the stone remains just that, motionless stone, confounding the poet’s senses. The stories grow in complexity as our hero’s attention moves from each to the next, until we, the reader, believe it’s possible for a sculpture to be so perfect, that the mind’s eye can hear in it an elaborate back and forth between its characters.

This is so striking - it reminds me in some ways of how it feels to visit a beautiful art gallery, or rather, what it would feel to visit an ideal one.

Soon after, Dante hears the Lord’s Prayer, which the author bends into triple rhyme.

It’s a procession of shades, praying for the living, not for themselves. They walk all hunched, carrying boulders on their back, to expiate their pride.        

Praying so well for us, those souls, that stream,        

though burdened by those boulders from a dream,

to wash world’s soot away, went on and went

round the first edge, each in their own way bent.        

Is this just like Hell, then? No, it doesn’t feel like Hell. The people here undergo the ordeal willingly, even happily; the sense of hope always shines through in Purgatory, in spite of the tormenting (remember, they, too, are journeying upwards, just more slowly than our heroes). On the other hand, they have bad things to say about their own past and the vanity of earthly glory, and nobody in Hell speaks like this. Dante feels humbled as he listens; he knows he’s an excessively proud man. He himself hunches as he walks, ostensibly to better converse with the shades, in fact sharing in their penance.

Eventually, Dante and Virgil encounter an angel, who taps Dante’s forehead with his feathery wing, then shows the pair the way up. Dante feels mysteriously lighter. The angel has deleted one of the marks from his forehead.

This was Pride. Six more terraces are to follow, one for each capital sin. The envious have their eyes sewn shut, the wrathful are enveloped by smoke, the slothful must run, the greedy must lie facing the lowly* ground, the gluttons starve, the lustful burn.

Each terrace has its own equivalent of the impossible sculptures that convey examples of virtue and vice - invisible spirits whispering as they streak through the air, chants delivered by the penitents themselves, dreamlike visions internal to the mind, messages coming from the leaves of a tree.

The final step of the purification journey - Dante must walk through a wall of fire!

He is petrified with fear.

Scanning the fire, and vividly recalling
The human bodies I had once seen burned. (Longfellow)

Virgil, as always, is there to comfort him. “See, son, this wall is between you and Beatrice.”

They enter the fire.

When I was in it, into molten glass

I would have cast me to refresh myself,
So without measure was the burning there! (Longfellow)

As soon as our heroes are on the other side, the atmosphere is again idyllic, as it was in the earlier part of Purgatory.

Once the purifying ascent is finally over, Virgil tells Dante that his free will is now healthy, and he no longer needs mentoring:

“I crown and miter you over yourself.” (Longfellow I think)

We have reached Eden, located at the top of Purgatory. It looks as you think Eden would. Singing birds, pleasant woods, waters purer than any other, the tree of good and evil. Virgil is still there for now, but a woman from Heaven is the one to show Dante around, Mathelda, who comes across as the embodiment of innocence and serenity (she is initially seen picking flowers).

At one point, Dante sees seven trees of gold in the distance. No, wait - it’s seven lit candelabra, not trees of gold. No, wait - it’s a whole procession of people dressed in white, advancing behind the candelabra. But wait, there’s more - the flames leave a long trail through the air, like banners of light. But wait, there’s more…

This is so typical of the Divine Comedy. Everything unfolds bit by bit to the senses of our hero. We catch a far off glimpse of something, which then reveals itself to be something else, and more details are added as we get closer. At each step, Dante chronicles his reaction, thoughts, the exchanges of gazes and words with Virgil and any other character who might be with him.

It’s time for Dante to finally meet Beatrice.

In his youth, Dante wrote a famous book of prose mixed with verse, the New Life, which chronicles his great love for Beatrice.

He recounts first falling in love with her when they were both children, then again when they were both adults.

At this point I’m at a loss for an English word for “salutare”. It’s one of those words that seem basic to us Italians, but have no English equivalent (there are many cases of the opposite, too). To acknowledge, to greet, to say hi? I’m going with say hi, but keep in mind that in Dante’s poetry the word has a religious connotation, since it’s a cognate of “salvation”.

Early on, in the New Life, Beatrice says hi regularly to Dante, which in the context of wealthy medieval society can be seen as encouragement. Then she stops doing so, leaving Dante devastated. As far as we can tell, Dante’s feeling for Beatrice were never more requited that that, in real life at least.

Then, Beatrice dies.

In one touching scene, Dante draws a picture of Beatrice on a tablet as an angel. That image, I think, sums up how he sees Beatrice after her death. A heavenly object of love, and, clearly in the Divine Comedy, an instrument of religious salvation. Apparently this is unprecedented in medieval love poetry.

The New Life ends with this passage:

(google translated, with a couple corrections)

a wonderful vision appeared to me, in which I saw things that made me decide not to say any more about this blessed woman, until I could treat her more worthily. And to come to this, I study as much as I can, as she knows to be true. So that, if it pleases Him to whom all things live, that my life lasts for several years, I hope to say of her what has never been said of anyone. And then may it please Him who is the lord of courtesy, that my soul may turn to see the glory of its lady: that is, of that blessed Beatrice.

Beatrice has always been a great mystery to me.

How real is she? Is she even intended to correspond to a real person?

Why is the New Life so sparse in details about her?

Isn’t it convenient that her name means “beatifier”?

And yet, I don’t think she is purely allegorical, because if she were, she would be the only named character in the Divine Comedy who is.  And if she’s not, then we must accept that Dante imagined that she, a woman whose only flirtation with Dante was to say hi to him for a while, would intercede with God for him, descend into Limbo to save him, and finally guide him across the heavens.

I wonder how Beatrice would react to this if she magically came back to life.

But let’s get to the apparition of Beatrice in Eden.

She appears atop a carriage, showered with flowers by angels.

The way I’ve seen, at dawn, between amenities,                

eastward the rosy sky, westward serenity,

the face of Sun arise behind a cloud,

a sight endured for long across that shroud,

so she appears, behind that blur of flowers                

which rising from the angels falls and showers,

a dame, white veils behind her, in a crown                         

of olive, a green cape, a flame-red gown.

So long a time had passed, since last her presence

had struck with trembling wondrousness my essence;                        

from just her unseen strength, and not her sight,

I felt an ancient love’s tremendous might;

and when it reached my eyes, that noble strength

which hit me first within my childhood’s length,

I turned to Vergil, as a child would fumble,                        

afraid or hurt, to mom; I felt that humble:        

“There’s little blood in me that doesn’t fret;

I know the signs of my old flame.” And yet                                                        

he’d gone! My father sweet, Vergil himself,                        

to whom to become saved I gave myself!                                        

What ancient Eve had lost was in my view,

yet tears stained back my cheeks once cleared by dew.        

“No, Dante, shed no tears, though Vergil’s going;

there’s one more blade for which they will be flowing”

The last two lines came from Beatrice herself. She is about to reprimand him sternly. She wants him to repent.

Dante’s reaction:

My gaze dropped to the waters, then, to grass,

because I’d seen myself - the shame, alas!

The angels sing out of pity for him

Beatrice retell how, in life, she used to show her young eyes to Dante in order to guide him on the path of virtue, but after she became a spirit, and therefore even more beautiful and virtuous, he turned away from her, and chased “false images of good” (the wording at times suggests other women). She tried to inspire him by appearing to him in dreams, but it didn’t help!

Nothing could save a man who’d sunk so low,

except to show him where the lost ones go.

So she had to descend into Hell to beg Vergil to intervene.

It seems that sin is inseparable from no longer loving the expired Beatrice, and that only his love for her can keep him on the straight path!

Beatrice continues to grill Dante. The moment of his breakdown coincides with him falling into the river Lethe, which causes people to forget having sinned. She finally takes off her veil and smiles at him. He no longer remembers having ever sinned. Finally, he regains his memories, by drinking from another river, the Eunoe. He is now pure, and ready to ascend to Paradise.

On to Paradise.

Allmover’s glory shines across the universe,

and makes some places less and some more luminous.

I roamed that heaven which the most he lights,

and none who’s back from there can tell its sights,        

because our mind, when nearing its desire,

compared to what we can recall, goes higher.

That was the beginning of the third volume. Some of the wonders of the divine realm are so high, they cannot be remembered, much less recounted.

Right in the first canto, Beatrice gets philosophical:

All things are ordered, all across the board,

and it makes Universe resemble Lord;

high creatures see the prints of worth unbounded,

the goal for which that order has been founded.

Thus each and every nature stays a course,

some closer and some further from their source,        

to varied instincts each of them agreeing,

sailing to many ports the sea of being.

This is what moves a fleeting, mortal heart,

what clumps the Earth together in one part,

what draws a burning flame to Moon above,

what looses arrows, too, that think and love.

I’m sure that there is a kind of reader who will be fascinated by the concepts laid out here. He’s probably a fervent Christian, or a lover of medieval philosophy. I’m not that person, nor are most people. Similar lectures are everywhere in Paradise, and have earned the volume a reputation for being the most boring, and even the “worst” of the three.

The poetry in these passages, however, is beautiful. Rhymes, sounds, rhythm. The poetic images deftly woven throughout. I tried to convey a glimmer of that in translation.

The project itself of explaining theology in such dazzling language is awe-inspiring, even if I’m not the intended audience for it.

And besides, I suspect there are legions out there who will find it fascinating if instead of “philosophy” you call it “worldbuilding”.

After all, these explanations apply to the universe itself of the book, which forms a cohesive whole.

What would fantasy readers think of a fictional world in which every creature is drawn to its natural place in a divine order, except when it rebels (in the case of souls due to its free will, in the case of matter due to having been created indirectly, as far as I can tell)?

That the author identified that world with the one he lived in, should make it even more interesting.

In short, Dante visits Paradise and the universe is explained to him.

At the start of the next canto, Dante warns us explicitly against reading on:

You wishful hearers in your little boats,

trailing my ship that goes intoning notes,                

turn back! Turn back, or else you might be lost,

lost in the ocean into which I’ve crossed.

The author wants only those with a background in theology to read this difficult volume.

That is not because he’s afraid you would be bored. No, he fears you might get something wrong and become a heretic.

Dante and Beatrice take off, flying across Ptolemaic space!

We must cast aside our modern understanding of what planets are.

Here, the Moon, Mars, Venus… are nothing like the Earth.

They have no gravity, and Dante and Beatrice can fly right into them.

This is how Dante describe his immersion into the Moon:

A cloud so clean and bright and dense and prime, and

we entered it as sunlight with a diamond;

as waters take in rays without a swirl,

we were accepted by the timeless pearl.

Contrast with how the Moon is described in Orlando Furioso 200 years later:

Here other river, lake, and rich champaign
Are seen, than those which are below descried;
Here other valley, other hill and plain,
With towns and cities of their own supplied;
Which mansions of such mighty size contain,
Such never he before of after spied.
Here spacious hold and lonely forest lay,
Where nymphs for ever chased the panting prey.  (William Stewart Rose)

How had space changed in 200 years! And that was still before Copernicanism

The moon spirits are those who lived virtuous lives, but failed to fulfill a vow they have taken. Because of this, they occupy a lower spot in Paradise. Doesn’t that trouble them? No, their will is one with God’s.

“I notice in your looks a thing divine

raise you from what you were, and does it shine!

That’s why I failed to recognize you fast;                        

it helps you’ve told me; I can see at last.

But while you’re happy here, don’t you desire                

good spots to befriend God and see him, higher?”                

They smiled together. With so glad a gaze                                

she seemed to burn with love with the first Blaze,                        

she said: “Our will is softened so by charity,

we long for what we have, for this prosperity,

not to be more and ever more supernal;                        

our will would then oppose the will eternal

that wants us here, which makes no sense in heaven;                

here charity must be, that is a given.”

The core of blessedness, she told me still,                

“is will that is with God’s. One is our will,                        

and all the realm, along with Lord, likes well

the way that each is sorted shell to shell.

Our peace lies in that will, that sea, that ocean,

to which all flows, all creatures in their motion.”        

Dante has many questions for Beatrice, but he doesn’t even need to ask out loud; she can read his mind.

How come Piccarda can’t ascend any higher, even though it’s not her fault she was dragged from the convent and forced to marry? If she had been perfectly virtuous, she would have become a martyr rather than leave.

How can it be that the souls are in the stars, just as Plato maintained in Timaeus?

They aren’t actually there, explains Beatrice. They’re just showing themselves that way for the benefit of your limited human mind. The blessed are all high up in the Empyrean, the area outside of the physical universe “in the mind of God”, and the star in which they appear to you corresponds to their ranking up there.

Misunderstanding this about the stars

has made the world pray wrong - to Venus, Mars.

So that is why Dante doesn’t want the unlearned masses to read his Paradise!

This was the Moon. Six more “stars” are to follow (a word that used to refer to any celestial body, like the Italian “stella”).

Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

These are the bodies that influence all creatures on Earth according to medieval astrologers, and the spirits that we encounter in each match the astrological quality of the star.

We have reached the stars, but they have been a big part of the book since the beginning. Throughout Hell, Virgil often remarks on which constellations are ascending or descending in the sky right now, as if he had X-ray vision and could see across the vaults of the underworld. This helps locate the story at a particular point in time, and of course has obscure astrological meaning that goes well over my head. Throughout Purgatory, the stars shine above, and Dante often launches into poetic descriptions of them. And now, we’re finally there, flying from star to star.

You may have seen the rather unfaithful illustrations for Paradise by Doré. Or by Moebius, who based his ones on the former.

A very cloudy heaven.

You won’t find clouds like that in Dante’s heaven.

Everything is ethereal and made of light. Everything is in varied shades of blinding brightness. The souls swim around, form up circles and other figures.

Spirits used to be called “shades”, now they’re “lights”.

The higher you fly, the more beautiful Beatrice becomes.

I thought, so beamed the laughter in her eyes,

I’d touched the bottom of my Paradise.

Other than Dante singing her ever increasing beauty, there is none of the romantic chemistry between Dante and Beatrice modern people might expect. Medieval courtly love wasn’t necessarily platonic, but theirs is. It’s worth noting Dante was married, and has direct descendants today who bear the name Alighieri.

In Mars, we meet Dante’s crusader ancestor Cacciaguida, who rants about how wholesome and simple and virtuous the people of Florence were in the good old days, nothing like the corrupt present day, then he goes on to prophesize Dante’s own exile and tribulations. Like so many other prophecies in the Comedy, it is given in 1300 in the story, but of course it foretells events that are in the past as Dante writes. Other epics have backstories, this one has forestories. This is Dante’s forestory. He will be cast out of Florence, he will have to abandon all he loves.

You’ll learn it’s tough to climb another’s stair

and how the bread of others tastes bare.

Beatrice comforts him with sweet words as he hears this.

I know that many of you want to know what Dante thought of non-Europeans. Like Beatrice with Dante, I can read your minds!

So, let’s talk about Jupiter, where the local spirit join together to form a great Eagle of Justice:

In front of me, fair open wings appeared;

the souls wove up that image as they cheered,                        

each like a ruby through which sunlight’s beam

shines brightly so, it makes your pupils gleam.

I’ll say what’s not been said in voice or writ,

what hasn’t been conceived till now by wit:

I saw and heard the joyful eagle’s beak

use ‘I’ for ‘we’, and ‘me’ for ‘us’, and speak.

(note that the original doesn’t use the word “eagle”, because it has already been specified in the canto before).

This, by the way, is a good example of the kind of airy, surreal imagery found all over Paradise.

Similes involving rays of light, jewels, birds…

The Eagle, too, can read Dante’s mind, and knows the question he’d like to ask: how is it fair that those from places where Christianity is unknown, such as India, will never enter Heaven, and the best possible fate for them is an eternity in Limbo?

No straight answer is given. Mortals cannot possibly understand divine justice, any more than their sight can reach the bottom of the sea. All Dante can be told is that, when doomsday comes, many Christian kings will have it worse than many Asians and Africans. The Eagle lists the realms of Europe one by one, condemning every ruler.

The final orb is Saturn, inside of which (yes, inside!) can be found a great stair, or ladder (in Italian we don’t distinguish between the two). A literal stairway to heaven, one that can take you all the way to the top of the universe.

It is allegorical, obviously, like everything else. It has to do with Saturn being the patron of contemplative life.

Here, Saint Benedict tells Dante that nobody in the order he founded wants to climb that stair anymore.

Dante and Beatrice fly along the stairway, reaching Gemini, the author’s own zodiac sign.

From the top of the physical universe, Dante looks back at it. He describes the planets with grand words and classical references - except the Earth, which looks so small and lowly! We should think little of it.

…and I beheld this globe
Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance.

(…)

The threshing—floor that maketh us so proud,
To me revolving with the eternal Twins,
Was all apparent made from hill to harbour!

Then to the beauteous eyes mine eyes I turned. (Longfellow)

Longfellow uses “proud”, but the word is “feroci”, ferocious, violent. The Earth is “the little courtyard that makes us so ferocious”.

The sphere of the fixed star is a boundary; you can see from above the same universe visible from Earth, and you can see from below the Rose of the Blessed and the Virgin Mary as great, elaborate apparitions of light. Dante is tested by Saint Peter and other saints on matters of faith; this is a long episode that takes up many cantos, and is modeled after university exams. Eventually, Dante and Beatrice ascend further, first to the First Mover from which the angels are visible as yet more elaborate apparitions of light, and eventually into the Empyrean, the space outside space and “in the mind of God”.

Saint Bernard, who briefly has taken the place of Beatrice as Dante’s guide, leads a great collective prayer to Mary. Will Mary intercede with God, so that Dante, who has traveled all the way to the Empyrean, will have the power to look upon God, and remember what he’s seen?

“Mother and virgin, daughter of your son,

you lowlier and you loftier than all creatures,

you milestone of eternal plans, the one

who dignified so highly human features

that the creator didn’t mind assume,

take up himself, the essence of the creatures;

love was revivified within your womb,

and its rekindled warmth, in peace eternal,        

allowed this rose to germinate and bloom.

Here, you’re the face of charity diurnal,

below, for mortals, you’re a lively spring,

a fountainhead of hope in the supernal;

my lady, you’re so good and great a thing,        

those who seek grace and not your intercession

are trying to fly high and have no wing.

You don’t just help when hearing an expression

of need, a bid for aid; such is your pity,

you help before as well, at your discretion.

In you, commiseration, mercy, pity,

in you, munificence, in you well thrives

all that within created souls is pretty.

This man, who’s gone through all, this man, who dives

down till the lowest lake of all creation

then up, beholding all spiritual lives,        

now prays you grace him with fortification,        

enough of it that he can raise his gaze        

higher above, to ultimate salvation.”

Mary looks up, into the bright light of God above. Dante now can do the same.

One dreams of sights, and wakes from such a place

with nothing but emotion stamped inside,

and of the rest that has been seen, no trace;

that’s me; the vision waned and almost died,

and still within my heart I feel it drizzle,

the sweetness left behindby such a ride.

And so the sunlit snow melts into dribble;

and so, lost in the wind, they fly away,

the words written on airy leaves by Sybil.        

You soar so far above our mortal concepts, ray

of highest light; give back some verity,        

a trace of what you showed my mind that day,        

and lend my tongue the force and clarity        

for just one glimmer of your glory’s good

to be my spark for all posterity,

for if I could remember, if I could        

resound it out a little here in song,        

your triumph would become more understood.

(…)

In that illumination’s deep self-being,        

so clear, three circles of three colors showed,        

in their extension equal and agreeing;

one was one’s mirror image, in the mode

of rainbows facing rainbows; one was fire,

which from the first two haloes blew and flowed.        

Alas! All that I say is so much drier        

than what’s within me! Which is less, itself,

than nothing, next to what I did admire.        

Light endless, alone dwelling in yourself,

alone self-understood and self-perceived,

you smile and love, alone to know yourself!

That ring in you that seemed to be conceived

the way a mirrored light’s a light anew,

my gaze ran all along it and perceived,

within, in the same color, the same hue,

a painted icon of our kind, a man;        

my eyes were wholly set upon that view.

Geometer will strive and strive to scan

the circle, brooding hard to find the key,

yet ever fail to square and know its span,

that vision stumped me to the same degree:

how could that figure suit so well that sphere?

I tried in vain to make it out, to see;        

no wings of mine could fly past that frontier,        

but lightning came and hit my mind, to fill        

the longing in it. At this point and here,

high fantasy no more had power; still,

turning my wheel so well there were no jars,

now Love was spinning in me wish and will,        

the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.

_________________________________________

Why is Dante’s Italian so beautiful to us Italians?

As is common knowledge, English has a Latinate linguistic tier on top of a Germanic one, and the first is more formal than the second.

Belief - creed, lawful - legal, child - infant, fatherly - paternal, shape - form, uplifting - elevating.

(although, looking at a Wikipedia list of such pairs, I’m not sure it’s true; one can easily find examples of the opposite; try it yourself. Whatever…)

In Italian, though, almost all words are from Latin.

There is, however, a difference between the Latin words that have reached Italian via literature, and those that have reached it via speech.

Take the words for dark.

The literary word for dark is oscuro. It comes from the latin obscurus, which means the same. The corresponding noun is oscurità. That word is a plague.

The most colloquial and beautiful word for dark is buio. It means both dark and darkness. I love that word. Buio! So sweet to the ears.

It comes from late Latin burium, which does not mean the same. The word changed over time in both pronunciation and meaning, therefore it has no equivalent in Latin, therefore it is perceived as informal.

The stigma against “buio” is a pet peeve of mine. Why would any Italian use *rolls eyes* oscurità, when a word as beautiful as buio exists?

Even in pop culture (think of every fantasy franchise where “darkness” comes up, e.g. Star Wars) it’s always oscuro and oscurità in Italian dubs. “Buio” would be perceived as too informal for the bland solemn tone translators try to strike in those genres.

But Dante uses “buio” a lot!

This just scratches the surface of the unique beauty of Dante’s language.

Can you explain to a foreigner who doesn’t speak English why Shakespeare is good with words?

How can I explain it?

_________________________________________

Imagine a fantasy work set in a magical ancient Greece, or even in a fictional magical setting merely inspired by ancient Greece. It’s full of magic and monsters. You would expect that in such a setting, the deities of Greek mythology exist. Indeed, in all movies, books, games… with such a setting, invariably Zeus, Athena, Apollo…. exist. It would be a letdown if they didn’t.

Imagine a fantasy work set in a magical Norse world, or even in a fictional magical setting merely inspired by Vikings. It’s full of magic and monsters. You would expect that in such a setting, the deities of Norse mythology exist. Same as the paragraph above.

Indeed, in any escapist exotic setting where the supernatural is real, the convention is that whatever the people in the setting believe about the supernatural, is real.

One of the most beloved escapist settings is “medieval Europe”. You can see it in the popularity of renaissance fairs, or of the whole “dragons and wizards” type of fantasy.

And yet, medieval Europe is the only fantasy setting that never gets the full treatment.

Consider, for example, Westeros. It is not medieval Europe, but it’s meant to hint at it. It has magic, dragons, giants, the undead, a supernatural wall of ice. It also has a religion that is meant to hint at Christianity, the faith of the Seven. And yet, the Seven… don’t seem to actually exist in the setting. Instead, they represent the way we atheists see religion.

I’m sure there are exceptions, but the trend with “medieval fantasy” is that either it gets a belief system that doesn’t resemble the medieval one at all, or it gets one that does but is not real in the setting. And isn’t that a letdown, like a story about Vikings where magic and monsters exist but all the mythological creatures and deities in which Vikings believe… don’t?

Imagine you’re brainstorming for a work of “medieval fantasy”.  What are the three most common fantastic creatures in medieval culture?

Most people would give answers such as “dragons”, or “giants”.

Very few would think of angels. And yet, they surely make that list. They may even be at the top of it.

Think of a work of medieval literature. It’s likely that there are angels in it. There are angels in the Canterbury Tales. Angels are everywhere.

An outsider culture would think of angels as the quintessential medieval European creature, just as we think of serpentine dragons as quintessentially Chinese.

And yet, nobody would cosplay an angel at a Renaissance fair!

But it hasn’t always been that way.

Note that what we today call “medieval fantasy” (or “epic fantasy”, or “sword and sorcery”, that is to say, the genre with wizards and dragons in it), is the same genre that was once called “chivalric”, and it’s so ancient that the foundational novel of Western literature, Don Quixote, is a parody of it. When Cervantes wrote it, there had been at least 450 years of wizards and dragons already (I’m thinking of Chretien de Troyes as the earliest clear example). Scott Alexander’s beloved Tennyson wrote in that genre too - the Idylls of the King.

In this long literary history, the strange disappearance of the medieval belief system from medieval fantasy is recent. For example, as recently as Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1976), God himself speaks to Arthur form the clouds. In Disney’s Sword in the Stone (1964), the titular sword is twice referred to as a “miracle”, and when it’s time to draw it from the rock, a ray of divine light from above grants the teenage hero heavenly strength.

I think this fully explains the popularity of Vikings in pop culture. As far as premodern warriors go, they have the unique advantage of being familiar to Westerners, without offending anyone with their belief system, even if it’s portrayed as true. Thus, Hollywood can make a movie (the Northman) that ends with the hero being carried to Valhalla by a flying Valkyrie. Imagine how controversial the equivalent scene would be, with a Christian hero and a Christian angel!

I’m an atheist. Reading Dante reminds me of how wondrous is the Christian mythology of angels and demons, heaven and hell. And while I’ve always felt drawn to the “medieval fantasy” setting, in its stock version it has always felt off to me. I think it’s because the medieval supernatural is never true in that setting.

_________________________________________

The world is full of clichés.

Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Everyone before Columbus thought the world was flat.

The mitochondria are the powerhouses of cells.

Raise your hand if you heard this one:

English is “rhyme-poor”, meaning it’s difficult to rhyme in it. Therefore, rhyme is not very common in English poetry.

It’s much easier to rhyme in Romance languages. For example, the Divine Comedy, a novel length work that follows a triple rhyme scheme throughout, could never have been written in English, and is impossible to translate because of its rhyme scheme.

I don’t know about you, but I come across variations of that statement surprisingly often. Even the part where Dante gets singled out.

It’s nonsense, like the notion that everyone before Columbus believed the world was flat.

Spencer wrote the Fairy Queen, a work longer than the Divine Comedy, in a rhyme scheme more difficult than the one in the Comedy. This consideration alone should debunk the myth.

The notion that rhyme is uncommon in English is obviously false. I feel like I’m saying that the pope is Catholic here.

Rhyme is everywhere in English, from Chaucer all the way to modern rap, pop, and musical theater.

It’s true that Paradise Lost does not rhyme, but Milton was going against the grain, and had to defend his weird decision in the introduction he penned for his epic, where he invokes the precedent of Spanish and Italian poets who had already dared to reject rhyme.

He states that his work is the first ever rhyme-free epic in English:

This neglect then of Rhime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so  perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.

Milton was telling the truth, as far as I can tell. Epic poetry was common in the early modern era, and with the exception of Milton himself, all English examples I’ve seen rhyme.

Examples: the Faerie Queen, Venus and Adonis, the Rape of the Lock, Pope’s Iliad and Odissey, Chapman’s Iliad and Odissey, Dryden’s Aeneid, Golding’s Metamorphoses.

As you can see, even English translations of ancient works had to rhyme, even if originally they didn’t rhyme!

In the same period, translations of ancient works into Italian tended not to rhyme.

When the Rape of the Lock was first translated into Italian in 1736, the translation didn’t rhyme, even if the original did.

Keats and Leopardi are close analogues of each other, the greatest poets of the early 1800’s in Britain and Italy. Keats used rhymes more than Leopardi.

I’ve come across the argument that the reason it’s supposedly easier to rhyme in Italian is that it has only 7 vowels, while English has 20.

Let me show that, when it comes to possible vowel-consonant combinations, Italian is as varied as English.

• Italian distinguishes between geminate and non-geminate consonants; e.g. “fato” does not rhyme with “fatto”. This doubles the number of consonants.
• In American, there are 14 or 15 vowels. This is only twice as many as Italian, meaning American has twice the vowel and half the consonants of Italian, and therefore a similar number of vowel-consonant combinations.
• In British, there are 20 vowels, but the “r” sound is not pronounced except before a vowel, which limits the variety of consonant clusters compared to either American or Italian. In practice, this compensates for the extra vowels, which for the most part are heard where Americans would pronounce an “r” that Brits don’t. Compared to American, it’s easier to rhyme in British, where “dawn” rhymes with “morn”, “father” with “farther”, “lion“ with “iron”, “bought” with “court”, “Messiah” with “sire”, “sofa” with “loafer”, “car” with “spa”, one could go on and on (to British readers: those pairs don’t rhyme in the US).
• The official 14 or 15 or 20 vowels of English cover English diphthongs, whereas the official 7 vowels of Italian don’t cover Italian diphthongs. The latter are occasionally used in rhymes, for example Petrarch knows something about “aura” rhyming with “Laura”, where “au” rhymes with English “how” - how come this sound gets counted as its own vowel in one language but not in the other?
• Italian has no vowel reduction.

Let’s look at the issue from another angle.

Rhyme in English can be masculine (ending with a stressed syllable) or feminine (ending with a stressed-unstressed sequence).

Traditionally, a stressed-unstressed-unstressed sequence in iambic meter can form a masculine rhyme as well. For example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 (can’t accuse me of cherry picking) has three such rhymes, including “niggarding” with “spring”.

In English, about half of a few thousand most common words can form masculine rhymes (mostly ending with a stressed syllable, but also some of the other type), the other half can form feminine rhymes. How did I get to this figure? I counted them in the past using an online word list, but I don’t remember which one and I don’t have the time right now to do it all over again.

Feminine rhymes are difficult. For example, “woman” doesn’t rhyme with anything. That must be why some people believe English is “rhyme poor”.

But masculine rhymes are easy! For example, “man” rhymes easily.

Italian words are right in between.

Overall, it is not any easier to rhyme in Italian than English. I know from experience.

The only case in which rhyme is easy in Italian is when the part that rhymes is wholly contained in the grammatical ending. Occasionally Dante rhymes that way, but of course you can’t rely on it much.

I suspect that what’s going on is that when Anglo-Americans see Italian poetry, where almost every rhyme is “feminine”, their reaction is: “Wow, Italians come up so easily with feminine rhymes, which for us are so tough! It must be a language where rhyming is trivial!” They forget that we have no other option.

But what’s *really* going on is that translators need an excuse not to rhyme perfectly. The Divine Comedy is the most famous non-English rhyming epic, therefore it’s the one about which English speakers are most exposed to the laments of those translators who find their work impossible and complain about it in introductions. I don’t blame them; it’s extremely difficult to translate rhymes without sacrificing either meaning or quality. But the issue is not exclusive to English; it’s just as difficult to translate English rhymes into Italian.

A related misconception is that stress pattern within the line doesn’t matter in Italian poetry, or in Dante. This is not the case.

The notion may possibly stem from the fact that in his unfinished treatise on vernacular poetry, he didn’t get to the point of discussing stress patterns. But in the Comedy, Dante clearly is very deliberate with his stress patterns.

_________________________________________

Did people believe that the Divine Comedy was literally true?

Galileo seems to have interacted with a group of scholars who did. It’s bizarre. Just look at this Wikipedia page:

On the Shape, Location, and Size of Dante's Inferno

It says:

Since the publication of Divine Comedy in 1314, scholars had attempted to map the physical features of Dante's Inferno, such as the blasted valleys, caverns and the roiling rivers of fire.[3] In his lectures Galileo suggested that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, Galileo calculated that Vellutello's description of the hell's structure, such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth, would, in reality, collapse under their own weight.

I’ve always thought that the Divine Comedy wants to be believed.

Fortunately, thanks to the Internet I’ve found today one critic (Robert Hollander) who says out loud what I’ve always suspected:

“Dante, faced with the strong opposition of theologians to the idea that secular literature had any meaningful claim to purvey truth, made a bold decision. Rather than employ the allegory of the poets, which admitted, even insisted, that the literal sense of a work was untrue, he chose to employ the allegory of the theologians, with the consequence that everything recounted in the poem as having actually occurred is to be treated as "historical," since the poet insistently claims that what he relates is nothing less than literally true. We do not have to agree that such was in reality the case, only that the poet makes precisely this claim -- and no less than it.”

(…)

Charles Singleton, one of the leading exponents of the "theological school," put the matter succinctly: "The fiction of the Divine Comedy is that it is not fiction.”

Hollander also write of Dante’s letter to his patron Cangrande della Scala:

“Certainly its most astounding and controversial assertion is that the fourfold interpretation of texts used to elucidate the historical meanings of the Bible was the very method to be used in order to understand the Comedy. This is surely the stuff of heresy. For the position at the very least and unmistakably implies that the literal sense of the poem is historical, i.e., that Dante's seven-day visit to the afterworld is to be treated as historical fact.”

Remember when I said earlier it’s significant that the Comedy has the same four levels of allegory that were attributed to the Bible?

But I think it’s easier to accept this if Dante himself believed it to be true!

Is it possible that Dante believed his own trip to the afterlife to be true?

Let’s look at the Wikipedia page about near death experiences. It list typical features.

• A sense/awareness of being dead.

Let’s look at the opening of Hell:

My translation:

I crossed the mid of life, and as I crossed,

I found myself awake in a dark wood,

for the direct way forward had been lost.

I can’t describe it without pain, who could,

that wild so harsh and tangled! All the dread

returns as I remember the dark wood!        

Almost as bitter as becoming dead;        <———

but since I mean to tell the good found there,        

all else I’ve come across will too be said.

Longfellow: So bitter is it, death is little more;

Mandelbaum: so bitter — death is hardly more severe!

Imagine one whose gasps still pour and pour,

who’s climbed onto the beach out of the sea,

and back at risk he gazes from the shore,

that’s how my soul, still striving to get free,        <———

turned back to contemplate the very pass        <———

that never let a living person flee.        <———

Longfellow:

So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.

These lines hint at death so much, without saying he died!

To be clear, throughout Hell and Purgatory, he makes it very clear he’s alive and has his body with him. In Purgatory, he is the only person around who projects a shadow.

Still, these lines describe a vague feeling of death, maybe what’s left of a thought his mind later retconned or reinterpreted. I think a vague sense of death is enough to check the box in this list.

Of course, everything here has an allegorical meaning. But all Dante ever does is say many things at once.

Oh, and obviously every literary critic ever would laugh at what I’m saying here, so feel free to think mine is crazy talk.

• A sense ofpeace,well-being, painlessness and other positiveemotions. A sense of removal from the world. An intense feeling ofunconditional love andacceptance. Experiencing euphoric environments.

Paradise.

• A "tunnel experience" or entering a darkness. A sense of moving up, or through, a passageway or staircase.

Hell itself is a gigantic dark tunnel, and the passage between Hell and Purgatory is a long, narrow tunnel. Purgatory is a great steep path to be climbed, as is the literal stairway to heaven in Paradise (see picture; note that in Italian we don’t distinguish between stairs and ladders; a ladder is a very steep stair).

• A rapid movement toward and/or sudden immersion in a powerful light (or "Being(s) of Light" or "Being(s) dressed in white" who communicate telepathically with the person).

Every time Dante and Beatrice zoom through space at incredible speed, towards a gleaming star, sometimes diving into it, to encounter shining people clad in bright light.

Everybody in Paradise knows Dante’s thoughts before he speaks (this is often pointed out).

“Immersion into powerful light” also describes the final encounter with God.

I find the correspondences here particularly strong.

• Being reunited with deceased loved ones.

Beatrice.

• Receiving alife review, commonly referred to as "seeing one's life flash before one's eyes".

The first thing Beatrice does is Give Dante a life review.

• Approaching a border or a decision by oneself or others to return to one's body, often accompanied by a reluctance to return.

As it appears on the wiki, this one seems to imply that the border is always the end of the journey, where one turns back.

But I’ve read other stuff. Unfortunately, I can’t find it any longer on the internet (especially not now that I have only a handful of hours left to finish writing this piece), which means you’ll have to take me on faith. Or not. You can also skip this paragraph while rolling your eyes. The other stuff I’ve read described a pattern, in which people reach a visible border where they must choose whether to go on or return. This is a broader concept than the one on the wiki, because one can also choose to go on. There are several moments of the Comedy that fit this pattern, but the most impressive is the moment of hesitation upon entering the door of Hell.

Finally, although the most commonly talked about near death experience resembles Dante’s trip to Paradise, there is also a pattern in which people experience something similar to Hell. One common feature is the experience of being tortured by creatures that, for Christians, may resemble demons. Some people experience both Hell and Heaven in the same trip. You can find out about it by googling around; try “distressing near death experience” or “hellish near death experience”.

I want to make it clear I'm not suggesting any of this is “real”! I’m an atheist. I think it’s a trick of the brain. You can probably experience something similar by taking some drug.

But I do suspect that our concept of a Heaven and a Hell have always been influenced by such experiences.

And I think in this way we can explain Dante’s confidence in the fundamental truth of his journey, which allowed him to present it as true, even if invented many of the details.

_________________________________________

I wanted to say so much more!

I wanted to write a section about Dante’s unique use of similes.

I wanted to write a section about Dante’s politics.

I rushed through whole sections of the summary.

But it’s May 5, the due date. In America, that is. Here in Italy, it has been May 6 for 8 hours.

Dante would describe the situation with a soaring tercet about the revolving universe.