Tom Simone has taught at the University of Vermont
for more than thirty years. He is the author of books on Shakespeare and on the beginnings of the Western Tradition as well as numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett, Shakespeare on film, and the history of recorded classical music. He currently is working on a translation of Dante’s “Purgatorio” for Focus Publishing.
Focus Publishing
DANTE INFERNO • TOM SIMONE
Tom Simone’s translation is simply superb. Of all the translations with which I am familiar, this is the one that is the most faithful to what’s there in the Italian: no frills, no poetic sallies, no choosing a word because it brings the line closer to iambic pentameter -- just unadulterated Dante with good old Anglo-Saxon words and in highly readable prose. - Peter Kalkavage, St. John’s College
R. Pullins Company PO Box 369 Newburyport, MA 01950 www.pullins.com
Tom Simone
I S B N 978-1-58510-113-9
781585 101139
For the complete list of titles available from Focus Publishing, additional student materials, and online ordering, visit www.pullins.com.
Focus
9
Inferno
The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by birth, but not by character
Canticle One
Inferno
Translation and commentary by Tom Simone University of Vermont
Copyright 2007 Tom Simone Cover Design by Guy Wetherbee | Elk Amino Design, New England.
[email protected] Cover image: Domenico di Michelino (1417-1491). Dante and his poem. Duomo, Florence, Italy. Scala / Art Resource, NY. Interior illustrations by Sam Kimball. ISBN 10: 1-58510-113-3 ISBN 13: 978-1-58510-113-9 This book is published by Focus Publishing / R. Pullins Company, PO Box 369, Newburyport MA 01950. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, produced on stage or otherwise performed, transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording, or by any other media or means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0407TS
Table of Contents
Preface General Introduction Inferno Suggested Reading on Dante Glossary
vii xi 1 253 257
Preface The reading of a major classic text is a great challenge for any serious reader. Considerations of background, different natures of narrative, allusion, and all the peculiarities of any important text offer major obstacles and rewards to the new reader. The case of Dante is particularly difficult. Dante’s Comedy offers the reader innumerable points of interest that cannot be divined without the aid of at least basic glossing and commentary. Dante’s work is a central poem in world literature, but also an historical text, full of references to the world of late medieval Italy and the broad history of culture and thought of the era. Italian, religious, and classical references abound. And a significant number of references appear only in Dante’s work. Coming out of a period of the New Criticism and maybe further back from Protestant belief in the availability of the Biblical text to the unaided reader, a significant number of classic works have been presented in the United States in a deceptively barebones form. While translations of Dante appear with annotation, virtually all the major version place annotation at the end of the volume or sometimes at the end of the canto section. The result is that the annotation seems incidental or strangely and awkwardly placed. I know from frequent experience that the most used of current editions of Dante fall short of the practical needs of today’s reader of good will attempting the daunting task of a first acquaintance with the Comedy. This is not to say that important aids and reflection are not a part of these versions, but rather that such tools are inconvenient and all too often neglected by the reader. Last year, while giving a visiting lecture on translating Dante for a colleague, I had the chance to speak informally with a sample of the students in the class. Almost none of them had ever even looked at the notes at the end of the volume, and some students didn’t even know they were there. In surveying my own students, I know that without great urging, even students of good will are discouraged from significant use of cumbersome endnotes.
vii
viii
Inferno
I have a colleague at the University of Vermont who is a senior professor in French literature and language. She is a woman of exquisite intelligence and elegance of scholarship, who was amazed on her first reading of Dante at how difficult and challenging the project was. If my colleague, who is the model of the advanced literate and intelligent reader, had difficulty in approaching Dante, what must be the situation of the general reader or student when attempting to learn something of the great poem? The present translation and commentary are founded on the desire to assist in providing sufficient tools to allow the beginning student of Dante to arrive at an informed first reading of Inferno. The translation attempts to stay as close as possible to the literal meaning of Dante’s Italian text while still suggesting that the work is a poem. I have tried to follow the pattern of Dante’s thought and imagery in a way that is clear and reminiscent of the unfolding narrative and thought of the poem. A straight prose translation seemed to me to fall short of articulating Dante’s rhetorical and poetic impulse. So, while any version of Dante must fall short in English, I have tried to summon aspects of Dante’s thought and language that will suggest aspects of the power and range of the Italian. Needless to say, the idea of a terza rima format was set aside as imposing too violent an effect on Dante’s sense and directness. I have also adjusted the translation for more straightforward English sense and accuracy than in earlier versions, based on the thoughtful comments of two readers for Focus Publishing, who are unknown to me. The format of this edition is to preface each canto with a short commentary on the narrative and major issues at hand. And most simply, I have placed succinct annotation at the foot of the page of the text. As any perusal of Italian editions will show, virtually every native version of the text is provided with annotation by footnote. I have keyed footnotes with a raised circle next to the passage and with line number at the foot of the page giving the material at hand. In my commentary I have drawn on the Italian editions of Sapegno, di Salvo, and Pasquini and Quaglio. From English language material I have relied on Toynbee’s Dictionary, Lansing’s Dante Encyclopedia, and the commentaries of Grandgent, Sinclair, Singleton, Hollander, and Durling and Martinez in the main. At times I have consulted early commentators through the internet web sites of the Princeton Dante Project and its links to the Dante Dartmouth Project. Of Dante, as of Shakespeare, there is no end to commentary and interpretation. I have used drafts of this edition over two years in both introductory Western tradition survey courses and senior level majors seminars. I have also reviewed the entire text with the assistance of students from the senior level class to try to find an appropriate degree of annotation and information that meets the needs of today’s students. This edition does not claim to provide
Preface
ix
exhaustive annotation or commentary, but rather to provide a workable level of information and support to allow for that informed reading that will allow the reader to appreciate and then continue study at her or his option. I am grateful for the encouragement and support of many people. My teachers in Dante were fine guides: David Sices, formerly of Dartmouth College, and Ricardo Quinones of Claremont Graduate School. A half-year sabbatical from the University of Vermont in 2004 allowed me the time and concentration to draft the first version of this edition. And I have received much support from my students. In particular Alex Spadinger, Peter Quigley, and Andrew Nelson aided revisions. Megan Alderfer provided especially extensive help on the manuscript. My editor at Focus Publishing, Kathleen Brophy, has been consistently alert and supportive of the project, always keeping an eye on clarity and consistency. My publisher, Ron Pullins, has been a model of patience and support. Any errors or infelicities are, of course, my own. The task has been fascinating and humbling, more extensive, challenging, and involving than I had at first suspected. However, like the narrator of the poem, but to tell of the good that I discovered, I will speak of the other things that I found there. With good luck and strength, I hope to be able to proceed, however slowly, with pilgrim and guide to visit the next realm of Purgatorio and to see those content in fire, because they hope to come to the blessed people whenever that time may be.
Tom Simone 5 January 2007
Introduction Dante’s place in world literature When Dante composed his Comedy in the early 14th century, the poem quickly took its place as a major work of Italian literature. In a world of manuscript transmission, hundreds of copies were in circulation in the following century, including an impressive array of detailed commentaries. By the latter part of that century, Dante’s importance was recognized far beyond Italy, as seen in Chaucer’s many references to the Italian poet in his work. The appeal of Dante also quickly spread to the medium of painting and, with the introduction of printing, into many annotated and illustrated editions. In the visual arts, Signorelli’s New Chapel at the cathedral in Orvieto, Botticelli’s hundred drawing sequence illustrating the poem, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican are three of the most prominent examples of Dante’s fame and influence. After a waning of interest in Dante in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, fascination with the poet and the poem increased in the early Romantic period and has continued unabated ever since. In recent years numerous editions, translations, commentaries, scholarly studies, and series of illustrations have appeared in an impressive stream. To this day Dante remains one of the towering figures of world literature. What accounts for the immediate and enduring appeal of Dante’s poem? Dante tells the story of the journey of an endangered pilgrim through the known cosmos and the realms of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise to allow him to see the spectrum of human reality and the glory of divine origins that lead to salvation. Dante makes the pilgrim a version of himself and creates two major voices: the voice of the pilgrim experiencing the journey for the first time, and the voice of the narrator shaping and retelling the journey. The fate of the individual pilgrim has its own urgency in the question of his knowledge, belief, and fate, but as the poem indicates in its opening line, the single pilgrim’s fate is parallel to all of human experience: In the middle of the journey of our life…
Inferno
Dante is careful from the beginning to emphasize that the journey of the pilgrim is representative of human need in general even though it is interwoven so fully with his own historical experience. Consequently he measures the pilgrim’s journey as in the middle of “our life,” that is, at the time of the action of the poem in 1300, he is 35 years of age and at the center of the biblical human life span of seventy years. The spectrum of all of human life, as portrayed in the poem, will unfold with breathtaking variety, drama, thought, and beauty. The poem begins in high drama with the pilgrim’s life hanging in the balance. He finds himself in a chaotic wooded place, and three beasts cut off his escape up a hill of hope and promise back into the darkness. The faint figure of a man appears to console and lead the pilgrim. This is the Roman poet Virgil, who becomes a character of great rational and cultural experience in the poem, a model of the poet in his own time as well as for later readers like Dante, and now a guide for the struggling pilgrim. Since the pilgrim cannot escape the menace of the beasts, he has to take the dark road through Inferno and the realm of the lost souls before he can return to the mountain of hope, which is transformed into the mountain of Purgatory in the second part of the poem. Dante’s Inferno remains the most extensive and dramatic portrayal of the underworld of the dead in Western literature. While Purgatorio and Paradiso show the recuperation of the human soul and its triumph in the presence of the transcendent deity, Inferno explores the world of souls remaining in unhappiness and cut off from the primal sources of life and renewal. The world of the early 21st century echoes with images and fears of a chaotic existence with wars, natural disasters, crime, murders, assaults of all kind haunting our daily awareness. As I write this, we in Vermont are reeling under a barrage of shootings and murders in a local elementary school while scanning the horizon for news of foreign wars and looming hurricanes. Dante’s Inferno, while coming from a far distant time in the Middle Ages, speaks of such fears and troubling events so full of pain and unhappiness that our sense of a meaningful and orderly life is called into doubt. Inferno is full of division, both of kinds of transgression and of one soul from another. Here the great personalities cling to their separateness and their own concepts of reality. We encounter such memorable figures as the amorous Francesca (Canto 5), the grand general Farinata (Canto 10), the corrupt pope Nicholas III (Canto 19), and the bold, ever seeking Ulysses (Canto 26). The external torments of these lost souls are endlessly varied and often fascinating in their inventiveness and sharpness: souls submerged in mud, fire raining down, distorted human figures, and souls frozen in ice. But as inventive and varied as he makes the external effects of Inferno on its inhabitants, Dante gives dramatic and even psychological particularity
Inferno Introduction to Canto 1 The pilgrim awakes in a dark wood. A hill lit by the sun The pilgrim opposed by three beasts The appearance of the poet Virgil to be the guide
The first canto works as both an introduction to Inferno and the Comedy overall. Here we are immediately brought into the spiritual crisis of the pilgrim, his fear of death, and his unsuccessful struggle against three beasts to escape from the terrors of the dark wood to the inviting sunlit hill that stands beyond. Only extraordinary measures will open the future for the pilgrim, the intervention of the great Roman poet Virgil and the prospect of a journey through the lands of the dead: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. This opening canto seems to take place in a liminal place, on the boundary between sin and salvation, evil and good, water and land, spiritual unconsciousness and an abruptly awakened moral concern. The mood mingles the insubstantial images of dreams with the emotional panic and needs of the pilgrim. The medieval form of the dream vision allows for a sense of inner immediacy and a flexible use of symbolic images that suggest a range of other levels of meaning. The narrator will often address the reader, as at Canto 9.6163, to consider the moral and spiritual meanings of the literal events being presented. That multi-layered awareness in the poem will become part of the reader’s response and growing experience. The canto opens in a sudden crisis of mortal peril. The memorable opening lines speak of a spiritual awakening at the chronological and symbolic center of human life: In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, where the straight path was lost. 21
22
Inferno
The pilgrim is thirty-five years of age, the middle of the seventy normative Biblical years of human life. He is both himself and an everyman, who represents the pattern of human experience. As he struggles to emerge from darkness, he moves toward a hill touched by the rays of the sun. The hill suggests an image of escape from fear and darkness and the prospective expectation of salvation that will be explored extensively in Purgatory and Paradise later in the second and third parts of the Comedy. His desire to climb is thwarted by three beasts, a lion, a leopard, and a wolf, and they drive him back into darkness. These beasts work as external figures of power in the poem but also symbols the internal images of weakness and sin. The medieval interest in using animals in symbolic ways permeates the poem. In the darkness a shade appears, the image of a man now dead. This is Virgil, the poet of the Roman epic, the Aeneid. He is the pilgrim’s artistic hero and a representative of the excellence of human potential unaided by Christian revelation. He bears both the supremacy of the art of language and the exercise of intellect schooled in the ancient world of human virtue and thought. The time is Good Friday in the year 1300, and the journey to be taken involves the Biblical concepts of the individual soul and the pattern of eternal hope in the search for the sources and potential of life. The danger to the pilgrim is great, but the time of the year suggests the hope of renewal. Uniquely among the great epic tales, here the narrator is the experienced pilgrim recounting his own story, and the pilgrim yet to make that journey has a poignant autobiographical experience. In the time of the action, the journey itself, the pilgrim is the endangered but inexperienced figure whose task is to learn of the nature of human reality and its consequences, and to apply such learning to his own life. The narrator is the pilgrim returned from the whole journey whose task is to retell the story so crucial to his own life but also to show how relevant the story is to the lives of his readers. This double narrative perspective, naïve traveler and reflective narrator, establishes a variety of understandings from the very inception of the poem. While rooted in the life of Dante and his time, the Comedy lays claims to being a universal story. The fate of one man, the pilgrim, is crucial because of its reverberating consequences for his soul through eternity. The absoluteness of the state of the soul in Dante’s Christianity and its endurance, along with the religious and philosophical framework for the story, give the poem an almost scriptural status. The opening of the work establishes many expectations as well as immediate concerns and even puzzling elements. In a way, the reader would ideally make the journey of the poem and then return, like the narrator, to reread, reinterpret, and even retell the story. The relationship between the narrator and the pilgrim works to establish a method of comparative understanding of the nature of the poem for the reader.
Canto 1 23
Canto 1
1
13 17
In the middle of the journey of our life° I found myself in a dark wood, where the straight path was lost.
3
Oh, it is a hard thing to tell what it was, that wood was so savage and harsh and strong that my fear renews even at the thought of it!
6
It is so bitter, that death is scarcely worse; but to tell of the good that I discovered, I will speak of the other things that I found there.
9
I cannot tell clearly how I entered there, I was so full of sleep at that point where I abandoned the true way.
12
But when I had come to the foot of a hill,º there toward the end of that valley which had pained my heart with fear,
15
I looked up and saw the shoulders of the heights dressed already with the rays of that planet° that leads each one straight on every path.
18
Then my fear, which had endured in the lake of my heart, was quieted a little during the night that I had passed with such fear.
21
I was like one with labored breath, who struggles out of the surf onto the shore, who turns to the deadly water and gapes;
24
so my fleeing soul turned back to look again at the treacherous pass that never yet let any person escape alive.
27
Dante, the character, is 35 years old at the time of the events of the poem. This is halfway through the biblical lifespan of 70 years (Psalms 90.10). The poem begins on Thursday evening, April 8, 1300, before Good Friday. The pilgrim represents his life, “I found myself ” and the life of all humans, “the journey of our life.” The valley, hill and sun prefigure Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. The sun is seen as the brightest planet circling around the earth. See Glossary for Ptolemaic world view.
24
30
Inferno When I had rested my exhausted body a little, I began to make my way along the deserted slope, keeping my firm foot always lower.º
30
And look, just at the beginning of the rise, there was a leopard,º light and so quick, all covered with a mottled skin.
33
And it did not swerve from in front of my gaze, but so completely blocked my upward journey that I was turned back and spun around many times.
36
It was the time of the beginning of the morning, and the sun rose up with those stars that were with him when divine love
39
first moved all those beautiful things;º so that from the hour of the day and the sweet season there was reason for me to have hope
42
about that beast with the gaudy skin; but not so much that fear did not show me the sight of a lion that appeared before me.º
45
The lion stalked toward me with head high and with such ravenous hunger that it seemed as if the air was trembling.
48
And a she-wolf,º that seemed to be weighed down with hunger in its leanness and longing, and she had made many people live in grief.
51
This beast put such a burden of fear on me from the very sight of it that I lost the hope of the heights.
54
And like one who is so eager to win, when the time of his losses comes on him, and his sudden despair drives him to tears;
57
The interpretative tradition has taken “firm foot” as indicating the left foot, associated with earthly desires. In this interpretation the left foot representing will proceeds more slowly than the right foot, which represents intellect. 32 The leopard is representative of either fraud or malice, depending on interpreter. 38-40 The medieval belief that the world was created at the beginning of spring, parallel in the calendar to the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus. It is now Easter time in 1300, so that the pilgrim’s despair is countered by the hopefulness of spring and renewal. 45 The lion represents for most commentators either violence or pride. 49 The wolf is representative for most commentators of either incontinence or wrath.
GLOSSARY Allegory An allegory is a narrative that has a literal meaning but also carries hidden or symbolic levels of significance. In the first canto of the Comedy the three beasts that oppose the pilgrim’s journey are literal impediments, but each one symbolizes another meaning. Medieval thinking is full of such symbolic representations, and Dante’s epic involves many allegorical moments and methods.
Aquinas Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was the great scholastic philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. He worked to harmonize the classical rational philosophy of Aristotle with Christian belief. Dante has Aquinas appear in the sphere of the sun in Paradiso, Cantos 10-12, as the spokesman for the theologians.
Aristotle Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) was the most influential classical philosopher in the Middle Ages. His Nicomachean Ethics forms the most important background to Dante’s structure of Inferno. His writings on the natural world, human society, and logic provided a systematic approach to the world that influenced Aquinas and Dante in major ways. Except for the Bible, Dante refers to Aristotle more than to any other single source. Dante places Aristotle as the most honored philosopher in Limbo (Inf. 4.131) and calls him “the master of those who know.”
Beatrice Beatrice Portinari (1266-1290) is the idealized woman of Dante’s earliest work, La Vita Nuova or The New Life. In that work Dante starts with aspects of courtly love poetry but soon raises the object of his love to theological expectations. Beatrice becomes the ideal of Christian belief and beauty as the pilgrim’s guide from the end of Purgatorio through Paradiso. She is introduced in the second canto of Inferno when Virgil explains to the reluctant pilgrim that Beatrice summoned him from Limbo. According to Virgil’s narration (Inf. 2.52-120), Beatrice was encouraged by Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Saint Lucia to intercede on the pilgrim’s behalf to save him from spiritual and perhaps physical death. Beatrice’s Christian knowledge complements and perfects the humanist knowledge of Virgil in the Comedy.
Black Guelfs See entry for Guelf factions: Whites and Blacks.
bolgia Dante names the ten subdivisions of Circle 8, the circle of plain fraud, as bolge (the Italian plural form of bolgia), or pockets. Each bolgia contains a class of souls who have used conscious reason for evil purposes. For instance, bolgia 7 (Inf. Cantos 24 and 25) contains the thieves.
257
Tom Simone has taught at the University of Vermont
for more than thirty years. He is the author of books on Shakespeare and on the beginnings of the Western Tradition as well as numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett, Shakespeare on film, and the history of recorded classical music. He currently is working on a translation of Dante’s “Purgatorio” for Focus Publishing.
Focus Publishing
DANTE INFERNO • TOM SIMONE
Tom Simone’s translation is simply superb. Of all the translations with which I am familiar, this is the one that is the most faithful to what’s there in the Italian: no frills, no poetic sallies, no choosing a word because it brings the line closer to iambic pentameter -- just unadulterated Dante with good old Anglo-Saxon words and in highly readable prose. - Peter Kalkavage, St. John’s College
R. Pullins Company PO Box 369 Newburyport, MA 01950 www.pullins.com
Tom Simone
I S B N 978-1-58510-113-9
781585 101139
For the complete list of titles available from Focus Publishing, additional student materials, and online ordering, visit www.pullins.com.
Focus
9
Inferno
