Reading Dante As A Complete Noob

I first encountered Dante (that is to say his writing, rather than the writer, or indeed the long shadow his name casts across a lot of Western culture) in my third term as an undergraduate, possessing no Italian beyond “Ciao”, and in a fussy, roundabout way. We’d been set an essay comparing two English translations of Dante’s sonnet “Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io…”, one by Percy Shelley, and one by Robert Creeley from a century later. We were told these were both available in the book Dante in English, or we could source them ourselves.

Though the former is pretty widely available on the internet now, at the time they were both pretty #rare poems, and my coursemates had trouble finding them in the one week we had to complete the essay. A pretty long chain of emails were fired off: the book wasn’t in the English faculty library, nor in the University’s copyright library, and it was £17 from Amazon (this is pre-prime, so it would’ve cost around £20, or around $35 to get it in time to write the essay). Eventually our teacher relented and typed out the two sonnets for us; you’d have thought it would be an enjoyable experience, they’re beautifully written.

An unromantic start, then. It turned out Dante in English had been very recently published when we were set the essay by a friend of our teachers, and was the subject of a highly contentious review by Helen Vendler in the London Review of Books– the review, and the author’s response to it, are definitely worth a read. But a couple of years later I found the book in a reduced bookstore; I figured at half price it was worth a punt, partly because of my chequered personal engagement with it, but also partly because I had a vague but powerful curiosity about this poet, fragments of whose work I recognised from the way it had been churned up by other sources, but the substance of whom remained uncharted territory.

Probably the most important thing for an English speaker writing about Dante to state is that he is totally and utterly unrenderable in English– which helps to account for the never-ending, always mutating and fascinating series of attempts to translate the Commedia, his crowning achievement.

The poem (I say poem, though it embodies much of what we now conceive of as the territory of the novel) is written in a spiky, dynamic style that isn’t especially easy for native Italian speakers. It’s intensely idiomatic: bearing in mind Robert Frost’s statement about poetry being what gets lost in translation, attempting to translate Dante’s style at the same time as his content in a poetic way seems like an impossible task. There’s also the rhyme scheme: terza rima, “third rhyme” is Dante’s invention, and locks the poem together with rhymes that run aba, bcb, cdc, etc. It demands three end-rhymes per syllable; doable in Italian, a naturally vowel-heavy and open language, but extremely difficult in English, which is more closed and consonant-focused. The way Nintendo’s Mario exclaims “It’s-a me, Mario!” isn’t as silly as it might seem at first: he’s breaking up a consonant cluster with a vowel.

Like a lot of readers, it was the vivid imagery of the Inferno, often grotesque, always striking, which sucked me in. It roars through the shroud of translation. Dante is accompanied by the great Roman poet Virgil as he enters hell and witnesses those who suffer there, all of whom have their punishment fitted to their specific sins. The Italian word (which Dante only actually uses once) is contropasso, or “counter-suffering”. The modern idiom, which is probably a bit overused, would be poetic justice. Those guilty of lust are constantly blown around by stormy gusts of wind, so that they’re constantly moving backwards and forwards, without any direction or purpose, just as they made themselves slaves to their capricious desires during their lives. False prophets and sorcerers have their heads twisted a hundred and eighty degrees on their bodies: a comment on the unnatural nature of “magic”, and a bitingly ironic end result for those who tried to see illicitly into the future. Despite this deep irony, it’s important we don’t just see the punishments merely as God claiming revenge on those who broke the rules, rather, they are the final manifestation of the free will the individual misused over the course of their lifetime.

One of the most iconic, and climatic examples comes towards the end of the Inferno. Dante meets Bertran De Born, a baron from the twelfth century who wrote a number of poems praising the glory of war, and, according the vida, a short biography which was posthumously attached to collections of his poems, played an important role in encouraging Henry the Young King to revolt against his father, Henry II of England. To Dante, this was one of the most grievous crimes going, that of sowing schism and disunity; even worse, between a father and a son. Since he separated two things which should naturally be joined, De Born has his head separated from his body, and must carry it around “like a lantern”.

Because I divided people so joined
I carry my head, severed, alas!
From its origin, my body.

It’s a classic piece of Dantescan stagecraft: the grotesque drama of a man carrying around his own head has an effect similar to a shocking moment in a slasher flick, but then the pithy and far-reaching philosophical justification arrives, and it becomes stronger the more we consider it. Since Henry II was the head of state, Henry the Young King ought to have been part of the body of citizens subject to him (Dante’s surprising phrase, dal suo principio, “from its origin”, tips off us to this correspondence). Even the slashes fit together: Bertran’s horizontal separation (which happens at the end of Canto 28) is the counterpoint to the vertical separation of Mohammed and his son-in-law Ali, whom Dante encountered at the beginning of the Canto.

This dramatization of the consequences of sin is something doesn’t really have an analog in English poetry. It would inspire a range of responses: Milton’s Paradise Lost is probably the best known. The poet Ezra Pound (who would scorn Milton), a powerful reader of Dante in that he took exceptional pains to understand the Florentine in context with his predecessors and contemporaries, was fascinated by the De Born scene, and took an imaginative reconstruction of him, along with his reasons for writing poems, and status as a warmongering baron, as the subject of one his most ambitious shorter pieces, “Near Périgord”.

Dante’s influence ranges far and wide: his virtuoso and insistent terza rima would encourage The Inferno has proved by far the most popular in the English-speaking world (with many translators choosing to focus on the section alone), probably because it’s the most accessible. It’s not easier, per se, but it requires less familiarity with Dante’s idiosyncratic brand of medieval theology. Nevertheless, the gorgeous harmony of abstract concepts as Dante reaches heaven in Paradiso would be profoundly influential to Percy Shelley– a poet who would vehemently reject everything about Dante’s system of belief whilst very deliberately modeling his longer poems after the pulsating sound and light he found forming the structure of Dante’s paradise.

The review I mentioned at the beginning makes a point of haranguing the book for comparing our world to Dante’s, and seeing the correspondences between the two. There are accusations of dumbing down, of forcing comparisons to contemporary slang and culture which don’t really fit. I’ve listed particular poetic influences so far, but perhaps the best testament to the power of his work is the it permeates our culture still: we use the Italian word Inferno to describe hell and hell-like places, we know the phrase “abandon hope, all ye who enter here”, there is a video game called “Devil May Cry” where you fight devils as a character named Dante, and The Sopranos and even How I Met Your Mother allude to his work. Dante’s writing is still alive, and, now, being subjected to the full power of the internet.