Dante on EGD: 100 Days, 100 Cantos

 

               Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
               mi ritovai per una selva oscura
               che la diritta via era smarrita.

    Lately, with work becoming more and more demanding ... well, not really. Just the same three columns a week, though it feels harder. Anyway, with the news so grim... No, that isn't it. As grim as usual. Maybe it's just the author, so old and tired. That sounds more on point. Plus having to then migrate the columns here, and also think of something to dispatch the remaining four days, the whole process began to seem an intolerable burden, for me, and probably you too.

     So I've been thinking, lately, "How can I perk up EGD? Make it more, you know, fun." For me and, it would follow, you as well. Happy host, happy guest.

     Which led me, as always, back to Dante. As longtime readers know, I am a fan of the dour Florentine, and drop references to his epic Commedia now and then. I know how much readers love him. 

     Okay, maybe not. I know what you're thinking: what's fun about Dante? C'mon, his famous book (he does have others) is Commedia — "The Comedy." Something that begins in crisis but ends happily. (And, to be thorough, because he wrote it in Italian, instead of Latin, which at the time was seen as truckling to the masses. It can be argued that Dante invented modern Italian).

     Mostly now and then. A little Dante, I assumed, goes a long way.

     But what if I'm mistaken? It occurred to me: why limit myself? Self-restraint is so 2016. It's bad enough the Sun-Times expects me to march grimly from topic to topic, never spending much time on anything, assembling 795 words on some ephemeral news development that came out of nowhere and is forgotten just as quickly. Then 48 hours later, do it again, turning a spotlight on a puff of fluff.

     What if, instead of doing that, I settled in and really deep dived into something significant, timeless and eternal? Something that has held the thinking world in rapt attention for more than 700 years. Something like the Commedia. The perfect subject for a blog, when I am unconstrained by space considerations, or the need to either generate money or hold readers' interest. It's my hobby blog — shouldn't I be able to do as I please? To have fun?

     The Commedia offers so much. Demons and angels. Popes and Muslims. Satan and God. As you should know, it takes place over 100 cantos — chapters, basically, from cantus, Latin for "song" —  over three books. Inferno — the most famous one, with the pitchfork-wielding devils  — Purgatorio, or Purgatory's mountain, no font of fascination, true, but not without its merits. And Paradiso, aka heaven. Lots of light and swirling glory.

     Why not devote a day to each canto? Sure, news and current events and whatever piffle I put in the paper will be overlooked. But think of what is to be gained. By a careful, line-by-line analysis of the text, including the original Italian, as seen above, the famous opening lines.

     What could be more enjoyable Nothing that I can think of, that's for sure. So let's get to it.

     Nel mezzo del camnin — poet Robert Pinsky translates that as "Midway on our life's journey." Me, I would be more literal — "In the middle of the journey of our life." That more closely tracks the original. (Someday I have to assemble clunky translations of Dante, staring with Henry Francis Cary's, "In the midway of this our mortal life," though "midway" does allude to the carnival aspect of existence).

     Be honest. That "our" sticks out for you, in each translation, does it not? Me too — I was hoping you would notice. Is Dante being grandiose? One one hand, that would suit him. Full of himself, he is. Speaking in the first person plural does drip of regality, Queen Victoria's "We are not amused."

     Particularly when Dante immediately shifts into first person: "I found myself in a dark woods."

     Why the inconsistency? A mere mistake? Wouldn't a good copy editor leap to correct that? Impose parallelism. What are we to make of that shift? Luckily, like Dante, we are not alone (sigh, because he's soon joined by Virgil, who acts as his guide. One way of viewing the Commedia, perhaps unique to me, is as the original buddy adventure). 

By Gustave Dore

     Francesco Mazzoni's devotes 12, count 'em, 12 pages to analyzing this very couplet, in his essential Saggio di un nuovo commento alla “Divina Commedia”: “Inferno” –Canti I-III (Sansoni, 1967). 

     Summarizing mightily, Mazzoni says the shift is done to direct the reader from a universal human condition — feeling lost in middle age — to a specific personal experience of being dragged through hell by a dead Roman poet.

    Prue Shaw, whose new book I wrote about recently, puts it well: "But it is our life as well as his (nostra vita); we are implicated in the story. This double focus is present from the beginning. Dante stands for all of us, as a representative of humanity, an everyman figure."
     Dante is us. Okay, me anyway. And, admit it, probably you too. Sure, we don't all have our property confiscated while being banished form our hometowns, by the pope no less, after seeing the love of our lives marry someone else and then die at 24. But we all have our disappointments. 

     Dante returns to this shift later — in the opening Canto of Paradiso, for instance, when he says, basically, he's not smart enough to convey what he's seen: nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,/che dietro la memoria non può ire. or "our intellect sinks into an abyss /so deep that memory fails to follow it" before shifting back to the first person. The idea of sinking into an abyss is very 2026, is it not? Another reason I love Dante — always relevant. 

     But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Not jumping ahead is going to be a challenge. Patience. Returning to the opening tercet. To be fair, since I've previously commented on the general unreadability of John Took's Dante, I feel duty-bound to observe that he agrees with Shaw, assembling a moment of coherence when he points out, "Dante registers the journeying character of his own humanity and, as the understands it, the journeying character of humanity as a whole." Given the slim odds of many readers struggling over the 322 pages Took needed to get to this point, I feel I'm doing a service by sharing this with you now.

     Since some of you, hard as it may be to believe, are perhaps new to the Commedia, I should probably mention the terza rima rhyme scheme, which Dante invented, being a fan of rhyme, calling it concatenatio pulcra — "beautiful linkage."  The cantos are divided into stanzas of three lines — each line having 11 syllables, though only of course in the original Italian. 

     The first and third lines — ending vita and smaritta — rhyme, obviously, while the end of the second line, oscura, introduces a new final syllable that rhymes with the opening line of the second stanza, Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura," which in turn rhymes with the end of the third line, paura, while the second line introduces a new sound, forte, which links to the opening line of the third verse, morte. 

    Locking the whole thing together and giving it strong propulsive force.  Think ABA, BCB, CDC, and so on, for you diagramming at home.

    While we're giving backstory, I need to elaborate on mezzo — middle. The Commedia, while fiction, (it might seem odd to point this out, but otherwise you find yourself slipping into thinking that Dante actually did go to hell and report back what he found there) takes place over a specific period of time, Easter Week, 1300. So Dante, born around June, 1265 (he doesn't specify a day, but does say he's a Gemini, as am I, which I find very cool) was 35 years old, meaning that if we take the biblical lifespan of three score and 10, he was precisely halfway through his life (precision, as we will see, being a central value in Dante's writing). 

     Looking ahead, the opening line is the first of 575 biblical citations that Peter S. Hawkins counts in the Commedia.  Or as Hawkins explains:

    "A case in point is the very first line of the Commedia, coming immediately before Dante tells the reader of his terrifying experience in the dark wood and of his resolve to recall it, 'because of the good that I found there'. . . he also echoes King Hezekiah in Isaiah 38:10, whose song of thanksgiving is written down in the prophet's book to commemorate a rescue from mortal illness: 'I said: in the middle of my days I shall go to the gates of hell'."

    Indeed, as Hawkins continues: "the opening line of the Commedia reveals in miniature the biblical matrix of Dante's imagination. He assumes the Psalm's estimation of our lifespan, draws not only upon a single sentence, but upon a narrative moment in the book of Isaiah, and then adapts for his own purposes an ancient exegetical tradition on what it means to face Hell in the middle of one's days."

    Moving on to the second line, mi ritovai per una selva oscura, which Pinsky translates as, "I found myself/In dark woods." Charles Ross has it, "I found myself within a shadowed forest," which makes it seem like he's wandered into the Cook County Forest Preserve. (Cary's must be remembered; there is a mesmeric power to a bad translation: "I found me in a gloomy wood astray.").    

      Much thought has been expended on those trees.

     "Here the forest precedes the journey through Hell," Charles Ross and Allen Mandelbaum write in Lectura Dantis. "It is the dark wood of life on earth when lived in sin; it is Dante's interior wood; and it is the wood of political darkness, of Florence, of Italy, of papal corruption, of the absences of imperial authority."

     Reminding us that it isn't really a forest at all. The trees are, for want of a better word, notional.

     "We find ourselves in a forest that is not a forest, we see a hill that is not a hill, we look up toward a sun that is not a sun." Benedetto Croce writes in his La poesia di Dante (Bari: 1920).

     Hmmm ... it occurs to me, just now, that we've been going at this for quite a while, and not only have we not dispatched Canto 1, as planned, but we've only discussed the first line and started in on the second. There are 134 more to go, not to forget the 14,097 lines waiting beyond Canto 1 in the rest of  the Commedia. 

     Plus I'm not done with everything I have to say about that second line — I'm looking at nine more pages of notes.

     At this pace, well ... okay, let's be frank: 100 days are not going to do it. We'll try to be briefer tomorrow when we pick up with line four, Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cost dura. 

    Daunting? Not at all. As the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam writes, "Above all, the reading of Dante is an endless labor, for the more we succeed, the further we are from our goal. If the first reading brings on only shortness of breath and healthy fatigue, then equip yourself for subsequent readings with a pair of indestructible Swiss hobnailed boots. In all seriousness the question arises: how many shoe soles, how many oxhide soles, how many sandals did Alighieri wear out during the course of his poetic work, wandering the goat paths of Italy."  

     In that spirit, strap on your stoutest footwear, your Redwing boots, lace 'em up good and tight, and let's join Dante wandering around the back alleys of Ravenna. Thank you for embarking upon this adventure with me, this massive undertaking. I'd feel stupid doing it alone, and knowing that my EGD readership is right there with me, eagerly awaiting each new installment, is a great comfort. Truly, I'm blessed that you would agree to accompany me on such a massive undertaking. I'm sure when we are finished, some months or, heck, to be honest, years from now, we will find the effort well worth it.  Until then: onward!

     Oh, and to encourage brevity, I've kept my footnotes and sources separate, but if you want to read them — only another six pages — you can find them here. 

Tomorrow: Lines 4, 5 and 6.