The New York Review of Books - USA (2021-12-16)

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