by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Dante’s World, Open to Ours
“In the middle of the road of my life …” More than any other literary work, the The Divine Comedy is meant to be entered into, the way you enter a particular place at a particular time. As Dante enters the world of the hereafter while still mortal with Virgil as his guide, we as readers are invited to enter it with Dante as our guide.
Artists and scholars alike have poured great energy into imaging forth the immersive experience of the poem, whether through illustrations (such as Gustave Doré’s and Tom Wright’s), through films (such as Harry Lachman’s 1935 effort – poster above), or through the schematic maps and charts found in the front matter of most translations. Lately, these efforts have been joined by digital counterparts which strive to join the immersive experience of the poem to the immersive experience of the web. There’s the Paris Review’s long-running bloggy commentary on the Inferno, which I’ve followed and posted about. And there’s Georgetown’s MyDante, which the staff at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship characterize as “a custom-designed online environment developed … [to] aid students’ contemplative engagement with the poem.”
Now MyDante will figure into in a spatially ambitious point of entry into the poem: a massive open online course called “The Divine Comedy: Dante’s Journey Toward Freedom,” developed by Georgetown in partnership with EdX, the university online learning enterprise whose members include MIT, Harvard, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Texas.
Philosophy professor Frank Ambrosio is leading the course, building on his celebrated Georgetown College course on the poem; following Dante’s own balanced scheme, he will devote four weeks each to the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso.
The tag for the course – and for all of GeorgetownX’s courses – applies just as well to Dante’s hereafter: “… free and open to anyone in the world.”
Hoping to audit the course (with tens of thousands of other students) and report back as I go.
Dante Alighieri, Magic Realist
“Is and is not” is a riff familiar from the magic realism of Marquez, Rushdie, and their inheritors – a stylistic signature akin to Hemingway’s monosyllables and Faulkner’s latinate meanders.
So it was striking to find is right there in Canto 7 of Clive James’s recent translation of the Purgatorio. Virgil is speaking of his plight as a holy man who had the bad luck to precede Christ by just a few years:
“Before
Souls worthy of the climb to God came here
To this hill, my dead bones were buried by
Augustus. I am Virgil. For that mere
Defect – lack of the faith that I could not
Have had, because a child was not yet born –
I lost Heaven.” So spoke Virgil of his lot.
Hearing him is Sordello, like Virgil a poet of Mantua – but one born 1200 years later:
As one who marvels at the sudden dawn
Before him of a thing he both believes
And disbelieves, and says `It is … and yet
It isn’t …’ and then finally retrieves
His power to move, Sordello with bent head
Again went humbly to my lord, embraced
Him low down as the lowly do, and said
“O Glory of the Latins, you that graced
Our tongue and proved its power to Earth,
What did of mine or blessing shows me you?”
James made this translation of Dante out of his deep familiarity with postwar writing, and he may be making use of intentional anachronism. But the effect is to suggest that Dante was a magic realist – the first?
Love X 3
Dante, grandmaster of terza rima, thought in threes as thoroughly as anybody ever has. So there’s a kind of sense in seeing the Paris Review’s recaps of three cantos side by side. With full intent, Alexander Aciman takes Dante exegesis from the sublime to the silly – comparing translations of a famous passage in Canto V, summarizing Canto VI via Facebook-style fanpage reviews, and evaluating Canto VII quantitatively, from the “number of inner groups encountered” (3) to the “number of times Virgil comforts Dante” (4, and Aciman adds, “this number feels low”).
For the Canto V passage about the doomed lovers Francesca and Paolo, who had an affair, he assembles an all-star team of translators: Lord Byron, John Hollander, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Pinsky, and even his undergraduate self, working in the purgatory that was freshman year at the University of Chicago. But he passes over the translation that has been my own favorite (for the whole Commedia, that is) ever since I spotted it on the desk of a poet I admire: the one by C.H. Sisson, a British scholar and government official, published in Oxford’s World’s Classics.
Sisson renders the passage from Canto V – Francesca’s monologue – this way:
`The country I was born in lies along
The coast, just at the point the Po descends
To have some peace among its followers.
Love, which quickly fastens on gentle hearts,
Seized that wretch, and it was for the personal beauty
Which was taken from me; how it happened still offends me.
Love, which allows no one who is loved to escape,
Seized me so strongly with my pleasure in him,
That, as you see, it does not leave me now.
Love led us two to find a single death;
Caina awaits him who brought us to this end.’
These were the words which came to us from them.
Note the use of the word love to begin three tercets in a row: that’s the power of love raised to the power of three.
The painting is by Sean Scully.
Day of the Departed
All Souls: The expression brings to mind a family story from South Boston, or the Oxford college that produced T.E. Lawrence and Sir Isaiah Berlin. (That’s the college chapel reredos in the picture above.)
But the day after the day after Halloween – a k a the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed – is an apt day to visit the underworld again with Dante, and his guide, Virgil, and our guide, Alexander Aciman, who is blog-trotting the poem at parisreview.org. "The theological underpinning of the feast is the acknowledgment of human frailty,“ as one reliable Catholic encyclopedia has it, and there’s plenty of frailty in Canto IV: Dante sees Virgil’s face overcome by a "fearful pallor,” and when he asks Virgil why, Virgil tells him that "it is not fear, but pity, that has altered his expression; the pair are entering limbo, where those who might have been able to enter paradise, had they lived in the time of Christ, are instead forever confined.“
No, not everybody:
Dante asks Virgil if anyone has ever made it out, and in the slightly embittered tone of someone who has watched countless coworkers get promoted above him, Virgil tells Dante of Moses, Noah, and a few others who were “plucked” from limbo and taken upward by some mysterious stranger.
Departed, you are in mind this morning.