Books: A Man for the Ages

The mother of Dante Alighieri, not long before his birth, had a dream in which her son, having eaten the berries of a laurel tree, grew up and was miraculously transformed into a shimmering peacock.

The portent was fulfilled in a blaze of genius for which the bird of the sun is no intemperate metaphor. For seven centuries La Commedia, which in 14,233 lines of lordly language describes the poet’s descent into hell and ascent into heaven through the refining fires of purgatory, has been widely considered the greatest poem ever composed; and its author has been virtually deified by the critics. T. S. Eliot pronounced him “the most universal of poets in the modern languages,” and added: “Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth. They divide the modern world between them; there is no third.”

Most readers remain unconvinced. Floundering through turgid translations, they begin to wonder uneasily: is Dante really great—or even interesting?

A Colossal Crystal. Last week, in connection with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth, the world was taking a fresh look at the man and the artist, and making a sharp reappraisal of his nature and his relevance. From Berlin to Buenos Aires, eminent dantisti were promulgating treatises and tributes. In Rome, Pope Paul was preparing an encyclical in Dante’s honor. And in the U.S., Yale’s Thomas G. Bergin produced the best general introduction to Dante ever written in English (Dante; Orion Press; $6.50).

After reading it, and reading selectively in any of the six superior translations of La Commedia available in the U.S.,* no reasonable man can deny that Dante was indeed a titanic personality and that La Commedia is a masterpiece: a colossal but exquisite crystal in which the total experience of human being is reconstituted in radiance. At one level, La Commedia is a spiritual autobiography; at another, a parable of the progress of the soul; at a third, one of the noblest love stories ever told. Incidentally it is a manual of mysticism and an encyclopedia of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Scholastic learning. Fundamentally it is both a fearful reprise of Apocalypse and the gospel of a rising religion of individuality that still moves and shakes the Western world. And spiritually, because it so profoundly agitates the great continuing questions of man’s essence and existence, it is a work that can still tell a wondering human being who he is and what his life is all about.

A Turbulent Life. Professor Bergin begins his book with vivid chapters on Dante’s century and Dante’s life. It was the century of Cimabue and Giotto, of St. Francis, St. Dominic and St. Thomas: an epoch of religious renascence that brought forth two major religious orders and the last great golden flower of Scholastic philosophy. But it was also the age of Marco Polo, Charles of Valois and Roger Bacon: an epoch of magnificent secular energy that propelled the rise of the middle classes and the independent city states, divided Italy between the party of the Pope (Guelph) and the party of the Emperor (Ghibelline) and embroiled Italians in a century-long civil war that concluded with the collapse of the empire and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.

In and amid this turbulent collisioncollusion of the medieval and the modern spirit, Dante Alighieri lived his turbulent life. His mother died when he was five or six, and when he was 17 he lost his father, a member of the petty nobility. “By nature impressionable and eager,” as he remarks in La Commedia, the boy somehow acquired a superb intellectual education. At an early age his appearance was forceful—hook nose, big jaw, protruding lower lip—and his disposition thorny. “He was somewhat presumptuous, disdainful and haughty,” according to a contemporary, “and knew not well how to bear himself with common people.”

Dante & Beatrice. He was also ferociously ambitious for “eternal fame,” and even in his teens he was recognized as an important poet in the “sweet new style” of vernacular verse imported, with some modifications, from Provence. With the Provencal style came the Provencal subject: the cult of courtly love and the service of the lady fair. In Dante’s life the lady fair was Beatrice. A 14th century biographer reports, not altogether reliably, that she was a daughter of Folco Portinari, a Florentine nobleman, and that she looked like “a little angel.” Dante, the account continues, met Beatrice when he was nine and she was eight, and he swore to love her forever. On the evidence of his poetry, he adored her from a distance. But the affair was nevertheless passionate and profound. When Beatrice died at 24, Dante was shaken to the bottom of his being.

His response was historic. Soon after Beatrice’s death, Dante published La Vita Nuova (The New Life), a history of his passion that was interspersed with some of the purest love lyrics in the language. Some time before 1294, still in his 20s, Dante married a Florentine noblewoman named Gemma Donati, by whom he had three sons and a daughter. He also instituted a series of sensual liaisons, and to one of these women he wrote some of the most ferocious love poetry ever penned.

If I could lay hands on those tender tresses

Which are become a lash and scourge to me,

Seizing upon them before morning prayer

I’d clutch through vespers and through

evening bell.

I’d show no pity nor be courteous, But rather play at passion like a bear; And if love scourge me now because

of them, I would revenge myself a thousand

times.

And more: into those eyes from

which come spitting Sparks that burn my heart before

they die,

I would look hard and deep, I would Revenge the terror that she strikes

me with. And then I would give her peace

with love.

Exile & Consolation. With a passion equally ferocious, Dante hurled himself into politics. By 1300, thanks to his partisan zeal and forensic brilliance, he was one of the six principal executives of Florence; but in 1301 he met with a political disaster. The French marched on Florence and established Dante’s enemies in power. Condemned in absentia to death by burning, Dante for the last 20 years of his life wandered in exile from the “bella citta” he loved. Most of his political colleagues sooner or later won remission of exile, but Dante proudly refused to compromise his principles and drifted drearily through Italy, learning

how bitter is the taste

Of another’s bread; how weary is the road

Of going up and down another’s stairs.

Dante’s loss was literature’s gain. To anesthetize his lacerated pride and evaporate his boiling anger, the idle exile seized upon a project the busy politician could never have accomplished: night and day for at least eight and perhaps for 20 years, he labored to produce his enormous literary monument.

La Commedia is composed of three colossal canticles: I’lnferno, il Purgatorio, il Paradiso. Each canticle, if the first canto of I’lnferno is counted as a prologue, contains 33 cantos, and each canto contains about 142 lines composed in terza rima, a rhyme scheme (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on) so cruelly intricate that only Dante ever mastered its hazards.

The poem opens with a noted tercet:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a gloomy wood

For the straight way was lost utterly.

Whereupon Beatrice descends from heaven and summons the shade of Virgil to lead her demoralized adorer through the landscape of the afterlife “to procure him full experience.”

L’lnferno, the most exciting of the canticles, reads like a scenario for the ultimate horror movie. Hell, as Dante conceives it, is formed in the shape of a funnel. Terraces circle its inner surfaces in a descending series of damnations. In the first circle, the innocent shades of pre-Christian times exist in peace. In the next four, the souls of the incontinent are tormented. Heresy, violence and fraud have their reward in the sixth, seventh and eighth circles, and traitors fill the bottom of the pit—a region not of everlasting fire but of eternal ice.

On the way down, Dante encounters three giants, 30 monsters, dozens of demons, and 128 spirits he can call by name—among them Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ulysses, Mahomet, Brutus and Judas Iscariot. He also meets some of his best friends, but finds them leniently dealt with: his old teacher, for instance, the famous Brunette Latini, is only slightly singed for his sodomy. Dante’s personal enemies are more numerous and less fortunate; their agonies are described with grisly glee.

The murderers swim forever in a river of blood; the flatterers wallow in human excrement; the sowers of discord are split up the middle and stagger through eternity with their entrails hanging out. From time to time, with the brutality characteristic of his age, Dante personally assists their torment —he kicks one sinner in the face and sadistically rips out a fistful of his hair. More sympathetic episodes are artfully interspersed. In the second circle, for instance, Dante meets Paolo and Francesca and tells the touching story of their tragic love. Unhappily, the canticle concludes with a large and, to modern readers, faintly ludicrous letdown: Satan. The Old Gentleman looks like King Kong and does nothing but sit in his pit and chomp on Judas Iscariot.

Il Purgatorio, the most complex and psychological of the canticles, is an allegory of a process the church calls conversion and the psychoanalysts individuation. Purgatory, as Dante conceives it, is formed in the shape of a mountain. Around the mountain, like a mighty serpent, winds a path that spirals upward to the summit. At seven stages of the ascent are situated seven cornices, and on each of them penitents purge one of the seven deadly sins. The proud plod under heavy burdens; the envious wander with eyelids sewn shut; the gluttonous gaze at inaccessible fruit. As Dante and Virgil ascend, they meet famous figures of the Middle Ages engaged in the agonies of atonement—among them Pope Adrian V, King Philip the Fair, the poets Guido Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel. At first the climb is cruelly difficult, but as Dante ascends it becomes easier. Both as a man and a poet, he visibly grows as he goes. In I’lnferno the verse is harsh, immediate, brilliant; in Il Purgatorio it becomes progressively more rich and reflective.

At the last cornice Dante walks through a wall of fire (“When I was in it, into molten glass/ I would have thrown myself to be refreshed”) to burn away his lust, and then passes into the terrestrial paradise, the garden of Eden, where he sees again his beloved Beatrice.

// Paradiso, the most profound and beautiful of the canticles, is a work of radiant religious majesty. Heaven, as Dante conceives it, is a seamless empyrean, a simple blazing thought in which saints and angels mystically merge in the glory of God. Nevertheless, since “thus the human mind must be addressed,” Heaven arranges itself for his experience into a hierarchy of nine heavens ascending in series to the Heart of Light. Suddenly “transhumanized,” the poet is swiftly borne upward through the heavens as “a falling rill that plunges from a mountain to the depths.” Beatrice precedes him, and on the way they encounter the shining spirits of the saved—among them Justinian, Charles Martel, St. Thomas, Solomon, Charlemagne and St. Benedict. As Dante’s spirit soars toward God, his lines soar into a region of mystical incandescence.

The light I saw was like a blazing

river A streaming radiance between two

banks Enameled with the wonders of the

Spring And from that streaming issued living

sparks That fell on every side as little

flowers And glowed like rubies in a field of

gold.

In his last canto, Dante is granted the Beatific Vision, and as he looks upon the face of God he rises to what Eliot called “the highest point poetry has ever reached or ever can reach.”

Fixing my gaze upon the Eternal

Light

I saw enclosed within its depths, Bound up with love together in

one volume, The scattered leaves of all the universe: Substance and accidents, and their relations

Together fused in such a way That what I speak of is one simple

flame.

Within the luminous profound

subsistence Of that Exalted Light saw I three

circles Of three colors yet of one

dimension And by the second seemed the first

reflected As rainbow is by rainbow, and the

third Seemed fire that equally from both

is breathed.

A Meticulous Lucidity. Experienced in luminous Tuscan, this passage magically induces the sense of mystical identity with deity, the supreme religious experience. No more complex effect of poetry has ever been conceived, yet Dante achieves it with simple means. He is always simple, vigorous, lucid. His descriptions are like paintings by Giotto: childlike in their simplicity yet sculptural in their power—when the shades approach him through the gloom of Dis, for instance, they “sharpen their brows” and peer at him “as an old tailor peers at the eye of a needle.”

Simplicity of language, on the other hand, does not prevent what Critic Erich Auerbach described as “artful and meticulous composition unequaled in the whole of literature.” The last canto of I’Inferno, for instance, descends to the depths of despair through a brilliant cacophony of rhymes that snarl, snigger, squeak, squitter, screech like a sackful of demented imps. And the structure of the entire poem is a miracle of symmetry; all its canticles are consciously articulated in a great Golden Section, an ancient system of proportion in which the nature of God and the structure of the human soul are reconciled.

Into this “vehicle of total esthetic possibility” Dante impounds the complete experience of medieval man—an experience bestial in its earthiness and supernal in its spirituality. Dante sees man reverently and sees him whole: as an ape and an angel, as a worm

Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly

That flies to judgment naked and

alone.

In his poem, Dante suffers the “full experience” of this immortal metamorphosis. Faith is not enough; he demands experience. And with that demand, Dante becomes the first modern man.

Yet in his medieval vision of man’s nature and man’s role in the universe, in the dazzling immensity of moral possibility he presents, men diminished by seven centuries of sphacelating materialism may experience a sudden enlargment of life and some of the joy felt by the souls in Paradise who followed after Dante, crying: “Lo, here is one who shall increase our loves!”

*Dorothy L. Sayers, Geoffrey L. Bickersteth and Laurence Binyon have severally translated La Commedia into rhyming tercets, and translated it amazingly well. John D. Sinclair has prepared an excellent edition of La Commedia that offers the original Italian and a faithful prose translation on opposite pages. But for the reader without Italian, the most satisfactory versions are those in blank verse. Lawrence Grant White is both accurate and musical, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, though his diction is at times antique, presents passages of stunning power and precision. Unfortunately, neither of these is readily available at this writing. In preparing the translations of this article, TIME’S editors principally consulted White, Longfellow—and Dante.