The Divine Comedy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  THE INFERNO

  Canto I

  Canto II

  Canto III

  Canto IV

  Canto V

  Canto VI

  Canto VII

  Canto VIII

  Canto IX

  Canto X

  Canto XI

  Canto XII

  Canto XIII

  Canto XIV

  Canto XV

  Canto XVI

  Canto XVII

  Canto XVIII

  Canto XIX

  Canto XX

  Canto XXI

  Canto XXII

  Canto XXIII

  Canto XXIV

  Canto XXV

  Canto XXVI

  Canto XXVII

  Canto XXVIII

  Canto XXIX

  Canto XXX

  Canto XXXI

  Canto XXXII

  Canto XXXIII

  Canto XXXIV

  THE PURGATORIO

  Canto I

  Canto II

  Canto III

  Canto IV

  Canto V

  Canto VI

  Canto VII

  Canto VIII

  Canto IX

  Canto X

  Canto XI

  Canto XII

  Canto XIII

  Canto XIV

  Canto XV

  Canto XVI

  Canto XVII

  Canto XVIII

  Canto XIX

  Canto XX

  Canto XXI

  Canto XXII

  Canto XXIII

  Canto XXIV

  Canto XXV

  Canto XXVI

  Canto XXVII

  Canto XXVIII

  Canto XXIX

  Canto XXX

  Canto XXXI

  Canto XXXII

  Canto XXXIII

  THE PARADISO

  Canto I

  Canto II

  Canto III

  Canto IV

  Canto V

  Canto VI

  Canto VII

  Canto VIII

  Canto IX

  Canto X

  Canto XI

  Canto XII

  Canto XIII

  Canto XIV

  Canto XV

  Canto XVI

  Canto XVII

  Canto XVIII

  Canto XIX

  Canto XX

  Canto XXI

  Canto XXII

  Canto XXIII

  Canto XXIV

  Canto XXV

  Canto XXVI

  Canto XXVII

  Canto XXVIII

  Canto XXIX

  Canto XXX

  Canto XXXI

  Canto XXXII

  Canto XXXIII

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously

  published in three separate volumes by Mentor and Signet Classics. Acknowledgment is

  made to Venture, Italian Quarterly, The Saturday Review, Between Worlds, The Massachusetts

  Review, New World Writing, Arbor, Hartwick Review, and The Rarer Action Essays in

  Honor of Francis Fergusson, in which excerpts from John Ciardi’s translations of

  The Purgatorio and The Paradiso first appeared.

  First New American Library Printing, June

  The Inferno copyright © John Ciardi, 1954

  The Purgatorio copyright © John Ciardi, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961

  The Paradiso copyright © John Ciardi, 1961, 1965, 1967, 1970

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321.

  [Divina commedia. English]

  The divine comedy: The inferno, The purgatorio, and The paradiso / Dante Alighieri; translated

  by John Ciardi.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-11799-6

  I. Ciardi, John, 1916-86 II. Title.

  PQ4315.C5 2003

  851’.1—dc21 2002037963

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  HOW TO READ DANTE

  In the opening allegory of the Divine Comedy, Dante finds himself lost and in darkness:Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

  from the straight road and woke to find myself

  alone in a dark wood.

  These are familiar allegorical devices and no sensitive reader will fail to understand that “the straight road” has something to do with rectitude (“the straight and narrow”), that “the dark wood” has something to do with error/sinfulness/loss of purpose, and—by extension—that the proper course must lie in finding the light.

  Having “something to do with” is not close enough, however. Dante demands more careful reading. Because of that demand, because of the immense and minute scholarship that has been expended upon Dante, and because too few English readers have been pointed in the right direction to him, Dante has acquired a reputation as an immensely difficult poet.

  It is true that Dante writes in depth. Though his language is normally simple, his thought is normally complex. But if the gold of Dante runs deep, it also runs right up to the surface. A lifetime of devoted scholarship will not mine all that gold; yet enough lies on the surface—or just an inch below—to make a first reading a bonanza in itself. All one really needs is some first instruction in what to look for. Thereafter he need only follow the vein as it goes deeper and deeper into the core of things.

  The instruction may properly begin with those opening lines. “Midway in our life’s journey,” writes Dante. The reader must understand that Dante is not tossing off a poetic generalization. “Our life’s journey” means specifically the “threescore years and ten�
� of the Biblically allotted life span. “Midway,” therefore, means that Dante was thirty-five years old at the time of which he writes. Since he was born in 1265, it follows that the poem opens in the year 1300. And from a number of statements that can be culled from the poem, the careful reader can learn that the exact time is just before dawn of Good Friday.

  By culling certain other statements, most of which are made at once, the reader may further learn that the sun is at the vernal equinox, that it is in the sign of Aries (the zodiacal sign in which God placed it at the Creation), and that the moon is full. These elements, added to the fact that it is the hour of the dawn and the season of Easter, clearly compound a massive symbol of rebirth. All things are at their regenerative peak when the lost soul realizes it has gone astray, for that realization is itself the beginning of the soul’s rebirth.

  Scholars have since shown that there was no Friday in the year 1300 on which all these conditions obtained. Dante, moreover, was a close student of astronomy and astrology. He knew that no such conjunction of sun, moon, zodiacal sign, and Easter season had taken place. He invented that conjunction as a full-swelling introductory theme in what amounts to a symphonic structure. The poem sounds its first chords with first light striking through darkness. In what follows, the darkness must grow more and more absolute to the very depth of dark (Hell); the light must then begin to overcome the darkness (Purgatory); and finally the “music” must mount from light to light to the ultimate indescribable glory of the all-blazing presence of God at the peak of Heaven.

  As soon as Dante recognizes that he is lost and in darkness, he looks up and sees the first light of the new day glowing on the shoulders of a little hill. Throughout the Divine Comedy, the sun (“that planet/ whose virtue leads men straight on every road”) is a symbol for God, for Divine Illumination. In the Purgatorio, for example, souls may climb only in the light of the sun: once it has set, it is possible for them to descend, but they lack the power to move upward even so much as an inch. Only in the light of God may one ascend that road, for that is the light to which the soul must win.

  Another allegorical theme begins immediately. Dante, in his passion to reach the light (God), races straight up the hill to it. He uses a grand and typical synechdoche to describe his speed, saying that he raced up that slope at such a pace “that the fixed foot was ever the lower.”

  Synechdoche is that figure of speech in which a part is taken to represent the whole. A less certain writer might have reached for all sorts of great metaphors to describe the speed of his climb. Dante focuses on a single detail that does for all. If the feet of a man climbing a steep slope move in such a way that the moving foot is forever above the one that is pausing, it follows that the climb must be taking place at a blurring speed—in fact, at an impossible rate, whereby hyperbole must be added to synechdoche as a reinforcement of the poetic effect. The point for the reader to remember is that it will not do to slide over Dante’s details. They will take thinking about because they took thought to find.

  There is perhaps nothing so entirely impressive about the Divine Comedy as its power of mind. The true mark of any writer is in the choices he makes. Having written three words, he must choose a fourth. Having written four, he must choose a fifth. Nothing happens into a good poem; everything must be chosen into it. A poem may be thought of as a construction for making choices, and it is in the quality of his choices that Dante makes his greatness known. His language and his prosody can be rough and awkward. Anyone who reads the original will wonder at times if this is really “poetry.” Very well, then, let it be prose, if one insists on folly. But if it is prose, it is prose of a previously unknown order, for the depth and multiplicity of mind that seem to function at every choice have not been matched in any piece of Western writing.

  Meanwhile, back at the narrative, Dante is racing up the slope to what would be immediate salvation, could he manage to reach that light. The sinner has realized he is in darkness, he has seen the light, he ardently desires it, and he races to be received by it. But salvation is not to be had that easily: Dante finds his way blocked by three beasts. There is a She-Wolf that represents the sins of Incontinence, a Lion that represents the sins of Violence and Bestiality, and a Leopard that represents Fraud. The beasts themselves are derived from Jeremiah; the three categories of sin are derived from Aristotle. Into these three categories fall all the sins of the world. The Three Beasts, therefore, represent the total blindness of which the world is capable. Symphonically, they also foreshadow the three divisions of Hell through which Dante must journey. In the Hell of the She-Wolf are punished the sins of excessive animal appetite. In the lower Hell, the Hell of the Lion, are punished the sins of bestial violence. In the lowest Hell, the Hell of the Leopard, are punished the sins of fraud, worse than the sins of bestiality because they involve the perversion of the higher gift of intellect—a beast, that is to say, can murder; but only a rational being, by perverting the gift of rationality, can commit a fraudulent act.

  These three beasts drive Dante back into the darkness, blocking the direct and easy way to that light. In that darkness, when all seems to have been lost, and when Dante can find no way around those beasts of worldliness, there appears to him the figure of Virgil.

  Virgil is a complex figure, combining within himself, among other things, the classical heritage, genius, magic powers, and Dante’s personal devotion. On the first level, however, it will do to take him as representing Human Reason in its best development. More subtly, he may be taken as Esthetic Wisdom, the knowledge of the true poet. For present purposes let him be taken simply as representing Human Reason. In that role, he points out that there is no such express road to God as Dante had imagined in racing up the hill: “He must go by another way who would escape/this wilderness.”

  The other way—the long way round—is the total journey into ultimate darkness and out again to ultimate light. Such is the arduous road of the Divine Comedy. It is the painful descent into Hell—to the recognition of sin. It is the difficult ascent of Purgatory—to the renunciation of sin. Then only may Dante begin the soaring flight into Paradise, to the rapturous presence of God. God, that is to say, may be found only the other side of the total self-searching experience of a zealous life. There are no short cuts to that totally encompassing experience. Salvation must grow out of understanding, total understanding can follow only from total experience, and experience must be won by the laborious discipline of shaping one’s absolute attention. The object is to achieve God, and Dante’s God exists in no state of childlike innocence: He is total knowledge and only those who have truly experienced knowledge can begin to approach Him.

  Virgil, as Human Reason, is the first guide to that ultimate knowledge, but Virgil cannot guide Dante all the way. Reason is finite and God is infinite. The greater guide, in the medieval concept, was Faith. Reason was merely the handmaiden of Faith. Virgil can guide Dante to the recognition of sin and to its renunciation, which is to say, through Hell and to the top of Purgatory. But once at that summit, the soul has achieved purity. It has risen beyond Reason. It is ready to enter the Divine Mysteries. And there Beatrice (call her Divine Love) must take over.

  It was in her infinite compassion as Divine Love that Beatrice sent Reason to the man’s soul in his hour of darkness, that Reason might serve as his guide to bring him into her higher presence. One may not simply wish himself into that higher presence. That presence must be won to by devout labor.

  That devout labor is what might be called the basic plot and the basic journey of the Divine Comedy. All that follows, once the journey has begun, is an amplification of themes that have already been established. That much understood, the writing itself will best explain itself as it unfolds—always, of course, with the help of those indispensable footnotes.

  When, however, one has read all the way through the poem and has returned to reread these first Cantos, he will find many other themes rooted in them. There are four such themes that any beginnin
g reader will do well to grasp as particularly able to enrich his first experience.

  The first has to do with Dante’s sinfulness. What sin was it that had brought him into the dark wood of Error? Dante was expelled from Florence on charges of having been a grafter, and some commentators have tried to identify his guilt in that charge. In the Purgatorio Dante himself recognizes that he is guilty of Pride, and to some extent of Wrath. He has both those offenses to pay for when he returns to Purgatory after his death. But the charges against Dante were certainly trumped up by his political enemies, and no specific act of Pride or Wrath can be cited to account for Dante’s opening mood. His offense was, rather, Acedia. Let it serve to label this first theme.

  The Seven Deadly Sins for which souls suffer in Purgatory are—in ascending order—Pride, Envy, Wrath, Acedia, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. Acedia is the central one, and it may well be the sin the twentieth century lost track of. Acedia is generally translated as Sloth. But that term in English tends to connote not much more than laziness and physical slovenliness. For Dante, Acedia was a central spiritual failure. It was the failure to be sufficiently active in the pursuit of the recognized Good. It was to acknowledge Good, but without fervor.

  The spiritual awakening to which Dante comes in the Dark Wood—the enormous rebirth—is the awareness of the fact that he has not been sufficiently zealous in his pursuit of the Good. The Divine Comedy is the zealous journey from the man’s recognized spiritual torpor (neglect of God) to the active pursuit of his soul’s good (love of God). Every step of that journey may simultaneously be understood as the man’s active embrace of his Godly experience, as the soul’s active pursuit of the love of Good, and as the artist’s pursuit of form.

  The second theme—perhaps it is not so much a theme as a method—is inseparable from the others. Call it the Five Levels. In a letter to his patron, Can Grande della Scala, Dante explicitly names four levels of meaning that he intends all the way through the Divine Comedy—narrative, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. That letter may, as many scholars contend, be a forgery. Whether genuine or not, what it states explicitly is clearly implicit in the writing. And to those four stated levels may be added a fifth: the journey seen as a progress of the soul.