How do you go on? This is the starting point of one of the most extraordinary and important journeys in western literature, a stunningly ambitious flight of imagination and philosophy which has reverberated down the years since Dante Alighieri first wrote it down in the fourteenth century. The Divine Comedy is a vision of the afterlife, the three regions of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, through which the narrator must journey in order to better understand the workings of the universe, the love of God, and his place in the world.
Poet and translator Steve Ellis translated the Inferno in , and it was greeted with great acclaim. Now Ellis's translation of the entire poem is published here for the first time, and Dante's epic can be experienced afresh and in new glorious life and colour, the physicality and immediacy of Dante's verse rendered in English as never before.
Dante Alighieri. His family was connected with the Guelph political alliance, supporters of the Papacy. Dante himself was betrothed to Gemma di Manetto Donati when he was aged only Dante and Gemma had several children. Allied to the White Guelphs, with whom he fought against the vanquishing Black Guelphs, he was eventually condemned to perpetual exile from Florence.
He went first to Verona and then to Liguria. There is speculation that he travelled more widely, including to Paris and Oxford, although this has not been verified.
During his time of exile Dante conceived and wrote the three poems which form The Divine Comedy. He died in , aged 56, of suspected malaria. He was buried in Ravenna, Italy, where a tomb was later erected in his name.
Stephen Wyatt is a playwright and dramatist with extensive experience in stage, radio and television. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in and belonged to a noble but impoverished family. He followed a normal course of studies, possibly attending university in Bologna, and when he was about twenty he married Gemma Donati, by whom he had several children.
They are spoken by a tramp-like waif as he contemplates death. To comment you must now be an Irish Times subscriber. Please subscribe to sign in to comment. Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. The Divine Comedy: the greatest single work of Western literature Dante Alighieri, a figure in his own work, has lost his way in middle age and is alone and frightened in the darkness Sat, Sep 8, , Ian Thomson. More from The Irish Times Books.
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Screen Name Selection. Only letters, numbers, periods and hyphens are allowed in screen names. Please enter your email address so we can send you a link to reset your password. Your Comments. Sign In Sign Out. The rule with books, of course, is that there is no such thing as lending and returning.
The lending part goes fine, but the returning is usually the tricky part. I feel that giving a book to either of my children is an investment in all of our futures. Since I decided to descend into hell with Dante, I was frequently glad to have Virgil as our guide. He explained the explainable. He provided a protective wing from the many monstrosities that we encounter. Over the souls of those submerged beneath That mess, is an outlandish, vicious beast, His three throats barking, doglike: Cerberus.
His eyes are bloodred; greasy, black, his beard; His belly bugles, and his hands are claws; His talons tear and flay and rend the shades. These early monk illustrators displayed such a vivid creativity in how they depicted their fears.
I can only wonder how terrifying their nightmares were and for them to believe that these terrors were real would only add wings and claws to their trepidation. They were infected with these fears by Christianity, while being dangled the balm and possibility of heaven. How about this for a living nightmare? It gripped his belly with its middle feet, And with its forefeet grappled his two arms; And then it sank its teeth in both his cheeks; It stretched its rear feet out along his thighs And ran its tail along between the two, Then straightened it again behind his loins.
Then just as if their substance were warm wax, They stuck together and they mixed their colors, So neither seemed what he had been before. Dante was so proud we will deal with pride in Purgatory that they accepted him as a member of their club. I was starting to wonder if Dante may have already resigning himself to a life in hell. One of the wonderful things about writing, to paraphrase Chaucer, is that you can eviscerate your enemies forever in print, and certainly the people who had most offended Dante in life were experiencing the tortures of everlasting hell.
Writers do play God. Because of the fame of The Divine Comedy , their names will always be associated with a list of famous sinners. God does seem to be very particular about all of his children fearing him, loving him above all else, and most importantly of all worshipping him. How about even just a leg up to purgatory, where eventually one might after thousands of years of suffering earn a pair of wings?
It was with some relief, my deodorant was starting to give way, we ascended to Purgatory and confronted the seven terraced mountain, representing the seven deadly sins. For those in need of a recap, there are the malicious uses of love, such as wrath, envy, and pride, and those where love is too strong, such as lust, gluttony, and greed. Sloth is the only sin not based on excesses, but on a lack of enough self-love or energy to be a contributing member of society.
As I weigh myself on these scales, I can honestly say that sloth and greed have never been sins of mine. Pride, I will admit, was a struggle when I was younger, but life has a way of knocking the piss out of us and reminding us constantly that we are only half as smart as we think we are. Lust I will plead the fifth, and gluttony. I did check out some of the real estate pricing while in Purgatory. Dante shared an epiphany with me while in Purgatory that left me thinking about the creation of dreams and how important it is for all of us to continue to build new dreams as we leap the final hurdles of achieving a dream or find that other dreams may no longer suit us.
She was the daughter of a banker, married a banker, and with her premature death at 25 remained forever the very vision of beauty. According to Dante, he only met her twice, but those sightings must have been magical because they left him with a permanent love hangover. I wanted to ask Dante if he had ever even talked to the lass or if he just projected all of his visions of her from glimpses of her outer beauty, but then the fact that she is here in Paradise may answer that question for me.
We all look our best. If you are considering reading Dante, I would recommend for sure reading Inferno. Most likely when you encounter Dante references appearing in your reading, they will probably be from the Inferno.
This Allen Mandelbaum translation is wonderful and so easy to read, and there are copious notes in the back to help guide you if Virgil loses you in a flaming forest. A word of caution though, be sure to buy some SPF before you take this scenic walk with Dante. View all 25 comments. And may be it is not a coincidence that he was the exact contemporary of Giotto , his fellow Florentine.
For if Giotto planted the seed for a pictorial representation of the world in which man, at the center, and through a window, delivers to us a naturalistic depiction of divine stories, Dante also used his writing to posit himself as the Author who through his fictional persona or Alter-Ego , gives us the viewpoint to contemplate the full cosmos.
His cosmos, but for us to share. DA was exiled in and led a peripatetic life, outside Florence, until his death in He wrote the Commedia during the exile, from and finished it in time. By masterfully welding the fact and mythologized fiction of the world of Antiquity, he cloths himself with the full robes of Auctoritas, and presents us the complex development of European politics during the thirteenth century.
He summons his views repeatedly either by the succession of visits to the traitors or in fully developed historical pageants. In this Inferno DA is the very Minos. He is the one who with his pen of many tails wraps around his enemies and throws them down the pit to the Circle that DA believes the chosen sinners deserve.
Even if this spectacle horrifies his ingenuous Pilgrim. Lust is the least damaging while Treason, in particular political treason and the betrayal of friends, is the most despicable. In comparison even Lucifer, a rendition that remains faithful to the medieval tradition, is not much more than a grotesque, and not particularly hateful, monster.
Politics continue in Purgatory. He is the one holding the Silver and Gold keys, and who claims to know the very intimate thought of those who had the luck to repent the instance just before dying.
He awards then the transit ticket to Paradise. Can we be surprised if some of the awardees had some relation to those figures who had welcomed DA during his exile? The Pilgrim, as the only human in Purgatory, can bid for more prayers to the still living relatives when he goes back to Earth. He can effect a change in the duration that any purging sinner is to spend in the transitional stage, the only one of the three realms in which the clock is ticking.
Could one expect DA to finally drop the political discourse in Heaven? No, of course not. There it even acquires greater strength since the discourse is cloaked with a divine mantle. In Paradiso it will be no other than Saint Peter himself who will denounce the path of degeneration that the Papacy had taken in recent years. Indeed, a secluded Apocalyptical attests that politics forms a triptych in Commedia.
In agreement with the intricate framework of parallels, symmetries and balances in this work, DA devoted the three chapters 6 in each book to political diatribes. Apart from his relying on Ancient Auctoritas, DA also accorded the full weight of history to his views, and it is mostly in a couple of major pageants and in the Valley of the Kings that he exposes the political disaster that the withdrawal from the Italian peninsula by the Empire had on the various city states.
It was left to the corrupt papacy and to the corrupt smaller kingdoms to spread crime along the full Europe. His solution was clear. The papacy had to govern only religious matters, and he extolled the Emperor Henry VII to hold the political reins of Europe. This extremely complex work is also soaking in Christian Dogma. And what is to me extraordinary about the immediate reception of Commedia , is that it was treated like Scripture.
In his appeal to religious dogma DA was extraordinarily successful, even if some of his claims were shockingly daring. He modified or added realms to the Christian Cosmos, with the peculiar understanding of the Limbo to accommodate revered figures from Ancient Antiquity, or added the Pre-Purgatory for the unabsolved Rulers. He designed his own ranking of the Sins, both for Hell and Purgatory. Not by chance did he place the discussion of Free Will at the very center of the work, in Canto 16 of Purgatory.
But the most dangerous proposition, for him, was his vehement defense of the limitations of the Papacy on Earth. He started writing in just a few years after the Papal Bull of Unam Sanctam the very controversial claim of papal infallibility. What is most remarkable for literature addicts is how DA, the author, develops all these themes, and succeeds in weighing with the gravest authority his poetic treatise. And this he does through his masterful manipulation of the power of fiction and the sophisticated uses of voices.
His humanity, and his being in the middle of the moral mess in which he has placed himself is the perfect mirror for the reader. But we can trust him to embody us because Virgil , the greatest Roman poet and chronologist of the foundation of Rome, will guide us. We can trust him also because Christian Divinity has selected him as the, temporary, guide. With his revealed identity he can say goodbye to the pagan guide who cannot, alas, have a place in Heaven.
Dante, however, will. The spoiler provided by our general culture has damaged the way we read the work. The astounding pretention of DA in assigning himself the powers in deciding who goes where in his system of divine retributions has been blurred to some naive readers. Some of them try to excuse Dante precisely because they have been entirely convinced by his acting puppet. The highly successful Dante the Pilgrim DP as a candid personality with the qualities of kindness, fear, anger and similar emotions, distracts our attention away from the real Dante, the Author.
The Pilgrim is an alibi mechanism for his creator. He shows pity for the people DA condemns. He can go beyond the Terrace of Pride , in which the rather proud DA may be still spending some of his time. And he becomes the anointed messenger from the Heavens to deliver to us what DA is writing. His brilliant dramatization with innumerable personages constitutes the choir of a ventriloquist. In the sophisticated Narrative technique, the handling of time is also magisterial.
Apart from the symbolic unfolding of the action during Holy Week of the year , and the references to eternal cosmic time, it is the numerous voices of this clever ventriloquist who continually foretell what is to happen to the sinners. Some of these were not yet dead at the time of the pilgrimage, but had already passed away when DA was writing his poem. He died three years later.
But there is also the shocking case of the soul that is already in penance while his body is still living on earth. This personality died even after Dante. Finally it is DP himself, once he has entered Heaven, who engages in this foretelling, and of course, it had to be in his warning to the Popes that were about to be in power in the years after the voyage of the Commedia , reminding them to stay out of politics and to forget material wealth.
He passes them with flying colors, because DP acknowledges that his knowledge is based on the Holy Text. And it is also with Text, and DA was very well versed in exploiting its four levels of interpretation Literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical , that is, with this new poetry that Dante Aliguieri is proposing a plan for his, and our, salvation. Because after such a heavenly Graduation who can deny the Commedia its status as Prophetic and Scriptural?
May be we saw it coming, when the still anonymous Pilgrim posited himself, at the very beginning of the poem, as the 6th greatest poet after the likes of Homer, Ovid, Virgil etc. So, may be it is not by chance that his identity as Dante is revealed until Virgil is used and expensed. But if DA has been exploiting his abilities as ventriloquist, it is with his own voice as a poet that he makes a presence in Commedia. Having reached the Empirium of the poem, we can stop and think about where Dante Alighieri has taken us.
Because, even if not eternal salvation, he has delivered us a most extraordinary feat of literature that we cannot but qualify as divine. Furthermore, he has done so in a newly coined language, to which he added some words of his own invention, and, most outstanding of all, he positioned the Author at the very center of that literary White Rose of fiction. But before that, it had a long life. View all 70 comments. Plumbing the crucible of happenstance.
I should also mention that 3 years ago I had never cracked Dante's Divine Comedy. Now, I am finishing the Divine Comedy for the 3rd time. I've read Pinsky's translation of the Inferno. I've read Ciardi. It gives the Divine Comedy the verbal energy and the poetry that makes inferior translations a slog and makes Dante so damn difficult to translate well. A mediocre translation might capture the stripes but lose the tiger.
Clive James pulled off a master translation of one of the greatest works of art in any medium -- ever. View all 10 comments. It is widely considered to be the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature.
I've wanted to read it for a long time but had, thus far, been too daunted to actually take up the task. The narrative describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, while allegorically the poem represents The Divine Comedy is a 14, lines-long Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c.
The narrative describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, while allegorically the poem represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin, followed by the penitent Christian life, and ultimately leads to the soul's ascent to God. The three cantiche of the Comedy — Inferno , Purgatorio , and Paradiso — each consist of 33 canti. In addition, there's an initial canto, serving as an introduction to the poem and generally considered to be part of the first cantica, which brings the total number of canti to The structure of the three realms follows a common numerical pattern of 9 plus 1, for a total of 9 circles of Hell, followed by Lucifer contained at its bottom; 9 terraces of Mount Purgatory, followed by the Garden of Eden crowning its summit; and the 9 celestial spheres of Heaven, followed by the Empyrean containing the very essence of God.
Within each group of 9, seven elements correspond to a specific moral scheme, subdivided into three subcategories, while two others of greater particularity are added to total nine.
For example, the seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church that are cleansed in Purgatory are joined by special realms for the late repentant and the excommunicated by the church.
The core seven sins within Purgatory correspond to a moral scheme of love perverted, subdivided into three groups corresponding to excessive love Lust, Gluttony, Greed , deficient love Sloth , and malicious love Wrath, Envy, Pride.
The last word in each of the three cantiche is stelle "stars". This exile, which lasted the rest of Dante's life, shows its influence in many parts of the Comedy, from prophecies of Dante's exile to Dante's views of politics, to the eternal damnation of some of his opponents. Dante is 35 years old, half of the biblical lifespan of 70, lost in a dark wood understood as sin , assailed by beasts a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf he cannot evade and is unable to find the "straight way".
Dante is at last rescued by Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin's punishment in Hell is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice by which each punishment matches its sin. The Mountain is on an island and was created by the displacement of rock which resulted when Satan's fall created Hell. The classification of sin here is drawn primarily from Christian theology, rather than from classical sources. While the structures of Inferno and Purgatorio were based on different classifications of sin, the structure of Paradiso is based on the four cardinal and the three theological virtues.
View all 17 comments. I propose an extra level in the Inferno for procrastinators and abandoners. I was planning to write a novel where three protagonists commit suicide and end up in Scottish Hell. Since overcrowding has plagued the old Scottish Hell HQ, the protagonists are forced to queue up for weeks on end before arriving at the building for processing.
Upon their arrival, their sins are assessed by an administrator to determine which circle of Hell is appropriate for them. But due to cutbacks and financial inst I propose an extra level in the Inferno for procrastinators and abandoners. But due to cutbacks and financial instabilities, the three suicides are deemed unfit for service in Hell and are returned to their bodies. Back on Earth, the three characters return to their miserable lives, which they want to leave immediately.
But before they commit suicide again, they have to break free from their mousy personalities and commit sins grievous enough to secure them a decent place in Hell.
As the characters commit petty thefts and minor infelicities, the sin requirements to Hell become tougher and tougher, and they are repeatedly returned to their bodies. They spend their lives building up to larger and larger sins, constantly being returned to their bodies as the world around them becomes increasingly more depraved and violent. I started this book but lost impetus halfway through. I was convinced this idea was derivative of other works the Hell-as-bureaucracy has certainly popped up in British satire and lost heart.
I also lost heart halfway through the Inferno section of this, despite the translation being very fluent and readable.
So I am going to the tenth circle, for the procrastinating bolter. I did read the graphic novel version: partial redemption? View all 27 comments. I finished it! Someone, bring me my medal I am, however, a reader who wants to read "all of teh books" and I appreciate vivid imagery and interesting human interactions in fiction. I tackled the recent Clive James version of Dante's Divine Comedy--no footnotes or canto introductions here--because I just wanted to let the story wash over I finished it!
I tackled the recent Clive James version of Dante's Divine Comedy--no footnotes or canto introductions here--because I just wanted to let the story wash over me, to see how much I could "get" on my own without knowing why Dante's father's baker's frenemy's ex-lover's dog-handler was sitting upside-down in the burning pitch in Hell. And when it comes to vivid imagery, the Inferno delivers.
Surprisingly to me , the Purgatorio was also fairly easy to follow, as Dante and Virgil continue up a ceaseless barren slope past the singing, self-flagellating sinners who do their time for various sins and, each time an angel wipes an ash-mark from their foreheads, become one level closer to heaven. From reading the inferno in high school I had recalled Dante as a sniveling, swooning sissy--but on this re-read found myself very much liking his sensitivity and sense of empathy, especially to many of the sinners in hell well, as long as they are classical figures.
If he knows them, he's more likely to go stomp on their heads. Guide Virgil has to chastise him numerous times to keep him from getting understandably emotionally mired in the horrors he witnesses.
My favorite parts, besides perhaps the insult-throwing trident-wielding demons, were the back-and-forths between Dante and Virgil.
Sadly, though, Virgil is barred from entering heaven, and in the third book Paradiso we are stuck with the so-nauseatingly-lovely-and-perfect-that-you-just-want-to-smack-her Beatrice. Regardless of this new guide, I found Dante's heaven as impenetrable as listening to someone describe an acid-trip. It struck me as a sort of renaissance-era Yellow Submarine complete with its own Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds though the incessant choral music wasn't quite as catchy.
Watch it! If I notice a problem, I will fix it! Should be working now, anyway. View all 7 comments. Justice the founder of my fabric moved: To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I shall endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here. One of the greatest epic poems to have been written, ever. The book is divided into three books, Inferno, meaning hell; Purgatorio, meaning purgatory; and Paradiso, meaning heaven. My favourite has always been Inferno, but Paradiso is highly underrated, as underrated as this brilliant work can possibly be. This poem mixes religion and science, everything from the most basic Christian Dogma to early Islamic astronomy, with a lot of his political views mixed in.
At the time this work was being written, Dante was living in exile, he uses this work as a way to show his enemies and what he thought not only of figures of his time, but of historical figures in general, including Plato, Aesop, Alejandro Magno, Mary as well as legendary people, such as Abel, Diana, and Isaac. If one does not wish to read this simply because it is a long poem, read it for the historical view, so many interesting characters for history buffs.
My favourite thing perhaps, was how he used his work to slam the people that harmed him, including Pope Boniface VIII, the man who exiled him. I have a horrible sense of humour. View all 11 comments. Feb 26, James Capp rated it it was amazing. I first read this poem four years ago as part of a dare. The next summer, I wanted to read it again on account of the graphic imagery of Inferno and Purgatorio.
Everyone should at the very least skim Inferno. Particularly in Inferno, the political references are funny and provocative, and the historical significance of I first read this poem four years ago as part of a dare. Particularly in Inferno, the political references are funny and provocative, and the historical significance of this epic poem is right up there with the Bible and Paradise Lost for me.
Paradiso is far more abstract and sappy than the other books. But yeah, this is my favorite book. It makes me want to visit Italy. It makes me want to write something worth reading! View all 6 comments. Sep 18, Jon Nakapalau rated it it was amazing Shelves: classics , favorites. I must confess that so much was beyond my comprehension; but I think that is the mark of a great work of art I was so happy when I finished this book!
View all 3 comments. In Falling Towards England , the second volume of his memoirs, Clive James recalls making an ill-prepared trip to Florence as a young man in order to meet up with a girlfriend.
Per me si va tra la perduta gente. Through me In Falling Towards England , the second volume of his memoirs, Clive James recalls making an ill-prepared trip to Florence as a young man in order to meet up with a girlfriend. Through me you go among the lost people.
A line that crushed the heart, but in the middle of it you could say tra la. It was music. For many years she was also his wife, and this book is dedicated to her. So anyone who has read much of James before will know to what extent this translation of Dante is a life's work for him, and it was indeed the last major work he finished before his death in I came to it completely fresh, never having read Dante before.
As a fan of James's poetry, I wish I could say I loved it more than I did; but the truth is I found it a mixed bag, with some moments of brilliance alongside some moments of awkwardness and bewilderment.
Henry Fuseli, Dante and Virgil on the Ice of Kocythos, s Apart from his vivid imagery especially in the Inferno , Dante is revered for the beauty of his poetry. At the risk of stating the obvious, that is a damn hard thing to recreate in another language. James makes the sensible choice to turn Dante's terza rima into rhyming quatrains, which he rightly says are a more natural form for English. But there is sometimes a sense of padding in his verses where you feel that three lines have been expanded into four, especially when interpolations have been used to make his rhyme scheme work.
The famous opening runs: At the mid-point of the path through life, I found Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way Ahead was blotted out. In terza rima , the middle line of every tercet rhymes with the first and third lines of the subsequent tercet — whose middle line rhymes with the next tercet, and so on in perpetuity. To complete the rhyme, you always have to read one more tercet. This gives the original a propulsive forward motion, which is obvious even if your Italian is as rubbish as mine is.
James achieves a similar effect with heavy enjambment which you can see something of already in that opening , although the drawback here is that it smothers his rhymes almost to the point of snuffing them out.
What language did I shape and use? These were Your thoughts, my son. Hear me as I begin To answer them. The tasting of the tree Was not, alone, the cause of my exile For so long. If you read through the line breaks the rhymes are elided; if you stress them, in many cases, there is a real danger of losing track of the syntax, which can sometimes be labyrinthine. Could One and the many show more harmony? It stuns you, doesn't it?
It still stuns me. Or felicitously colloquial passages like this, from Hell: But all those naked souls unhinged by fate Changed colour when they heard that speech so harsh. Clicking their bared, chipped teeth in hymns of hate, They cursed their parents, God, the human race, The time, the temperature, their place of birth, Their mother's father's brother's stupid face… Overall, then, James's verse often helped me connect with Dante, but sometimes felt like it was getting in the way.
All the chat with Dante is really about the Inferno , and one of the things that surprised me in the Divine Comedy was how little, relatively speaking, I enjoyed the scenes in Hell and how much more, relatively speaking, I found myself interested in Purgatory and Heaven. Hell was less grotesque and fantastic than I had been led to expect, whereas Purgatory deals with much more relatable moral situations and Heaven turns out to be a crazed attempt to describe things that are literally indescribable, like moving beyond time and space.
Henry Fuseli, Dante Observing the Souls of Paolo and Francesca, s Most of all, I was increasingly awestruck by the sense of having an entire medieval worldview laid out in detail before me. Most of these realms turn out to be peopled by religious or political figures from Florence, of varying levels of obscurity. James tries to soften the blow here by making explicit some references which are usually only explained in footnotes — but I found that I still needed to take in some secondary commentary as I went, checking in fairly regularly with the annotated John Sinclair translation.
Of more lasting interest are Dante's attempts to wrestle with the moral implications of his religious vision. Virgil, famously, is his guide through Hell and Purgatory, but Virgil can't go any further because in the final analysis he is damned for being born too early. Dante loved and respected the Classical writers; but he cannot save them.
They're stuck in Limbo — an antechamber of hell — for all eternity. With not one sin willed, Outside the faith and unbaptized he dies. Where is the justice that condemns him? Where Is this man's fault? To a modern reader, this might well point up the moral inadequacy of medieval Catholicism in particular, and of religion in general.
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