Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima
Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima
Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima
Ebook883 pages6 hours

Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

His new translation of Dantes INFERNO with a Foreword on The Poet and the Poem; an individual note briefly recapitulating each of the 34 Cantos and explaining names and terms important for the readers understanding; and an Epilogue on the ascent to the Terrestrial Paradise reflects long familiarity with this medieval classic and assumes, as the Preface emphasizes, that far from being an inaccessibly distant monument, it speaks compellingly to contemporary readers both through graphic portrayal of horrors all too familiar to our own age, and by vividly presenting its central character (who is at once the 14th-century Florentine Dante Alighieri and each one of us traveling the journey of our lifes way) as a wandering exile, and the one living person, subject to feelings ranging from tearful pity to outraged horror, in the dead world of the eternally damned. To this extent, it is in part a Human as well as of a Divine Comedy. And although it is only the first of the three major segments of that comedy of movement from the sorrows and sufferings of Hell up the steep slopes of Purgatory to the eternal bliss of the Celestial Paradise, INFERNO can be read, as it has often been read from its own time through many centuries since, as a whole in itself. Its travelers ultimately find that their long and terrifying descent to the lowest depths of the world turns suddenly into ascent up through the previously unknown opposite hemisphere to a new world where they once again see the stars.

The translation, as explained in the Foreword, is an English approximation of the terza rima of the Italian original, a difficult form invented by Dante and rarely used by later poets. This is no incidental aspect of the poem, for its interlinking of rhymes throughout each canto is fundamental to its movement. No translation can of course be perfect, especially in so difficult a meter from so different a language; and some previous English-language efforts have foundered on excessively many awkward archaisms, inversions, and forced rhymes. Yet the attempt to substitute an alliterative so-called terza rima more theoretical than audible (and only discernible, if at all, by close scrutiny of the page), has proved barely distinguishable, when read aloud (as all poetry should be read), from plain prose in which some very fine translations exist with no claim to being verse. In so far as the present translation dares hope to transmit, however incompletely, integration of the poems elevated style and subject matter with the grace of its subtly fluid verse form, it might boldly hazard a claim to be the best translation of Dantes great poem yet made in English.

At the very least, anyone who knowingly undertakes so forbidding, if not indeed so impossible, an endeavor must never lasciare ogni speranza (abandon all hope), as those do who enter the gates of Hell! For to convey even a little of Dantes poetic power and beauty is already much.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherXlibris US
Release dateJul 27, 2011
ISBN9781462845194
Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima
Author

Robert M. Torrance

Robert M. Torrance is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. He received his B. A. summa cum laude in Greek and English from Harvard in 1961, followed by a year in Europe on a Frederick Sheldon traveling fellowship. He took his M. A. at UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature in 1963, and his Ph. D. at Harvard in 1970. After further teaching at Harvard and at Brooklyn College of CUNY, he came to UC Davis in 1976. During 25 years at Davis as associate and full professor, he served several terms as director of the Comparative Literature Program, and played a key role in designing the undergraduate curriculum and instituting the Ph. D. program. His book-length publications are (1) verse translations of two plays of Sophocles, Philoctetes and The Women of Trachis (Houghton Mifflin, 1966); (2)The Comic Hero (Harvard University Press, 1978), examining embodiments of this variable character in different ages from Homer to Joyce and Mann; (3) Ideal and Spleen: The Crisis of Transcendent Vision in Romantic, Symbolist, and Modern Poetry (Garland, 1984); (4) The Spiritual Quest: Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science (University of California Press,1994; translated into Modern Greek in 2005 and Spanish in 2006); and (5) Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook (Counterpoint, 2008), a vast collection of literary, religious, philosophical and scientific primary sources demonstrating widely diverse experiences and developing concepts of nature in both Western and non-Western cultures throughout the centuries, with extensive original introductions and commentaries as well as poetic translations from Greek, Latin, Italian (including a canto from Dante’s PURGATORIO), Spanish, and French. This 1200-page “sourcebook” has been called the finest anthology of nature writing to have appeared, containing texts hard to find elsewhere from earliest times through harbingers of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. The original introductions and summaries alone constitute a balanced and incisive 500-page history of complexly changing relations between the worlds of humans and of nature — a term of multiple and shifting meanings in different times and places. A former Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Woodrow Wilson scholarship winner, he is a member of the Modern Language Association. His widespread achievements have been recognized by inclusion in the Marquis Who’s Who in America 2011, as well as in Wikipedia. His new translation of Dante’s INFERNO — with a Foreword on “The Poet and the Poem”; an individual note briefly recapitulating each of the 34 Cantos and explaining names and terms important for the reader’s understanding; and an Epilogue on the ascent to the Terrestrial Paradise — reflects long familiarity with this medieval classic and assumes, as the Preface emphasizes, that far from being an inaccessibly distant monument, it speaks compellingly to contemporary readers both through graphic portrayal of horrors all too familiar to our own age, and by vividly presenting its central character (who is at once the 14th-century Florentine Dante Alighieri and each one of us traveling the journey of “our life’s way”) as a wandering exile, and the one living person, subject to feelings ranging from tearful pity to outraged horror, in the dead world of the eternally damned. To this extent, it is in part a “Human” as well as of a “Divine Comedy”. And although it is only the first of the three major segments of that “comedy” of movement from the sorrows and sufferings of Hell up the steep slopes of Purgatory to the eternal bliss of the Celestial Paradise, INFERNO can be read, as it has often been read from its own time through many centuries since, as a whole in itself. Its travelers ultimately find that their long and terrifying descent to the lowest depths of the world turns suddenly into ascent up through the previously unknown opposite hemisphere to a new world where they once again see the stars. The translation, as explained in the Foreword, is an English approximation of the terza rima of the Italian original, a difficult form invented by Dante and rarely used by later poets. This is no incidental aspect of the poem, for its interlinking of rhymes throughout each canto is fundamental to its movement. No translation can of course be perfect, especially in so difficult a meter from so different a language; and some previous English-language efforts have foundered on excessively many awkward archaisms, inversions, and forced rhymes. Yet the attempt to substitute an alliterative so-called “terza rima” more theoretical than audible (and only discernible, if at all, by close scrutiny of the page), has proved barely distinguishable, when read aloud (as all poetry should be read), from plain prose — in which some very fine translations exist with no claim to being verse. In so far as the present translation dares hope to transmit, however incompletely, integration of the poem’s elevated style and subject matter with the grace of its subtly fluid verse form, it might boldly hazard a claim to be the best translation of Dante’s great poem yet made in English. At the very least, anyone who knowingly undertakes so forbidding, if not indeed so impossible, an endeavor must never lasciare ogni speranza (“abandon all hope”), as those do who enter the gates of Hell! For to convey even a little of Dante’s poetic power and beauty is already much.

Related to Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima

Related ebooks

Poetry For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima - Robert M. Torrance

    Dante’s INFERNO,

    A New Translation

    in Terza Rima

    Robert M. Torrance

    Copyright © 2011 by Robert M. Torrance.

    Library of Congress Control Number:       2011911389

    ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-4518-7

                       Softcover                                 978-1-4628-4517-0

                       Ebook                                      978-1-4628-4519-4

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

    This book was printed in the United States of America.

    To order additional copies of this book, contact:

    Xlibris Corporation

    1-888-795-4274

    www.Xlibris.com

    Orders@Xlibris.com

    101410

    Contents

    Preface

    Foreword: The Poet And The Poem

    Canto I

    Note To Canto I

    Canto II

    Note To Canto II

    Canto III

    Note To Canto III

    Canto IV

    Note To Canto IV

    Canto V

    Note To Canto V

    Canto VI

    Note To Canto VI

    Canto VII

    Note To Canto VII

    Canto VIII

    Note To Canto VIII

    Canto IX

    Note To Canto IX

    Canto X

    Note To Canto X

    Canto XI

    Note To Canto XI

    Canto XII

    Note To Canto XII

    Canto XIII

    Note To Canto XIII

    Canto XIV

    Note To Canto XIV

    Canto XV

    Note To Canto XV

    Canto XVI

    Note To Canto XVI

    Canto XVII

    Note To Canto XVII

    Canto XVIII

    Note To Canto XVIII

    Canto XIX

    Note To Canto XIX

    Canto XX

    Note To Canto XX

    Canto XXI

    Note To Canto XXI

    Canto XXII

    Note To Canto XXII

    Canto XXIII

    Note To Canto XXIII

    Canto XXIV

    Note To Canto XXIV

    Canto XXV

    Note To Canto XXV

    Canto XXVI

    Note To Canto XXVI

    Canto XXVII

    Note To Canto XXVII

    Canto XXVIII

    NOTE ON XXVIII

    Canto XXIX

    Note To Canto XXIX

    Canto XXX

    Note To Canto XXX

    Canto XXXI

    Note To Canto XXXI

    Canto XXXII

    Note To Canto XXXII

    Canto XXXIII

    Note To Canto XXXIII

    Canto XXXIV

    Note To Canto XXXIV

    Epilogue: Ascent To The Earthly Paradise

    Note

    For

    Donna

    loving wife,

    sometime

    Francesca,

    and Beatrice evermore

    Acknowledgment

    The cover design, showing Dante lost in the woods as he begins his long journey, was a lithograph by Gustave Doré first published in his edition of the Inferno in 1861, and reproduced in The Doré Illustratons for Dante’s Divine Comedy (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1976). My thanks to Richard Ogle for reminding me of this volume.

    ROBERT TORRANCE’s BOOK-LENGTH
    PUBLICATIONS ARE:

    Translations from Greek of two Tragedies by Sophocles

    (Houghton Mifflin)

    Ideal and Spleen (Garland)

    The Comic Hero (Harvard University Press)

    The Spiritual Quest (University of California Press)

    Encompassing Nature (Counterpoint)

    PREFACE

    Dante’s Commedia, or Divine Comedy—of which INFERNO, the first and by far best known and most read of its three major sections from his time till now (see Foreword: The Poet and the Poem)—is widely recognized as the greatest poem of the European Middle Ages. Because of this towering reputation, its extreme complexity, and its stature (especially in its final section, PARADISO), as a classic of Roman Catholic religiosity, it very often seems remote or intimidating to modern readers of more secular bent: a monument to be honored rather than a book to be read. To many, including myself, the more humanly centered classics of ancient Greece or the Renaissance—Homer or Sophocles, Shakespeare or Cervantes, to say nothing of the rich traditions of the novel in more recent times—will at first be far more accessible and appealing. Yet INFERNO, in particular, continues to fascinate and engage on many levels. Its horrors strike home in an age all too accustomed to our own. Its often grotesque scenes and actions amid the engulfing circles of Hell outdo in fantastic imaginings even the grimmer forms of today’s science fiction in extraterrestrial worlds; it is a gripping adventure story of stalwart advance through a very bad neighborhood. And most important, perhaps, the central character—whose path through these nightmarish realms is that of both the exiled Florentine poet Dante Alighieri and potentially of us all—is fully human: alone except for his disembodied spiritual guide from the distant past of a different culture and religion. As the only living figure of the poem, he is subject to a wide range of human feelings from pity and fear to repulsion and rage. In such ways, this section of Dante’s masterpiece is at its core a Human Comedy in which the imaginative reader can identify with the narrator amid the perils and hardships of his journeying on our life’s way.

    After some earlier partial encounters, I first read the complete Divine Comedy in English prose translation in the excellent edition of John D. Sinclair. His perceptively concise notes and comments to INFERNO, supplemented by the much extended commentary of Charles S. Singleton in the second volume of his magisterial six-volume edition, is first among many sources I have drawn on for the brief one-page notes I have written for each of the 34 cantos of the poem. Each note provides partial recapitulation of the canto, along with brief comments on some major events and characters referred to. Instead of numbered footnotes, I have highlighted in bold type most names the reader needs to know to make sense of the canto, and have given brief explanation for these.

    I first read the Italian text of the Divina Commedia in the revised text of C. H. Grandgent, which is another important source of commentary. My translation, in the terza rima which I view as an essential aspect of the poem, as explained in my Foreword, is not based exclusively on any one text among those available to me (mainly in Grandgent, Sinclair, and Singleton’s first volume). In approximating the poetic form of the original in a very different language, closely following the line numbering of the Italian, I have necessarily taken some liberties in the form, such as occasional off-rhymes, preserving long vowels as much as possible. No poetic translation aims to be literal, though I have stayed as close to the sense as a rhymed translation suggesting an elevated style can do. Not even the most meticulously literal prose translation can, of course, achieve perfect fidelity to the original: this would be achievable, if at all, only by the method of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, in Jorge Luis Borges’ story of that name, who translates Cervantes’ masterpiece by leaving it in the original Spanish: since every age reads the same words differently! To leave INFERNO only in Italian would little serve Anglophone readers, who I hope will try to follow the original text along with my version. Translation is an art that invites critique and requires humility; the beauty and power of Dante’s poetry can only be remotely suggested. But even that is not nothing.

    Among the many other works that I have consulted or drawn on to some extent over the years are the Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed translation and commentary; Michele Barbi’s Life of Dante; Charles S. Singleton, Dante Studies 1: Commedia, Elements of Structure; Thomas G. Bergin’s Dante; Francis Fergusson’s Dante; Irma Brandeis’s The Ladder of Vision: A Study of Dante’s Comedy; De Sanctis on Dante (selections from Francesco De Sanctis’ Saggi Critici); Erich Auebach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World and his chapter on Dante in Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature; and the two collections Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays and American Critical Essays on the Divine Comedy.

    Finally, my deepest gratitude to my inestimable wife Donna for help with the notes and preface, and many thanks to Richard Ogle for his valuable advice on self-publication.

    FOREWORD: The Poet and The Poem

    Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, the principal city of Tuscany, in 1265 at a time of confusing conflicts: between Guelfs and Ghibellines, and between Whites and Blacks. Moreover, German Holy Roman Emperors, who claimed secular rule, vied with a Papacy located, against the protest of Dante and many others, in the French city of Avignon. After having served his native city both as a soldier—at the 1289 victory of the Guelf League of Florence and Lucca over the Ghibellines of Arezzo and Pisa—and as a counsellor, envoy, and Prior, he was banished, when the Blacks took power, both from public office and from Florentine territory, ultimately for life and threatened with public burning should he violate the terms; his two sons were later included in the condemnation. During his exile he lived in various cities of Italy, notably in Verona under the protection of the Ghibelline leader Can Grande della Scala (Big Dog of the Ladder) and in Ravenna, where he died in 1321 and is buried. The bitter conflicts of this period recur prominently throughout Dante’s vision of hell.

    Dante’s Latin prose in this period includes the unfinished De Vulgari Eloquentia, a defense of the vulgar (vernacular) Tuscan or Italian language as equal to Latin, then still considered the sole dignified language for literary works. His political treatise, De Monarchia (On Monarchy) assigns maintaining peace and establishing world empire to the secular authority of a patriarchal king, and limits the church’s role to the spiritual realm; Popes who violated that trust appear in hell, and space is reserved for others not yet dead. He fervently hoped the German king Henry VII would achieve millennial empire, and was bitterly disappointed when these hopes came to an end when Henry died in 1313 near Siena three years after entering Italy with his armies.

    Before undertaking his masterpiece, Dante and his friends Lapo Gianni and above all Guido Cavalcanti (whose father despairs in INFERNO X when he mistakenly thinks his son is dead) wrote love poems in the new forms of the sonnet and the canzone. Dante celebrates their collaboration in the image of a magic boat ride in a sonnet beginning:

    Guido, I wish that Lapo, you, and I

    were spirited by some enchanter’s spell

    into a boat that bobbed with every swell

    across whatever seas we choose to try,

    so neither howling tempests could deny

    our hopes, nor other gloomy weather quell,

    but such unanimous desire would well

    within, that hope would ever soar more high.

    But the central experience of Dante’s life and poetry was not such casually conventional loves, nor his arranged marriage with Gemma Donati, the mother of his children, but his brief encounter at age 9, in 1274, with Beatrice Portinari, whom he met again at least once before her death at 25 in 1290. The experience of a purely spiritual love transformed his life, as he movingly wrote in his major early work, La Vita Nuova (The New Life), a mixture of prose and of poetry in the sweet new style (dolce stil nuovo), as in this sonnet beginning:

    So gentle and so circumspect appear

    my lady’s features greeting passers-by,

    that tongues all tremble mutely in reply

    and eyes look not upon her out of fear.

    She passes, hearing praises of her worth,

    benignly clothed in pure humility,

    and seems to have descended here, set free

    by heaven, to show a miracle on earth.

    Not only the poet, then, but all who see her with pure heart are elevated by her. For Dante she would remain the image of beatitude who would be his guide through the heavenly paradise after the long upward journey from the depths of hell.

    INFERNO (HELL) is the first major section (canticle) of Dante’s masterpiece, the Commedia, or Divine Comedy. The second is PURGATORIO; in the third, PARADISO, he fulfills the intention promised in the Vita Nuova to celebrate Beatrice in the heavens. The name Commedia indicates comic progression from a bleak beginning to a fortunate end (though there is also much black humor in the first canticle!). But though this larger context should be kept in mind amid the gruesome horrors of hell, INFERNO can stand alone. From Dante’s time to the present it has been by far the most famed and often read of the three parts; and to readers of the last two centuries, acquainted with repeated massacres and genocides, hell is again familiar territory. Most readers need not be concerned with all the multiple layers of meaning distinguished by Dante in a letter to Can Grande, and by countless commentators since (the foremost of whom among recent scholars in English is Charles S. Singleton). But awareness of the interaction between the literal or visible and the allegorical or invisible is fundamental: the visible reality embodies God’s Will. Thus the descent from the dark wood where the straight path is lost down through the depths of earth is literally Dante’s, but also allegorically humankind’s. It is we, as well as he, who emerge, after horrifying encounters, on the far side of the world to see again the stars (the last word of all three canticles).

    There were many predecessors or analogues to Dante’s journey to the land of the dead, going back millennia to the Sumerian and Babylonian stories that took form in the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, and to the texts compiled as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. None of these could have been heard of by Dante, and even the first renowned account in Western poetry, the trip of Odysseus (Ulysses) in Book XI of The Odyssey to the border of the shadowy world—where he encounters the prophet Tiresias, meets some of his comrades killed at the siege of Troy, and vainly tries to embrace the shade of his mother, who died for love of him—could have been known only indirectly, despite Dante’s elevation of Homer as unsurpassed in the Limbo of INFERNO IV, since Dante read no Greek, and the Odyssey had not yet been translated into Latin. His main precedent was of course the descent of Aeneas in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid to the underworld (where not only are wrongdoers punished, however, but the virtuous may recline in peaceful Elysian fields); and Virgil appropriately acts as his guide below. Scenes of hell were also often graphically portrayed in the Middle Ages and later, as in grotesque paintings in the Campo Santo of Florence’s hated rival and foe Pisa; by Luca Signorelli in the cathedral of Orvieto; and, centuries after Dante, in the Last Judgment painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel of Saint Peter’s in Rome. Its terrors were very real.

    Though often anticlerical, as the populace of his hell makes wholly clear, Dante remained a practicing Roman Catholic who largely accepted the doctrines of his age—in his own way. In contrast to the practice of many medieval poets, the literal is typically predominant over the allegorical, and the invisible is made indelibly visible. The vivid characters of INFERNO are a primary instance; as Erich Auerbach writes in Dante: Poet of the Secular (or more literally, Earthly) World, he undertook to portray the human beings who appear in the Comedy in the time and place of their ultimate self-realization, where their essence is fulfilled and made manifest for ever. Each inhabitant of hell will eternally remain what he most essentially was on earth. And no character is more fully realized than the living traveler, Dante himself, as he leaves the dark wood where he had lost his way and responds with deeply human emotions to the sufferings he sees, sometimes fainting or weeping with pity, but later voicing rage at sins of viciousness and betrayal. He does place some personal enemies in hell, it is true, as will Michelangelo, but by means of his journey he transcends the personal in the universal. And among the many other earthly aspects of his poetic masterpiece is his richly varied imagery, drawn both from close observation of nature and from the homeliest human activities, such as sewing and farming. Even in a poem set in Hell, the sights and sounds of daily life abound.

    The meter of the poem, terza rima, which Dante invented (and which this translation follows as well as possible in so different a language) is also intrinsic to it, binding each canto into an uninterruptedly flowing, closely interconnected whole, without stanzaic breaks, and with each tercet (three-line unit) linked to the one before and after: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on throughout each canto. It is a difficult form to write, followed by few poets after him in Italian or other languages (sections of Lope de Vega’s comedies in Spanish, and Shelley’s Triumph of Life and Ode to the West Wind in English, are rare examples or variations), and by none so masterfully and extensively as by Dante.

    These are but a few of the aspects of the Commedia that have occupied erudite commentators since his time; among those not here considered are numerology, chronology and location of the journey with reference to positions of the heavens, detailed historical and social allusions to the troubled history of his time and place, and others too many and esoteric to name in this context. The poem is inexhaustible, yet need not be exhausting: encyclopedic, yet simple at its movingly human core. And it remains, as it has been from the first, a gripping imaginative vision and an absorbingly told reading experience.

    INFERNO is the first of three parts of his pilgrimage, but between darkness and stars it foreshadows and encapsulates the whole.

    CANTO I

    Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

    mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

    ché la diritta via era smarrita.

    Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

    esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte                             5

    che nel pensier rinova la paura!

    Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;

    ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,

    dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.

    Io non so ben ridir com’ i’ v’intrai                             10

    tant’ era pien di sonno a quel punto

    che la verace via abbandonai.

    Ma poi ch’i’ fui al piè d’un colle giunto,

    là dove terminava quella valle

    che m’avea di paura il cor compunto,                             15

    guardai in alto e vidi le sue spalle

    vestite già de’ raggi del pianeta

    che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle.

    Allor fu la paura un poco queta,

    che nel lago del cor m’era durata                             20

    la notte ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta.

    E come quei che con lena affannata,

    uscito fuor del pelago a la riva,

    si volge a l’acqua perigliosa e guata,

    così l’animo mio, ch’ancor fuggiva,                             25

    si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo

    che non lasciò già mai persona viva.

    Poi ch’èi posato un poco il corpo lasso,

    ripresi via per la piaggia diserta,

    sì che ‘l piè fermo sempre era ‘l più basso.                             30

    Ed ecco, quasi al cominciar de l’erta,

    una lonza leggera e presta molto,

    che di pel macolato era coverta;

    e non mi si partia dinanzi al volto,

    anzi ‘mpediva tanto il mio cammino,                             35

    ch’i’ fui per ritornar più volte vòlto.

    Halfway through the journey of our life’s way,

    I found myself in a dark wood, and here

    was lost, uncertain where the straight path lay.

    Ah, it is hard to make this matter clear,

    how rugged, harsh, and wild this wooded lair                             5

    seemed, the mere thought of which renews my fear:

    so bitter, death itself can scarce compare!

    But, to speak of the good I there did find,

    first I must tell what other things were there.

    How I arrived, I cannot call to mind,                             10

    so full of sleepiness did I depart

    from my true path, and leave it far behind.

    But, where a hillside rose, I left apart

    the now upward sloping valley—fright

    of which had pierced and terrified my heart,                             15

    and toward the hill’s high shoulders raised my sight,

    which that bright planet’s rays already dressed

    that guides each man by every path aright.

    Now could the terror find a little rest,

    that in my palpitant heart’s lake did keep                             20

    me all night long incessantly distressed.

    For, as a half drowned, panting man might creep

    out from the sea, and safe ashore arrive,

    then turn around to view the perilous deep,

    so did my mind, though fleeing still, contrive                             25

    to turn and look back on the pass behind

    through which none ever yet had come alive.

    To rest my weary limbs I first reclined,

    then made my way across the desert shore,

    keeping firm lower foot and slope aligned.                             30

    Just as the ground began ascending more

    steep, behold, a she-leopard lean and fleet

    that on her back a spotted mantle wore,

    before me made no motion to retreat,

    but so completely did my course confine                             35

    that more than once I backward turned my feet.

    Temp’ era dal principio del mattino,

    e ‘l sol montava ‘n sù con quelle stelle

    ch’eran con lui quando l’amor divino

    mosse di prima quelle cose belle;                             40

    sì ch’a bene sperar m’era cagione

    di quella fiera a la gaetta pelle

    l’ora del tempo e la dolce stagione;

    ma non sì che paura non mi desse

    la vista che m’apparve d’un leone.                             45

    Questi parea che contra me venisse

    con la test’ alta e con rabbiosa fame,

    sì che parea che l’aere ne tremesse.

    Ed una lupa, che di tutte brame

    sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza,                             50

    e molte genti fé già viver grame,

    questa mi porse tanto di gravezza

    con la paura ch’uscia di sua vista,

    ch’io perdei la speranza de l’altezza.

    E qual è quei che volontieri acquista,                             55

    e giugne ‘l tempo che perder lo face,

    che ‘n tutti suoi pensier piange e s’attrista;

    tal mi fece la bestia sanza pace,

    che, venendomi ‘ncontro, a poco a poco

    mi ripigneva là dove ‘l sol tace.                             60

    Mentre ch’i’ rovinava in basso loco,

    dinanzi a li occhi mi si fu offerto

    chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco.

    Quando vidi costui nel gran diserto,

    «Miserere di me», gridai a lui,                             65

    «qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo!».

    Rispuosemi: «Non omo, omo già fui,

    e li parenti miei furon lombardi,

    mantoani per patrïa ambedui.

    Nacqui sub Iulio, ancor che fosse tardi,                             70

    e vissi a Roma sotto ‘l buono Augusto

    nel tempo de li dèi falsi e bugiardi.

    Morning’s first rays had just begun to shine,

    and upward surged the sun with all those bright

    stars that attended him when Love Divine

    first set in motion that resplendent sight,                             40

    so that both season and the time of day

    gave me good reason to believe I might

    escape this beast of coloring so gay:

    till the appearance of a lion brought

    stark fear, when suddenly he blocked my way.                             45

    Charging he came against me, as I thought,

    rabidly hungry, holding high his head,

    while the air quivered with his fierce onslaught.

    Then a she-wolf, whose meager leanness fed

    her insatiately ravenous desire                             50

    turning whole multitudes to living dead,

    burdened my heart so heavily with dire

    terror, occasioned by her very sight,

    that I abandoned hope of climbing higher.

    And, as a gamester easily makes light                             55

    of gains, till time converts his winning spree

    to loss: then wretchedly laments his plight,

    such did that unrelenting beast make me,

    driving me, bit by bit, far from the peak

    to where no silenced sunlight could I see.                             60

    While I was hurtling downward toward those bleak

    shadowy depths, before my eyes, began

    to rise one through long silence seeming weak.

    Seeing him in that desert’s boundless span,

    "Miserere on me," to him I cried,                             65

    whether a shade you be, or living man!

    No man—though man I was once, he replied:

    "from Lombardy my parents claimed high worth,

    of Mantuan lineage on either side.

    Sub Julio, though late, I had my birth,                             70

    and under good Augustus made my name

    in Rome, when false deceiving gods ruled earth.

    Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto

    figliuol d’Anchise che venne di Troia,

    poi che ‘l superbo Ilïón fu combusto.                             75

    Ma tu perché ritorni a tanta noia?

    perché non sali il dilettoso monte

    ch’è principio e cagion di tutta gioia?».

    «Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte

    che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?»,                             80

    rispuos’ io lui con vergognosa fronte.

    «O de li altri poeti onore e lume,

    vagliami ‘l lungo studio e ‘l grande amore

    che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.

    Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ‘l mio autore,                             85

    tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi

    lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore.

    Vedi la bestia per cu’ io mi volsi;

    aiutami da lei, famoso saggio,

    ch’ella mi fa tremar le vene e i polsi».                             90

    «A te convien tenere altro vïaggio»,

    rispuose, poi che lagrimar mi vide,

    «se vuo’ campar d’esto loco selvaggio;

    ché questa bestia, per la qual tu gride,

    non lascia altrui passar per la sua via,                             95

    ma tanto lo ‘mpedisce che l’uccide;

    e ha natura sì malvagia e ria,

    che mai non empie la bramosa voglia,

    e dopo ‘l pasto ha più fame che pria.

    Molti son li animali a cui s’ammoglia,                             100

    e più saranno ancora, infin che ‘l veltro

    verrà, che la farà morir con doglia.

    Questi non ciberà terra né peltro,

    ma sapïenza, amore e virtute,

    e sua nazion sarà tra feltro e feltro.                             105

    Di quella umile Italia fia salute

    per cui morì la vergine Cammilla,

    Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute.

    Poet I was, and sang the righteous fame

    won by Anchises’ son, who fled from Troy

    after proud Ilium went up in flame.                             75

    Why do you come where countless woes destroy?

    Why not ascend the pleasurable mount

    that is the source and cause of every joy?"

    "Are you that Virgil, then—are you that fount

    that pours forth copious cataracts of speech?"                             80

    I answered, feeling shame on my account.

    "O light and glory of poets, I beseech:

    may my long study and my boundless love

    help me now; all I know, your volumes teach.

    My master, and my author, too, above                             85

    all others, you: from whom alone I take

    the splendid style men think me worthy of.

    Behold the ravening predator for whose sake

    I turned away: protect me, famous seer,

    for, seeing her, my veins and pulses shake!"                             90

    "Another road now must you enter here,

    if from this savage place you wish to flee,"

    he answered, when he saw me shed a tear;

    "for that wild beast, of which you mournfully

    complain, allows none past her mountain door,                             95

    but hinders each, then kills him instantly.

    So vicious is her nature, furthermore,

    that never can she satisfy her will

    but, after food, is hungrier than before.

    With many animals she mates, with still                             100

    more shall mate, till the Greyhound of great worth

    shall come, and painfully this beast shall kill.

    (Not on pelf shall he feed and not on earth,

    but wisdom, love, and valor; in between

    felt and felt he shall celebrate his birth.                             105

    In him, low Italy’s savior shall be seen—

    for which slain Turnus, virgin Camilla died,

    and Nisus and Euryalus, warriors keen.)

    Questi la caccerà per ogne villa,

    fin che l’avrà rimessa ne lo ‘nferno,                             110

    là onde ‘nvidia prima dipartilla.

    Ond’ io per lo tuo me’ penso e discerno

    che tu mi segui, e io sarò tua guida,

    e trarrotti di qui per loco etterno;

    ove udirai le disperate strida,                             115

    vedrai li antichi spiriti dolenti,

    ch’a la seconda morte ciascun grida;

    e vederai color che son contenti

    nel foco, perché speran di venire

    quando che sia a le beate genti.                             120

    A le quai poi se tu vorrai salire,

    anima fia a ciò più di me degna:

    con lei ti lascerò nel mio partire;

    ché quello imperador che là sù regna,

    perch’ i’ fu’ ribellante a la sua legge,                             125

    non vuol che ‘n sua città per me si vegna.

    In tutte parti impera e quivi regge;

    quivi è la sua città e l’alto seggio:

    oh felice colui cu’ ivi elegge!»

    E io a lui: «Poeta, io ti richeggio                             130

    per quello Dio che tu non conoscesti,

    acciò ch’io fugga questo male e peggio,

    che tu mi meni là dov’ or dicesti,

    sì ch’io veggia la porta di san Pietro

    e color cui tu fai cotanto mesti.»                             135

    Allor si mosse, e io li tenni dietro.

    Her shall he hunt through cities far and wide,

    till he precipitates her back to hell                             110

    whence envy formerly thrust her outside.

    In your best interest, then, I deem it well

    you follow me wherever I shall lead,

    even to where eternal spirits dwell.

    There you shall hear despairing shrieks indeed,                             115

    see ancient souls suffering pains so dire,

    laments for second death are paid no heed;

    see others next, who are content with fire

    because they hope, when tribulations end,

    to soar above and join the blessèd choir—                            120

    to which, if afterward you will ascend,

    a worthier soul than I must lead you there,

    whom as your guide, departing, I’ll commend.

    That heavenly emperor beyond compare,

    whose sacred law I kept dishonoring,                             125

    denies me, in his city, any share.

    Everywhere he is emperor; there, king.

    There is his city, there his lofty seat.

    Happy whom he elects his praise to sing!"

    Then I to him: "Poet, I now entreat                             130

    you, by that God whom you could never know:

    this bane, and worse, assist me to defeat!

    Show me the way you urge me on to go,

    so that Saint Peter’s portal I may find,

    and those who suffer such enormous woe."                             135

    He started, and I followed on behind.

    NOTE TO CANTO I

    Astray in a dark wood and blocked from climbing a sunny hill, the pilgrim meets the shade of Virgil, who will show him another road.

    The poem begins in medias res as the pilgrim—halfway through the 70-year way of human life (the three score years and ten of Psalm 90:10)—wakens in a dark wood. Dante, in the year 1300, was 35, yet throughout the COMMEDIA he is named but once, when Beatrice addresses him late in PURGATORIO. From the first, the way through life is also that of our life, since all may awake in darkness astray from the straight path toward salvation, the goal of all born in sin. In this case the darkness precedes Good Friday, and Dante will spend three days among the dead before arising. He sees a

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1