The New York Review of Books - USA - 16.12.2021

(EriveltonMoraes) #1
8 The New York Review

Purgatorio
by Dante Alighieri, translated from
the Italian and with an introduction
and notes by Mary Jo Bang.
Graywolf, 365 pp., $20.00 (paper)

Purgatorio
by Dante Alighieri, translated from
the Italian and with commentary
by D. M. Black, with a preface
by Robert Pogue Harrison.
New York Review Books,
459 pp., $19.95 (paper)

After Dante:
Poets in Purgatory:
Translations by Contemporary Poets
edited by Nick Havely
with Bernard O’Donoghue.
Todmorden: Arc,
288 pp., £19.99 (paper)

Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno
by Rachel Owen,
edited by David Bowe.
Oxford: Bodleian Library,
135 pp., $40.

A few years after publishing his su-
perb translation of Dante’s Purgatorio
(2000), W.S. Merwin told me he was
toying with the idea of also translat-
ing Paradiso, but added that he had
some reservations. The first was that
the canticle contains an encomium of
Saint Dominic, who in Merwin’s eyes
was the most villainous churchman of
the Middle Ages. Dominic had zeal-
ously promoted the Albigensian Cru-
sade, which over a twenty- year period
in the early thirteenth century bar-
barically stamped out Catharism and
put an end to the vibrant and beauti-
ful court culture of southern France.
Merwin had purchased a farmhouse
in Languedoc as a young man and
was fiercely attached to the region,
where the troubadours, alongside the
Cathar “heretics,” flourished during
the twelfth century. Like many people
there today, he bitterly resented the
Albigensian Crusade, which claimed
hundreds of thousands of innocent
lives (by some estimates close to a
million).
Merwin’s second reservation had
to do with his antipathy toward Dan-
te’s guide through the nine heavenly
spheres. I agree with him that in Para-
diso Beatrice comes across as a pedan-
tic, irksome character who treats the
pilgrim like a wide- eyed child. The Be-
atrice of The Divine Comedy has little
to do with the historical woman who in-
spired such beautiful poems in Dante’s
earlier work Vita Nuova.
I urged Merwin to go ahead and
translate Paradiso, since it contains
some of the most sublime poetry of
the Western canon, which only a poet
of his caliber could do full justice to in
English. In the end he decided against
it. “I just don’t love it enough,” he said.
Given Merwin’s excellent version of
Purgatorio, plus dozens of others in
English, the only reason to undertake
yet another translation of it—or any
other part of The Divine Comedy, for
that matter—is love. “Love makes me
speak,” as Dante said, and the seven
hundredth anniversary of his death
has brought three new translations
of the second canticle, all of them by

poets enamored of it. Mary Jo Bang’s
Purgatorio comes eight years after her
equally sparkling rendition of Inferno.
The new translation by the Scottish
poet and psychoanalyst D. M. Black is
on a par with Merwin’s.* And if that
weren’t enough, sixteen different poets,
including Bang, contribute to After
Dante: Poets in Purgatorio, which, in
the words of one of its editors, Nick
Havely, “render[s] the Purgatorio in a
number of different voices, reflecting a
range of contemporary cultures, con-
cerns and techniques.”
One reason poets tend to cherish
Purgatorio is because in it Dante meets
a host of fellow poets and reflects on
the wonders of literary history. In Pur-
gatorio 21, for example, he and Virgil
encounter the Roman poet Statius,
who declares to the still- unidentified
wayfarers that Virgil’s Aeneid “was
my mother / and my nurse too in mak-
ing poetry: /without it I would not have
weighed a dram.” When it’s revealed to
him that he is in fact in Virgil’s pres-
ence, Statius is seized with rapture
and veneration. He tells Virgil that
the prophetic verses in his Fourth Ec-
logue—“Time is renewed... a new
progeny descends from heaven”—were
responsible for his conversion to Chris-
tianity, hence for his salvation. To Sta-
tius, Virgil was like “one who walks by
night and bears /a lamp behind him,
not to help himself / but to give light to
those who follow after.”
In that beautiful image of one poet
following in the footsteps of another,
the follower is saved while the forerun-
ner is not. (Virgil returns to his abode
in Limbo after his trek through Purga-
tory.) Statius declares, “Per te poeta
fui, per te cristiano” (“Through you
I was made poet; through you, Chris-
tian”). In Dante’s universe no person

can give another more than that. Nor
does it much matter that the historical
Statius almost certainly did not convert
to Christianity. Dante contrived that
story to express his own immeasurable
gratitude to the poet who came to his
rescue in the dark wood of Inferno 1,
and whose Aeneid put him on the path
to becoming an epic poet.

Poets are not the only ones who love
Purgatorio. Most readers who make it
that far into The Divine Comedy find
its deeply human and terrestrial spirit
enchanting. Whereas Hell has no stars,
sunsets, or seashores, on Mount Purga-
tory we are once again under the open
sky, where the sun’s movement marks
the hours and seasons; where night
gives birth to day, and day dies into
night; and where the shimmering seas
of the southern hemisphere surround
the island from all sides.
A palpable terraphilia informs the
canticle. We find here a love of the
planet and everything that makes it
our cosmic home—its rivers, valleys,
seas, and mountains; its diurnal cy-
cles; its ever- changing light and color;
and above all its celestial dome. Not
to mention its plant life. After Dante
enters the earthly paradise of Eden at
the summit of Mount Purgatory, the
fair Matelda informs him that he has
risen above Earth’s zone of meteoro-
logical disturbance. The gentle breeze
that graces the ancient forest of Eden
comes, she says, from the heavenly
spheres as they move from east to west
around the planet. This rotational wind
scatters seeds from the flora of that
primal place to the rest of the planet
below: “And then the Earth, accord-
ing to its character/and where it is be-
neath the heavens, conceives /and by its
various powers bears various plants.”
In sum, all the plant life of our bur-
geoning, self- renewing biosphere has
Edenic origins.

The shades in Purgatory have much
to look forward to and work toward—
salvation awaits them at the end of
their penances—yet the first nine can-
tos of Purgatorio are filled with the
pathos of loss and backward glances
(“It was already the hour at which the
sailor’s / longing remembers home and
his heart softens, / having that day said
farewell to his dear ones”). The open-
ing cantos contain wistful accounts
by various shades about the fate of
their mortal remains, which were bur-
ied, lost, exhumed, or reburied back
on Italian soil. A profound nostalgia
for embodied life and the loved ones
whom time and death have separated
from the recently departed pervades
the “body biographies” of the souls in
Ante- Purgatory.
Dante’s pilgrim, fresh out of Hell,
shares that nostalgia. When a newly
arrived shade reaches out to embrace
him in Purgatorio 2, he eagerly re-
sponds with the same gesture. Three
times he tries to hug the shade, and
“three times behind him my hands
clasped each other/and...returned to
my own breast.” Dante forgets that he
is dealing with an “empty shade” and
not a human body. The spirit smiles
and moves back a little. Dante steps
forward. The spirit holds him back:
“Soavemente disse ch’io posasse.” If I
had to choose the most beautiful verse
of The Divine Comedy, it would be
that one. In Black’s translation: “And
he then, gently, asked me to stay still.”
In Bang’s: “He gently told me I should
let it go.” Bernard O’Donoghue: “Gen-
tly he told me I must take it easy.” The
verse is as suave as the word soave-
mente, which the English “gently” con-
veys only in part.
The scene has two classical prec-
edents. In book 11 of the Odyssey,
Odysseus attempts to embrace his
mother’s shade three times and comes
up empty- handed. Aeneas repeats Od-
ysseus’s gesture with the shade of his
father, Anchises, in Hades, in book
6 of the Aeneid. In Dante’s case, it is
the shade of a friend, or better, of a
fellow human being who turns out to
be his friend Casella. What often goes
unnoticed in the scene is that only fol-
lowing his failed embrace does Dante
recognize Casella, evidence enough of
how starved he is for human affection
after his journey through Hell. This is
not by chance, for Purgatorio figures
as the canticle of friendship par excel-
lence. In Hell, no matter how near to
one another the sinners may be, there
are no bonds of friendship (with the
possible exception of the three noble
Florentines in Inferno 16). The regen-
erative moral sanity of Purgatory man-
ifests itself in the goodwill that binds
all its souls, whether they knew one
another in life or not, in communities
of fellowship.

Whereas Hell and Paradise perdure
eternally, Purgatory did not exist before
the Incarnation and will cease to exist
come Judgment Day. In that respect it
resembles our own finite human lives,
which begin and end in time. The pen-
itents on the mountain’s seven terraces
purge their sins in days, years, and cen-
turies. In due time each one of them

Labors of Love


Robert Pogue Harrison

Bronzino: Allegorical Portrait of Dante, 1532–1533. The poet is holding a copy of
The Divine Comedy open to canto 25 of Paradiso and looking at Mount Purgatory.

Pr

ivate Collect

ion

*Parts of this essay are drawn from my
preface to Black’s translation.

Harrison 08 13 .indd 8 11 / 18 / 21 1 : 17 PM

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