Dante's Inferno : the Indiana critical edition

428 Pages·1995·33.57 MB·English

by  Dante Alighieri

Dante's
INFERNO
MARK
Dante's
INFERNO
The Indiana Critical Edition
Translated and edited by
Mark Musa
Indiana University Press
BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dante Alighieri, 1265-132l.
[Inferno. English)
Dante's Inferno: the Indiana critical edition / translated and
edited by Mark Musa.
p. cm. - (Indiana masterpiece editions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-33943-0 (cloth). - ISBN 978-0-253-20930-6 (pbk.)
1. Hell-Poetry. 2. Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Inferno.
3. Hell in literature. I. Musa, Mark. II. Title. III. Series.
PQ4315.2.M775 1995
851'.1-dc20 94-20237
7 8 9 10 12 11
For Alec Marc Musa
on his entrance to the world

CONTENTS
ix
Preface
The INFERNO,
translated by Mark Musa / 3
Critical Essays
Read It and (Don't) Weep: Textual Irony in the
Inferno, 253
BY LAWRENCE BALDASSARO
Dante's Beloved Yet Damned Virgil, 266
BY GUY P. RAFFA
I: Breaking the Silence, 286
Inferno
BY DENISE HEILBRONN-GAINES
Dante's Canto IY, 299
Inferno,
BY AMILCARE A. IANNUCCI
Behold Francesca Who Speaks So Well V), 310
(Inferno
BY MARK MUSA
Iconographic Parody in XXI, 325
Inferno
BY CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ
Virgil and Dante as Mind-Readers XXI and XXIII), 340
(Inferno
BY ROBERT HOLLANDER
vii
The Plot-Line of Myth in Dante's 353
Inferno,
BY RICARDO J. QUINONES
Hell as the Mirror Image of Paradise,
BY JOAN M. FE"RRANTE
Dante in the Cinematic Mode: An Historical Survey of 381
Dante Movies, BY JOHN P. WELLE
Inferno 397
Selected Biblio9raphy:
Contributors 399
401
Index
viii I CONTENTS
PREFACE
Accompanying my verse translation of Dante's are ten essays
Inferno
which offer diverse approaches to a number of different aspects of the
first canticle of the
Divine Comedy.
In the opening essay Lawrence Baldassaro regards the "starting point
that necessitates the pilgrim's difficult journey through Hell" to be the al
legoricallandscape of Canto I of "a physical manifestation of the
Inferno,
pilgrim's contaminated soul." Because of his fallen condition, the way up
and out of the "selva oscura" is closed. Climbing the hill is impossible be
cause of the pilgrim's pride, which will be erased in Purgatory in a
similarly allegorical setting. Baldassaro asks, if Inferno is a representation
of universal sinfulness and Purgatory a point-by-point erasure of sin, how
does Inferno exhibit these sins? The allegory of Canto I gives way to dra
matic manifestations, he says, in which the pilgrim interacts and gradually
arrives at a "subjective awareness of his own capacity for wrongdoing, "
recognizing step by step the degree of his own contamination. Dante uses
himself as an example; he depicts his sinners "not as awkward allegorical
representations of specific sins, but as compelling human beings." The pil
grim's "mimetic response to the sinners he encounters" brings him and
them to life dramatically, not didactically.
The allegorical first scene is "negative potentiality" and the rounds of
Hell fulfillment of it. This is not a fact-finding journey the pilgrim is
taking. His behavior that "calls attention to itself" reflects the "ironic
stance that distinguishes the voice of the poet from that of the pilgrim."
Each of the sinners the pilgrim meets is a "potential other self." The pil
grim is a "reader" who tests "'texts'" in the Inferno, one who cannot see
the whole and whose limitations are indicated by his imitative responses.
In turn, the reader is a pilgrim to whom Dante speaks directly in his ad
dresses to the reader. But Baldassaro disagrees with Auerbach that Dante
misleads us by misleading his protagonist; rather he gives us credit for
being able to sort out the "ironic duality of the distinct voices of the poet
ix