Dante Alighieri, who died 700 years ago today, is kind of a big deal. Italy considers him the father of modern Italian and last year officially declared March 25 a national holiday, Dantedì or ‘Dante Day’. But he isn’t just a national hero; his Divine Comedy (originally just Comedy) is sometimes called the greatest work of literature in the Western literary tradition. The Inferno is the world’s second most translated book after the Bible. The best-known religious epic in the English language, Paradise Lost, is essentially John Milton’s attempt to correct The Comedy for a Protestant readership. Echoes of Dante’s writing can be sensed in countless works of art (books, musical works, paintings, TV shows, movies, video games, you name it). Writers from Chaucer to Balzac to T.S. Eliot have studied him in awe. Osip Mandelstam always carried copy of La Commedia with him just in case Stalin’s goons arrested him that day and Borges said, “The Comedy is a book we must all read. Not to do it means to deprive ourselves of the greatest gift literature has to offer, it means to condemn ourselves to a weird asceticism.”
For me, The Divine Comedy has always seemed hopelessly inaccessible, a bit like trying to climb a hill guarded jealously by a leopard, lion and she-wolf. How does it stump me? Let me count the ways…In the first place, I can’t read the original. Translations of any poem, let alone this one, are usually foul and I don’t see myself mastering 13th-century Tuscan vulgate any time soon. Secondly, the Bible is key to understanding The Comedy and I don’t know much about the Bible. Thirdly, the poem is crowded with allusions to people and events that were clearly front-page stuff in 1300 but that are less well known in 2021. Fourthly, there are parts that seem like slapstick but I don’t want to giggle in the wrong place. Fifthly, Guelphs and Ghibellines–ugh. There’s a sixthly, seventhly, eighthly and so on, but you get the idea.
But centuries of discerning readers can’t be wrong and they all agree The Divine Comedy is pretty hot stuff. I have decided that I really want to make an honest attempt at getting to Heaven, so have started looking into how to make it as easy as possible for myself. Based on somewhat chaotic researches over the last couple of months, I would like to share seven books that may help anglophone readers make progress on the well-trodden path to Paradiso.
- Dante (2020) by Alessandro Barbero
Alessandro Barbero is possibly the first medieval historian to be unironically described as a superstar. Pretty much everyone in Italy knows who he is. He is a novelist — he won a prestigious literary prize (Strega) for Master Pyle’s Bella Vita and Other Peoples’ Wars (1995) — but what he is really celebrated for is his ability to describe events of the past (especially wars) in an entertaining way for a lay audience. If you look him up on the internet, you can see he has given lectures on subjects as varied as Catherine of Siena, Garibaldi and Margaret Thatcher. In this new biography of Dante, which has been translated into several languages including English, he uses his super powers to explain the implications of the documentary evidence we have of Dante’s real life. After reading it, I was grateful for having a much clearer idea of Dante’s environment, of his place in it, of the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, of the Popes and Kings, and of many other aspects important for getting what’s going on in the poem.
- The Divine Comedy (1977) by John Ciardi
I’m not saying this is the best translation in English but I am saying it’s one I enjoy. Ciardi (1916-1986) was an American poet, teacher and etymologist who was pretty well known in his lifetime but whose popularity has since declined. He makes it easy for beginners, striving to communicate the poem’s essence without being boring or opaque. I especially like the brief notes at the end of each canto and the introduction to the book, which gives a nice broad sense of the poem’s structure.
- “Dante” (Selected Essays, 1932) by T.S. Eliot
It’s interesting to read what other poets admired in Dante’s poetry. In this essay, Eliot explains what it is that he finds attractive in the Divine Comedy. He declares that the final canto of Il Paradiso is “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach” and when you read it you have to agree. Of the Comedy, he says, “The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those that one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.” Going into specifics, he argues that Dante is extraordinary for ‘his universal mastery in the use of images’ and for drawing the peaks and valleys of our shared experience:
“[T]he Divine Comedy is a complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion…Every degree of the feeling of humanity, from lowest to highest, has, moreover, an intimate relation to the next above and below, and all fit together according to the logic of sensibility.”
- William Blake. Dante’s Divine Comedy (2020) Sebastian Schütze & Maria Antonietta Terzoli
Sometimes it helps to have pictures. William Blake (1757-1827) not only wrote dazzling poetry himself, he also illustrated the poems of others. I knew that Blake made illustrations for Paradise Lost, but only recently learned that in the last years of his life he produced 102 illustrations for The Divine Comedy, despite disagreeing with Dante’s theology. He died without completing the work and now the drawings and paintings are dispersed throughout the world. This book showcases his work, alongside the relevant excerpts from the poem. If you want to get a taste of the drawings, explore seven of them courtesy of the Tate Gallery.
- Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (2000) by Peter S. Hawkins
Lots of scholars over the centuries have wondered about what Dante read, they’ve even tried to reconstruct ‘Dante’s library’. Former Professor of Religion and Literature at Yale, Peter Hawkins here is not so interested in making a bibliography as he is in considering the wide range of Dante’s reading and particularly the way he read, as classical texts and personal events become filtered through his knowledge of and belief in the Christian narrative. Admittedly I haven’t read this yet but it’s on the wish list! Hawkins can be seen talking about Dante in the video below:
6. More Favourable Waters (2021) ed. Marco Sonzogni & Timothy Smith
Demonstrating that Dante is truly a universal poet, More Favourable Waters has just been released (dropping on March 25) in New Zealand Aotearoa. Published by Cuba Press, this volume is an anthology of poems by 33 of the country’s best poets. Each poem has been written in response to Dante’s writing. One of the poets is Kay McKenzie Cooke, who I talked to last year about her recently published novel Craggan Dhu. And who has also published several fine volumes of poetry.
