With good luck and strength, I hope to be able to proceed, however slowly, with pilgrim and guide to visit the next realm of Purgatorio and to see those content in fire,

because they hope to come to the blessed

people whenever that time may be.

Tom Simone

5 January 2007

Introduction

Dante’s place in world literature

When Dante composed his Comedy in the early 14th century, the poem quickly took its place as a major work of Italian literature. In a world of manuscript transmission, hundreds of copies were in circulation in the following century, including an impressive array of detailed commentaries. By the latter part of that century, Dante’s importance was recognized far beyond Italy, as seen in Chaucer’s many references to the Italian poet in his work.

The appeal of Dante also quickly spread to the medium of painting and, with the introduction of printing, into many annotated and illustrated editions. In the visual arts, Signorelli’s New Chapel at the cathedral in Orvieto, Botticelli’s hundred drawing sequence illustrating the poem, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican are three of the most prominent examples of Dante’s fame and influence. After a waning of interest in Dante in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, fascination with the poet and the poem increased in the early Romantic period and has continued unabated ever since. In recent years numerous editions, translations, commentaries, scholarly studies, and series of illustrations have appeared in an impressive stream. To this day Dante remains one of the towering figures of world literature.

What accounts for the immediate and enduring appeal of Dante’s poem?

Dante tells the story of the journey of an endangered pilgrim through the known cosmos and the realms of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise to allow him to see the spectrum of human reality and the glory of divine origins that lead to salvation. Dante makes the pilgrim a version of himself and creates two major voices: the voice of the pilgrim experiencing the journey for the first time, and the voice of the narrator shaping and retelling the journey.

The fate of the individual pilgrim has its own urgency in the question of his knowledge, belief, and fate, but as the poem indicates in its opening line, the single pilgrim’s fate is parallel to all of human experience: In the middle of the journey of our life…

1

Inferno

Dante is careful from the beginning to emphasize that the journey of the pilgrim is representative of human need in general even though it is interwoven so fully with his own historical experience. Consequently he measures the pilgrim’s journey as in the middle of “our life,” that is, at the time of the action of the poem in 1300, he is 35 years of age and at the center of the biblical human life span of seventy years. The spectrum of all of human life, as portrayed in the poem, will unfold with breathtaking variety, drama, thought, and beauty.

The poem begins in high drama with the pilgrim’s life hanging in the balance. He finds himself in a chaotic wooded place, and three beasts cut off his escape up a hill of hope and promise back into the darkness. The faint figure of a man appears to console and lead the pilgrim. This is the Roman poet Virgil, who becomes a character of great rational and cultural experience in the poem, a model of the poet in his own time as well as for later readers like Dante, and now a guide for the struggling pilgrim. Since the pilgrim cannot escape the menace of the beasts, he has to take the dark road through Inferno and the realm of the lost souls before he can return to the mountain of hope, which is transformed into the mountain of Purgatory in the second part of the poem.

Dante’s Inferno remains the most extensive and dramatic portrayal of the underworld of the dead in Western literature. While Purgatorio and Paradiso show the recuperation of the human soul and its triumph in the presence of the transcendent deity, Inferno explores the world of souls remaining in unhappiness and cut off from the primal sources of life and renewal. The world of the early 21st century echoes with images and fears of a chaotic existence with wars, natural disasters, crime, murders, assaults of all kind haunting our daily awareness. As I write this, we in Vermont are reeling under a barrage of shootings and murders in a local elementary school while scanning the horizon for news of foreign wars and looming hurricanes. Dante’s Inferno, while coming from a far distant time in the Middle Ages, speaks of such fears and troubling events so full of pain and unhappiness that our sense of a meaningful and orderly life is called into doubt.

Inferno is full of division, both of kinds of transgression and of one soul from another. Here the great personalities cling to their separateness and their own concepts of reality. We encounter such memorable figures as the amorous Francesca (Canto 5), the grand general Farinata (Canto 10), the corrupt pope Nicholas III (Canto 19), and the bold, ever seeking Ulysses (Canto 26). The external torments of these lost souls are endlessly varied and often fascinating in their inventiveness and sharpness: souls submerged in mud, fire raining down, distorted human figures, and souls frozen in ice.

But as inventive and varied as he makes the external effects of Inferno on its inhabitants, Dante gives dramatic and even psychological particularity Inferno

Introduction to Canto 1

The pilgrim awakes in a dark wood.

A hill lit by the sun

The pilgrim opposed by three beasts

The appearance of the poet Virgil to be the guide The first canto works as both an introduction to Inferno and the Comedy overall.