The Divine Comedy: Volume II: Purgatory: 002 - Softcover

Alighieri, Dante

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140444424 ISBN 13: 9780140444421

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 1985

Inhaltsangabe

The second volume in Dante's Divine Comedy 

Beginning with Dante's liberation from Hell, Purgatory relates his ascent, accompanied by Virgil, of the Mount of Purgatory - a mountain of nine levels, formed from rock forced upwards when God threw Satan into depths of the earth. As he travels through the first seven levels, Dante observes the sinners who are waiting for their release into Paradise, and through these encounters he is himself transformed into a stronger and better man. For it is only when he has learned from each of these levels that he can ascend to the gateway to Heaven: the Garden of Eden. The second part of one of the greatest epic poems, Purgatory is an enthralling Christian allegory of sin, redemption and ultimate enlightenment.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and belonged to a noble but impoverished family. His life was divided by political duties and poetry, the most of famous of which was inspired by his meeting with Bice Portinari, whom he called Beatrice,including La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy. He died in Ravenna in 1321.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Purgatory

By Dante Alighieri

Penguin Books

Copyright ©1985 Dante Alighieri
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0140444424

Foreword

If a poem is not forgotten as soon as the circumstances of its origin, it beginsat once to evolve an existence of its own, in minds and lives, and then even inwords, that its singular maker could never have imagined. The poem that survivesthe receding particulars of a given age and place soon becomes a shiftingkaleidoscope of perceptions, each of them in turn provisional and subject totime and change, and increasingly foreign to those horizons of human historythat fostered the original images and references.

Over the years of trying to approach Dante through the words he left and some ofthose written about him, I have come to wonder what his very name means now, andto whom. Toward the end of the Purgatorio, in which the journeyrepeatedly brings the pilgrim to reunions with poets, memories and projectionsof poets, the recurring names of poets, Beatrice, at a moment of unfathomableloss and exposure, calls the poem's narrator and protagonist by name, "Dante,"and the utterance of it is unaccountably startling and humbling. Even though itis spoken by that Beatrice who has been the sense and magnet of the whole poemand, as he has come to imagine it, of his life, and though it is heard at thetop of the mountain of Purgatory, with the terrible journey done and theprospect of eternal joy ahead, the sound of his name at that moment is not atall reassuring. Would it ever be? And who would it reassure? There was, andthere is, first of all, Dante the narrator. And there was Dante the man livingand suffering in time, and at once we can see that there is a distinction, adivision, between them. And then there was, and there is, Dante therepresentation of Everyman, of a brief period in the history of Italy and ofFlorence, of a philosophical position, a political allegiance ? the list isindeterminate. Sometimes he seems to be all of them at once, and sometimesparticular aspects occupy the foreground.

The commentaries date back into his own lifetime ? indeed, he begins themhimself, with the Vita Nuova ? and the exegetes recognized from thebeginning, whether they approved or not, the importance of the poem, the work,the vision, as they tried to arrive at some fixed significance in those words,in a later time when the words themselves were not quite the same.

Any reader of Dante now is in debt to generations of scholars working forcenturies to illuminate the unknown by means of the known. Any translator sharesthat enormous debt. A translation, on the other hand, is seldom likely to be ofmuch interest to scholars, who presumably sustain themselves directly upon theinexhaustible original. A translation is made for the general reader of its owntime and language, a person who, it is presumed, cannot read, or is certainlynot on familiar terms with, the original, and may scarcely know it except byreputation.

It is hazardous to generalize even about the general reader, who is nobody inparticular and is encountered only as an exception. But my impression is thatmost readers at present whose first language is English probably think of Danteas the author of one work, The Divine Comedy, of a date vaguely medieval,its subject a journey through Hell. The whole poem, for many, has come to beknown by the Inferno alone, the first of the three utterly distinctsections of the work, the first of the three states of the psyche that Dante sethimself to explore and portray.

There are surely many reasons for this predilection, if that is the word, forthe Inferno. Some of them must come from the human sensibility'simmediate recognition of perennial aspects of its own nature. In the language ofmodern psychology the Inferno portrays the locked, unalterable ego, formafter form of it, the self and its despair forever inseparable. The terrors andpain, the absence of any hope, are the ground of the drama of theInferno, its nightmare grip upon the reader, its awful authority, and thefeeling, even among the secular, that it is depicting something in the humanmakeup that cannot, with real assurance, be denied. That authority, with theassistance of a succession of haunting illustrations of the Inferno, hasmade moments and elements of that part of the journey familiar and disturbingimages which remain current even in our scattered and evanescentculture.

The literary presence of the Inferno in English has been renewed inrecent years. In 1991 Daniel Halpern asked a number of contemporary poets toprovide translations of cantos of the Inferno which would eventuallycomprise a complete translation of the first part of the Commedia.Seamus Heaney had already published fine versions of sections from several ofthe cantos, including part of canto 3 in Seeing Things (1991), and heended up doing the opening cantos. When Halpern asked me to contribute to theproject, I replied chiefly with misgivings, to begin with. I had been trying toread Dante, and reading about him, since I was a student, carrying one volume oranother of the bilingual Temple Classics edition ? pocket-sized books ? withme wherever I went. I had read parts, at least, of the best-known translationsof the Commedia: Henry Francis Cary's because it came with the GustaveDoré illustrations and was in the house when I was a child; Longfellow'sdespite a late-adolescent resistance to nineteenth-century poetic conventions;Laurence Binyon's at the recommendation of Ezra Pound, although he seemed to meterribly tangled; John Ciardi's toward which I had other reservations. Thecloser I got to feeling that I was beginning to "know" a line or a passage,having the words by memory, repeating some stumbling approximation of the soundsand cadence, pondering what I had been able to glimpse of the rings of sense,the more certain I became that ? beyond the ordinary and obvious impossibilityof translating poetry or anything else ? the translation of Dante had adimension of impossibility of its own. I had even lectured on Dante anddemonstrated the impossibility of translating him, taking a single line from theintroductory first canto, examining it wordby word:

Tant' ê amara che poco ê più morte

indicating the sounds of the words, their primary meanings, implications in thecontext of the poem and in the circumstances and life of the narrator, the soundof the line insofar as I could simulate it and those present could repeat italoud and begin to hear its disturbing mantric tone. How could that, then,really be translated? It could not, of course. It could not be anything else. Itcould not be the original in other words, in another language. I presented theclassical objection to translation with multiplied emphasis. Translation ofpoetry is an enterprise that is always in certain respects impossible, and yeton occasion it has produced something new, something else, of value, andsometimes, on the other side of a sea change, it has brought up poetry again.

Halpern did not dispute my objections, but he told me which poets he was askingto contribute to the project. He asked me which cantos I would like to do if Idecided to try any myself. I thought, in spite of what I had said, of thepassage at the end of canto 26, where Odysseus, adrift in a two-pointed flame inthe abyss of Hell, tells Virgil "where he went to die" after his return toIthaca. Odysseus recounts his own speech to "that small company by whom I hadnot been deserted," exhorting them to sail with him past the horizons of theknown world to the unpeopled side of the earth, in order not to live "likebrutes, but in pursuit of virtue and knowledge," and of their sailing, finally,so far that they saw the summit of Mount Purgatory rising from the sea, before awave came out from its shore and overwhelmed them. It was the passage of theCommedia that had first caught me by the hair when I was a student, andit had gone on ringing in my head as I read commentaries and essays about it,and about Dante's figure of Odysseus. Odysseus says to Virgil:

Io e i compagni eravam vecchi e tardi

In the Temple Classics edition, where I first read it, or remember first readingit, the translation by John Aitken Carlyle, originally published in 1849, reads

I and my companions were old and tardy

and it was the word "tardy" that seemed to me not quite right, from the start.While I was still a student, I read the John D. Sinclair translation (Oxford),originally published in 1939, where the words read

I and my companions were old and slow

"Slow," I realized, must have been part of the original meaning, of the intentof the phrase, but I could not believe that it was the sense that had determinedits being there.

The Charles S. Singleton translation, published in 1970, a masterful piece ofscholarly summary, once again says

I and my companions were old and slow

That amounts to considerable authority, and it was, after all, technicallycorrect, the dictionary meaning, and the companions surely must have been sloweddown by age when Odysseus spoke to them. But I kept the original in my mind:"tardi," the principal sense of which, in that passage, I thought had not beenconveyed by any of the translations.

When I told Halpern that I would see whether I could provide anything of use tohim, I thought of that word, "tardi." It had never occurred to me to tryto translate it myself, and I suppose I believed that right there I would haveall my reservations about translating Dante confirmed beyond further discussion.As I considered the word in that speech it seemed to me that the most importantmeaning of "tardi" was not "tardy," although it had taken them all manyyears to sail from Troy. And not "slow," despite the fact that the quickness ofyouth must have been diminished in them. Nor "late," which I had seen in otherversions, and certainly not "late" in the sense of being late for dinner. Ithought the point was that they were late in the sense that an hour of the daymay be late, or a day of a season or a year or a destiny: "late" meaning nothaving much time left. And I considered

I and my companions were old and near the end

and how that went with what we knew of those lines, how it bore upon the linesthat followed. Without realizing it I was already caught.

That canto had always been for me one of the most magnetic sections of theInferno, and among the reasons for that was the figure of Dante'sOdysseus, the voice in the flame, very far from Homer's hero, whom Dante isbelieved to have known only at second hand, from Virgil and other Latin classicsand translations. Apparently Odysseus' final voyage is at least in part Dante'sinvention, and it allows him to make of Odysseus in some sense a "modern"figure, pursuing knowledge for its own sake. In Dante's own eagerness to learnabout the flames floating like fireflies in the abyss he risks falling into thedark chasm himself.

That final voyage in the story of Odysseus is one of the links, within theultimate metaphor of the poem, between the closed, immutable world of theInferno and Mount Purgatory. It represents Odysseus' attempt to break outof the limitations of his own time and place by the exercise of intelligence andaudacity alone. In the poem, Mount Purgatory had been formed out of the abyss ofHell when the fall of Lucifer hollowed out the center of the earth and thedisplaced earth erupted on the other side of the globe and became the greatmountain, its opposite. And canto 26 of the Inferno bears severalsuggestive parallels to the canto of the same number in the Purgatorio.In the latter once again there is fire, a ring of it encircling the mountain,and again with spirits in the flames. This time some of the spirits whom Dantemeets are poets. They refer to each other in sequence with an unqualifiedgenerosity born of love of each other's talents and accomplishments (this iswhere the phrase "il miglior fabbro" comes from, as one of Dante'spredecessors refers to another) and their fault is love, presumably worldlylove, and no doubt for its own sake. The end of that canto is one of Dante'smany moving tributes to other poets and to the poetry of others. When at last headdresses the great Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, the troubadourgenerously refers to Dante's question as "courteous" ? a word that, withindecades of the great days of the troubadours and the courts of love, and thenthe vicious devastations of the Albigensian Crusade, evoked an entire code ofbehavior and view of the world. And in Dante's poem, Daniel's reply, eight linesof it that are among the most beautiful lines in the poem, is in Daniel's ownProvençal, and it echoes one of Daniel's own most personal and compellingpoems with an affectionate, eloquent closeness like that of Mozart's quartetsdedicated to Haydn.

The Commedia must be one of the most carefully planned poems everwritten. Everything in it seems to have been thought out beforehand, and yetsuch is the integrity of Dante's gift that the intricate consistency of thedesign is finally inseparable from the passion of the narrative and the power ofthe poetry. His interest in numerology, as in virtually every other field ofthought or speculation in his time, was clearly part of the design at everyother point, and the burning in the two cantos numbered twenty-six is unlikelyto have come about without numerological consideration. His own evidentattraction to the conditions of the soul, the "faults," in each canto, is afurther connection.

The link between the Odysseus passage and Mount Purgatory was one of the thingsthat impelled me to go on trying to translate that canto for Halpern's project.(I eventually sent him the result, along with a translation of the followingcanto.) Those two cantos which I contributed to his proposed Inferno Iinclude here even though Robert Pinsky has since published his own translationof the whole of the Inferno ? a clear, powerful, masterful gift not onlyto Dante translation in our language but to the poetry of our time. I ambeginning with my own translations of these cantos partly because they are whereI started, and because they provide the first glimpse in the poem of MountPurgatory, seen only once, at a great distance, and fatally, at the end of themortal life of someone who was trying to break out of the laws of creation ofDante's moral universe.

For in the years of my reading Dante, after the first overwhelming,reverberating spell of the Inferno, which I think never leaves oneafterward, it was the Purgatorio that I had found myself returning towith a different, deepening attachment, until I reached a point when it wasnever far from me; I always had a copy within reach, and often seemed to betrying to recall part of a line, like some half-remembered song. One of thewonders of the Commedia is that, within its single coherent vision, eachof the three sections is distinct, even to the sensibility, the tone, thefeeling of existence. The difference begins at once in the Purgatorio,after the opening lines of invocation where Dante addresses the holy Muses(associated with their own Mount Helicon) to ask that poetry rise from the dead-- literally, "dead poetry [la morta poesì] rise up again."Suddenly there is the word "dolce" ? sweet, tender, or all that is tobe desired in that word in Italian and in the word's siblings inProvençal and French ? and then "color," and there has been nothing likethat before. Where are we?

We ? the reader on this pilgrimage, with the narrator and his guide, Virgil ?have plunged upside down into the dark frozen depths of Hell through the bowelsof the Evil One, at the center of the earth, and have made our way through thetunnel of another birth to arrive utterly undone at a sight of the stars again.And we are standing on a shore seeing the first light before dawn seep into thesky, and the morning star, "lo bel pianeta che d'amar conforta" "Thebeautiful planet that to love inclines us," with all the suggestions ofconsolation after the horrors of the infernal world. We are seeing the sky, oursky, the sky to which we wake in our days. There is no sky in Hell. There are nostars there, no hours of daylight, no colors of sky and sea. One of the firstvast differences between Hell, the region of immutable despair, and Purgatory isthat the latter place, when we step out on it, is earth again, the ground of ourwaking lives. We are standing on the earth under the sky, and Purgatory beginswith a great welling of recognition and relief.

Of the three sections of the poem, only Purgatory happens on the earth,as our lives do, with our feet on the ground, crossing a beach, climbing amountain. All three parts of the poem are images of our lives, of our life, butthere is an intimacy peculiar to the Purgatorio. Here the times of dayrecur with all the sensations and associations that the hours bring with them,the hours of the world we are living in as we read the poem. Tenderness,affection, poignancy, the enchantment of music, the feeling of the evanescenceof the moment in a context beyond time, occur in the Purgatorio as theydo in few other places in the poem. And hope, as it is experienced nowhere elsein the poem, for there is none in Hell, and Paradise is fulfilment itself. Hopeis central to the Purgatorio and is there from the moment we stand on theshore at the foot of the mountain, before the stars fade. To the very top of themountain hope is mixed with pain, which brings it still closer to the livingpresent.

When I had sent the two cantos of the Inferno to Halpern, I was curiousto see what I could make of canto 26 of the Purgatorio, which hadcaptivated me for so long, and also of the lovely poem of Arnaut Daniel's whichDante echoed in that canto, and of at least one of the poems of GuidoGuinizzelli, to whom he spoke with such reverence, as to a forebear.

Other moments in the Purgatorio had held me repeatedly. Almost thirtyyears earlier, on the tube in London, I had been reading canto 5, which wasalready familiar ground. It was like listening to a much-loved piece of music,hearing a whole current in it that had never before seemed so clear. I rodethree stops past my destination and had to get off and go back and be late. Andhere once again, trying vainly to find equivalents for words and phrases, I wasin the grip of the Purgatorio. After canto 26 I went back to thebeginning.

The opening cantos that comprise the section known as the "Antepurgatorio" areamong the most beautiful in the whole poem. I thought of trying to makesomething in English just of those, the first six in particular. I turned themover slowly, line by line, lingering over treasures such as La Pia's few linesat the end of canto 5, hoping that I was not betraying them by suggesting anyother words for them (though Clarence Brown once said to me, to reassure meabout another translation of mine, "Don't worry, no translation ever harmed theoriginal") or at any rate betraying my relation to them. There were lines thathad run in my head for years, their beauty inexhaustible. The morning of thefirst day, looking out to sea, in canto I:

L'alba vinceva l'ora mattutina
che fuggia innanzi, sì che di lontano
conobbi il tremolar della marina.

What could anyone do? My attempt ran:

The dawn was overcoming the pallor of daybreak
which fled before it, so that I could see
off in the distance the trembling of the sea.

It was, I kept saying, some indication of what was there, what was worth tryingto suggest, at least, in English. I wanted to keep whatever I made by way oftranslation as close to the meaning of the Italian words as I could make it,taking no liberties, so that someone with no Italian would not be misled. And Ihoped to make the translation a poem in English, for if it were not that itwould have failed to indicate what gave the original its memorable power.

The Purgatorio is the section of the poem in which poets, poetry, andmusic recur with fond vividness and intimacy. The meetings between poets ?Virgil's with his fellow Mantuan Sordello, over twelve hundred years afterVirgil's own life on earth; his meeting with the Roman poet Statius; Dante'swith Guido Guinizzelli and with Arnaut Daniel and the singer Casella ? arecherished and moving moments. It is worth noting something about the current ofpoetic tradition that Dante had come to in his youth.

Of course there was Virgil, to whose Aeneid he alludes with suchfamiliarity that he must have long known many parts of it by heart. And Statiusand other Latin poets whose work was available in late-thirteenth-centuryFlorence.

Another dominant lineage of poetic tradition which Dante inherited and feltaround him as he reached maturity, that of the troubadours and their ownantecedents, was at once closer to him and more complex, but it gathers into onestrand the poetic conventions that were available to him, and some essentials ofhis thinking about love, and a crucial directive in the development of thefigure of Beatrice in the Commedia.

The three currents, and Dante's ideas about them, merge inextricably in thepoem, as they seem to have done in the mind of its author. Beatrice, in thestory as he finally made it, is the origin of the great journey itself, sendingthe poet Virgil to guide the lost Dante through the vast metaphor: the world ofthe dead which is the world of life, the world of eternity which is the world oftime. The principle that binds the metaphor in all of its aspects, as we aretold in one way after another, is love. After the passage around the becloudedterrace of anger, and Virgil's statement that "neither creator nor creature wasever without love," Dante asks, with considerable hesitation, for Virgil toexplain (indeed to demonstrate, "dimostri") to him what love is. Virgil'spresence there itself, as a guide on this unprecedented journey with nothing togain for himself in all eternity, and the watchful provision of Beatrice thathad sent him, and is waiting for Dante the pilgrim at the top of MountPurgatory, are of course, both of them, dramatic demonstrations of love;but Virgil proceeds to expound, to explain, the origins and evolution of loveaccording to Aristotle, whose work he might have known in his lifetime, andAquinas, whose work he could only have encountered posthumously somewherebetween his own day and Dante's. In due course Beatrice speaks on the subject,and some of her sources are the same. But quite aside from the explications ofthe scholastics, the subject of love, including aspects of it that were beingpurged in canto 26 of the Purgatorio, was the central theme of the greatflowering of troubadour poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In thatsurge of new poetry and feeling, the forms of love ranged from the openlysensual to the unattainably ethereal, and from such familiar treatment as mayhave verged upon folk poetry of the time (and is still to be found in thepopular culture of our own time) to courtly, allusive, highly stylized poetrythat seemed to treat love on many planes at once.

In its rapid development the tradition of troubadour poetry evolved theconvention of a beloved to whom, and about whom, for whom the poems werewritten. Of course love poetry, both erotic and idealized in one way or another,had existed and had been important in other ages and in many ? perhaps in most-- cultures. And the figure of the beloved who is the subject of the poems andto whom they are addressed had often been evoked, whether idealized or not. Butthe theme and elevation of a beloved emerged with particular intensity in thetenth-century Arabic poetry of the Omayyad Moorish kingdoms of southern Spain.In the highly cultivated poetry and culture that had evolved there, a code ofattitudes, behavior, gestures developed, a stylized choreography, that wereclearly the matured result of an ancient tradition. Early in the eleventhcentury Ali ibn-Hazm of Cordova, a philosopher and literary theoretician,produced a work entitled On Love in thirty chapters. In the chapter "Loveat First Sight" he tells of the poet Ibn-Harûn al-Ramadi, who met hisbeloved only once, at a gate in Cordova, and wrote all his poems for the rest ofhis life to her. Love in that tradition is spoken of as the greatest ofinspirations and the ultimate happiness. In Spain, Arabic philosophy absorbedthe work of Plato, which the Provençal poets and then their Italiansuccessors drew upon in turn. The forms of the Andalusian Arabic poetry weredeveloped from, or in accord with, the songs of the folk tradition. A stanza wasevolved, its measure strictly marked for chanting, and it made important use ofsomething that had not been part of the classical languages of Europe and theirLatinate descendants ? rhyme. One form in particular, the zajal, or"song," became the most common one in Spanish-Arabic poetry in the tenth andeleventh centuries. Out of the eleven surviving poems of the firstProvençal poet whose works have come down to us, the one who is generallyreferred to as the first of the troubadours, Guilhem de Peitau, or Guillaume dePoitiers, three are in the form of the Hispano-Arabic zajal. And Count Guilhem,one of the most powerful men in Europe in his generation, was at least asfamiliar, and probably as sympathetic, with the courts of Arabic Spain as he waswith much of northern France. So were the troubadours who were his immediatesuccessors; and the brief-lived courts of love of Guilhem's granddaughterEleanor of Aquitaine continued a brilliant kinship with the Moorish kingdoms tothe south.

The rhymed and highly stylized poetry of the troubadours, with its allegianceto music, the codes of the courts of love, the Hispano-Arabic assimilation ofthe philosophy of classical Greece, were essentials of the greatProvençal civilization of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Thesecular splendor of that culture and its relative indifference to the tediousimperium of the Church were in the end (1209) barbarously and viciously ruinedby the wave of political ruthlessness and deadly self-righteousness known as theAlbigensian Crusade, one of the great atrocities of European history. (It was abishop, Arnaud de Cîteaux, who gave the order, at the sack of Beziers,"Kill them all. God will know His own." And they did.) Both that rich, generous,brilliant tradition and the devastation that had been visited upon it were partof Dante's heritage. The latter had taken place less than half a century beforehe was born; the Mantuan poet Sordello, for one, had spent a major part of hislife at the court of Toulouse. The legacy of the troubadours survived evenbeyond Dante. Petrarch is sometimes described as the last of the troubadours.And the attention given to the manners, the psychic states, the perspectives,the ultimate power of love, the exalted beloved, the forms of verse, includingrhyme, all come from the culture of Provence either directly or via the court ofFrederick II of Sicily.

But Dante's beloved, Beatrice, did have an earthly original in his own life andyouth. From what can be known at present she was named Bice, daughter of FolioPortinari. Dante describes his first sight of her, in 1284, when he wasnineteen. She eventually married, and then died in 1290, when he wastwenty-five, ten years before the ideal date of the Commedia. In LaVita Nuova, finished in the years just after Bice's death, Dante vows toleave her a literary monument such as no woman had ever had. So she led him, hetells us, to the journey that becomes the Commedia and his own salvation.

That love, and that representation of it, took place in a life of enormouspolitical turmoil and intellectual ferment. Dante, as his words and the passionsin them make clear, was from Florence, where he was born in May 1265. His familybelieved themselves to be descended from the original Roman founders of thecity. An ancestor, Dante's great-great-grandfather, had died, Dante tells us, onthe second crusade. But his family ranked among the lesser nobility of the cityand was not wealthy.

The Florence into which Dante was born was deeply divided into politicalfactions. Principally, there were the Ghibellines, who were in effect the feudalaristocracy and, with the backing of the Empire, the holders of most power; andthe Guelphs, the party of the lesser nobles and the artisans, bitterly opposedto the principles and conduct, the heedless self-interest of the Ghibellines.Dante was educated in Franciscan schools and at an early age began to writepoetry. There were troubadours in Florence in his youth, and apparently he knewthem, knew their poems, learned from them. His early friendship with thearistocrat Guido Cavalcanti led them both to develop a style and art whichdistinguished them from their predecessors and most of their contemporaries.Cavalcanti too had a literary beloved, named Mandetta, in his poems; he tellshow he caught sight of her once in a church in Toulouse.

In his mid-twenties Dante served the commune of Florence in the cavalry. He wasat the battle of Campaldino, and scenes of the battle return in thePurgatorio. And his studies ? the Latin classics, philosophy, and thesciences ? continued. Within the circle of those who read poetry in Florence,his poems became well known, and after the death of the woman he called Beatricehe assembled a group of them, embedded in a highly stylized narrative ? LaVita Nuova (1292-93). At a date now unknown he was married to Gemma diManetta Donati, and they had at least three children, two sons and adaughter.

In 1295, in order to participate in municipal government, Dante became a memberof the guild of physicians and apothecaries, and he came to serve in electoraland administrative councils, and as an ambassador of his city on a number ofmissions. He engaged in a Guelph campaign of opposition to Pope Boniface VIII,who had a plan to place all of Tuscany under the rule of the Church. Theconflict became prolonged, bitter, and dangerous, with warnings of worse tocome. The Pope's cynical proceedings became more ruthless and ominous. Theopposition was no less determined. In 1301, on the occasion of Charles deValois's meeting in Rome with the Pope, Dante was sent by the commune ofFlorence as one of three emissaries to the Pope to try to exact from the momentsomething that would help to maintain the independence of Florence. The Popedismissed the other two emissaries and held Dante in Rome. There, and then inSiena shortly afterward, Dante learned of the triumph of his opponents, the"Blacks," in Florence, and then of their sentencing him to a heavy fine and twoyears' banishment, besides a perpetual ban on his holding any further publicoffice, and charges of graft, embezzlement, opposition to papal and secularauthority, disturbance of the peace, etc. Just over a month later, when he hadnot paid the fine, he was sentenced a second time. The new sentence stated thatif ever he should come within reach of the representatives of the commune ofFlorence he was to be burned alive. He was then thirty-seven. There is noevidence that he ever saw Florence again.

In the subsequent years of exile he found lodging and employment in othercity-states. He served as aide, courtier, and secretary to various men of power,lived for a time with the great lords of Verona. He wrote, in De VulgareEloquentia, that the world was his fatherland, as the whole sea is thecountry of the fish; but he complained of having to wander as a pilgrim, almosta beggar, through all the regions where Italian was spoken.

At some point during those years in exile he conceived and began the work which,because of the plainness of its style and the fact that it moves from hopelessanguish to joy, he called the Commedia. It was written not in Latin, norin the Provençal that was the literary language of his immediateforebears ? a language that he certainly knew very well ? but in his ownvernacular. And the subject of most poetry in the vernacular, in his heritage,was love.

Of the later years of his exile not much is known. Several great families ? thehouseholds of the Scaligeri, of Uguccione della Faggiuola, of Cangrande dellaScala ? befriended and sheltered him and provided for him. The last years ofhis life were spent in Ravenna, apparently in peace and relative security.Probably his children and perhaps his wife were able to join him there. He mayhave lectured there, and he worked at completing the Commedia. Shortlyafter it was finished he went on a diplomatic mission to Venice for Guido daPolenta, and he died on the way home, on September 13 or 14, 1321, four yearsshort of the age of sixty.

He was buried in Ravenna, and despite repeated efforts by the city of Florenceto claim them, there his bones remain.

We know as much as we ever will about what he looked like from a description byBoccaccio: a long face, aquiline nose, large jaw, protruding lower lip, largeeyes, dark curly hair (and beard), and a melancholy, thoughtful appearance. Noneof the surviving portraits is entirely trustworthy, though two have becomefamous and are commonly accepted.

Since adolescence I have felt what I can only describe as reverence for him, afeeling that seems a bit odd in our age. It is there, of course, because of hispoetry, and because of some authority of the imagination in the poetry, somewisdom quite distinct from doctrine, though his creed and his reason directedits form. I am as remote from his theological convictions, probably, as he wasfrom the religion of Virgil, but the respect and awed affection he expresses forhis guide sound familiar to me.

I have read, more or less at random, and over a long period, in the vastliterature of Dante studies ? not much, to be sure, in view of how much of itthere is. I am particularly grateful for works by Erich Auerbach, Irma Brandeis,Charles S. Singleton, Allan Gilbert, Thomas G. Bergin, Helmut Hatzfeld, CharlesSpironi, Francis Fergusson, Robert Briffault, and Philippe Guiberteau. The notesto the individual cantos in the translation are above all indebted to Charles S.Singleton's lifelong dedication to Dante studies and to the notes in his ownedition of the poem. But there has been no consistent method in my reading ofstudies about Dante. I have come upon what seemed to me individualilluminations of his work partly by chance, over a period of time, forgetting asI went, naturally. The one unfaltering presence has been a love of the poem,which has been there from the first inchmeal reading. I am as conscious as everof the impossibility of putting the original into any words but its own. But Ihope this version manages to convey something true and essential of what isthere in the words of the poem that Dante wrote.

-- W. S. Merwin

Continues...

Excerpted from Purgatoryby Dante Alighieri Copyright ©1985 by Dante Alighieri. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0140444424
• ISBN 13: 9780140444421
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Sprache: Englisch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar