Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity

337 Pages·2014·3.68 MB·English

by  Prue Shaw

For Claerwen and Lucinda
A poem is made of words,
not ideas.
..
—MALLARMÉ, IN CONVERSATION
WITH DEGAS

CONTENTS
Introduction
Dramatis Personae
1. Friendship
2. Power
3. Life
4. Love
5. Time
6. Numbers
7. Words
Excursus on Metre
Glossary
Principal Events in Dante’s Life
Further Reading and Notes
Acknowledgements
Art Credits
Index
INTRODUCTION
M
OST ENGLISH READERS KNOW THAT DANTE IS A GREAT POET, but few of them
have read him. His masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, is an adventure story: a
journey into the mysteries of the afterlife, a pilgrimage through hell, purgatory
and paradise towards a final, face-to-face meeting with God. Its broader
concerns are those of any thinking person, in any time and place. What does it
mean to be a human being? How are we to judge human behaviour? What
matters in a life or in a death? These themes are explored in a gripping narrative,
and in language that is uniquely vital and expressive.
The Commedia, to give it its correct title, is the greatest poem of the Middle
Ages and perhaps the greatest single work of Western literature. It was a huge
success in its time, quickly becoming the medieval equivalent of a best-seller. It
has continued to be read by most educated people up to the present day, and has
inspired poets, artists and composers for over seven hundred years. Yet to a
modern reader, reading for pleasure, the idea of a poem over fourteen thousand
lines long about hell, purgatory and paradise can seem vast, alien and forbidding.
This book aims to introduce the reader to Dante’s poem. It is intended for the
general reader who loves literature and poetry—for language lovers everywhere,
whether or not they know Italian. My main concern is to communicate the power
of Dante’s poetry—the imaginative power, the emotional intensity, the linguistic
brilliance, and the skill with which he orchestrates his themes. Dante had an
exceptional capacity to evoke the visual, the visceral; to imagine a world and
give it form and substance with incredible verbal economy and precision. By
conjuring up the sights and sounds and smells of the familiar world with
unparalleled immediacy, he was able to lead his readers through invented worlds
that were utterly convincing though infinitely strange. He populated them with
individuals whose emotions and moral predicaments are tangible and
compelling. Those he encounters speak with eloquence and their interchanges
with Dante are full of drama. He expressed the whole range of human feelings in
their raw power and endless variety: hope, fear, rage, delight, remorse, nostalgia,
yearning, affection, disgust, anxiety, sorrow, astonishment, melancholy,
curiosity, despair.
The qualities of imagination and expression, the emotions, come to us in
stories—the story of Dante’s journey and the stories of those he encounters on
the way. All those he meets have been judged by God: a final and absolute
decision has been made about the acceptability of their behaviour during their
life, and we know what it is. The counterpoint between this knowledge and the
sympathy, or lack of it, we feel for them creates a space in which the ultimate
meaning of human behaviour is brought into sharp relief. Anyone who has ever
felt the need to think about their own behaviour or somebody else’s, and to try to
understand its meaning, should find the poem riveting.
The way I have chosen to introduce the poem is unorthodox. I do not offer a
digest or summary of the facts of Dante’s life, or the stages of his journey to the
three realms of the afterlife. Such accounts can overwhelm with detail,
especially if the reader is new to the poem, and make it difficult to recognise the
power of its central ideas. Each chapter of the book is organised around a theme,
and illustrated by key episodes from the poem. I have linked encounters and
scenes that are widely spaced in the narrative in order to demonstrate their
connections, rather than moving in methodical fashion from one episode to the
next.
The way Dante orchestrates his themes is one of the miracles of the poem,
and not easy to pick up on a first reading, any more than someone listening to
Wagner’s Ring cycle will immediately appreciate the intricacy and complexity
of the way he handles his leitmotifs. One senses that Dante had an
extraordinarily rich map of the whole Commedia in his head as he was writing it,
and an ear highly attuned to the resonances his stories had with one another. My
hope is that these seven chapters will give some sense of this. I do not aim to
save you the trouble of reading the Commedia, as handbooks to the poem
sometimes seem to do. My aim is to fire you with the desire to pick up a copy
and start reading now.
Dante’s life and work were shaped by two friends of his youth in Florence.
Both friends were poets. One of them, who died young, he meets in purgatory.
The other was not someone he could meet in the poem, since he was not yet
dead when the journey to the afterlife supposedly takes place. But this other,
“best” friend—an atheist, as it happens—left an indelible impression on the
poem, and is one of its most haunting presences. The first chapter sets these two
friendships against the background of the city’s troubled political and social
history. The theme is literary friendship and rivalry, but it is also political
instability and turmoil.
These two key strands in Dante’s formative experience—poetry and politics
—run in parallel but are quite distinct at this stage of his life. In his thirties, for
the best part of a decade, he was a politician as well as a poet, passionately
involved in the public life of his city. In 1302 his political activities led to his
being exiled when he wound up on the losing side of factional struggles in
Florence. The Florentine years are the seedbed of his mature poetry. What brings
his poetry to maturity is the experience of exile.
The opening chapter shows where Dante started, and how his failure as a
politician is inseparable from his achievement as a poet. A distinguished
nineteenth-century Italian said that Florence should have erected a statue not to
Dante but to the obscure Florentine official who sent him into exile. Without the
experience of exile Dante would not—could not—have written the Commedia.
The second chapter is about art and its relationship to power. Dante calls to
account the great players on the world stage—popes and emperors—who have
the power to change the way things are but fail to do so. The archvillain is a
pope, Boniface VIII, one among many corrupt churchmen Dante attacks with
startling directness. The fate of these unprincipled popes in the afterlife is a
vision of Brueghel-like intensity and perversion.
The relationship between biography and art—between lived experience and
its imaginative transformation into literature—is the theme of the third chapter.
The poem seems richly autobiographical but resists being pinned down in these
terms. It lures us towards the dramas of its author’s life, but at the same time it
speaks of universal concerns, leaving its author partly shrouded in mystery. Just
as he is both the writer and the pilgrim making the journey, Dante is himself and
everyman.
In the Commedia love offers a key to understanding human behaviour. The
fourth and central chapter shows how Dante treated the theme of love as a young
poet, and how he developed and explored it in his maturity. Dante was driven by
the need to reconcile a sense of the seemingly irresistible power of love, desire
and sexual attraction as forces in human life with the notion of free will—with
his conviction that human beings are able to make meaningful choices about
their lives and actions, and can be held accountable for the choices they make.
Hell and paradise are eternal, outside or beyond time. Time can have no part
in their workings. But in purgatory time is vitally important: some of Dante’s
most lyrical and evocative passages mark the passing of time in the middle
realm. In the course of his journey Dante encounters many people he knew when