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Purgatorio

This translation of the PURGATORIO is inscribed to Irma Brandeis and Helaine Newstead—as l’altro Guido had it:

CHÉ ’N TUTTE GUISE VI DEGGIO LAUDARE

THE DIVINE COMEDY: PURGATORIO

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

THE DIVINE COMEDY OF DANTE ALIGHIERI, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, is published in hardcover by the University of California Press: Volume I, INFERNO (1980); Volume II, PURGATORIO (1981); Volume III, PARADISO (1982). Of the three separate volumes of commentary under the general editorship of Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross, Volume I: THE CALIFORNIA LECTURA DANTIS: INFERNO was published by the University of California Press in 1998. For information, please address University of California Press, 2223 Fulton St., Berkeley, CA 94720.

Bantam Classic edition / January 1984

Bantam Classic reissue edition / August 2004

Published by

Bantam Dell

A division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.

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ISBN 9780553213447

eBook ISBN 9780553900552

v4.1

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Purgatorio (English Version)

Purgatorio (Italian Version)

INTRODUCTION

FOR THE Virgil of Dante’s Purgatorio, “love is the seed in you of every virtue/and of all acts deserving punishment” (XVII, 104–105). To find one same source for all good and all evil is to insist on the need for the education of desire. The descent through Hell and ascent of the seven terraces of the Mount of Purgatory are the tale of that education of Dante’s hungering, longing, thirsting will. After those terraces, at the threshold of the Earthly Paradise, Virgil can assure him: “Today your hungerings will find their peace /…My son, you’ve seen the temporary fire / and the eternal fire; you have reached / the place past which my powers cannot see. / I’ve brought you here through intellect and art; / from now on, let your pleasure be your guide; / you’re past the steep and past the narrow paths…./ Await no further word or sign from me: / your will is free, erect, and whole—to act / against that will would be to err: therefore / I crown and miter you over yourself” (XXVII, 115–142).

This tale forms part of what Thomas Carlyle called Dante’s “unfathomable heart-song.” But in the Purgatorio, the song is sung by a careful cartographer and passionately precise watcher of the skies, one who contains time and space in the calculated space and time of his own lines: “Reader, I am not squandering more rhymes / in order to describe their forms; since I / must spend elsewhere, I can’t be lavish here” (XXIV, 97–99); and then, “If, reader, I had ampler space in which / to write, I’d sing—though incompletely—that / sweet draught for which my thirst was limitless; / but since all of the pages predisposed / for this, the second canticle, are full, / the curb of art will not let me continue” (XXXIII, 136–141).

The space of Dante’s island Mountain of Purgatory is in the southern hemisphere of Earth, directly opposite the northern hemisphere’s Jerusalem. In that southern hemisphere, the hemisphere of water, it is the only body of land. Souls who will undergo purgation before their entry into Paradise disembark on the shore of the solitary island. Behind them lies their sea-voyage from the mouth of the Tiber, which “always is the place of gathering / for those who do not sink to Acheron” (II, 104–105), under the care of a “helmsman sent from Heaven,” in a “boat so light, so quick / that nowhere did the water swallow it” (II, 40–41). Ahead of Dante there lies the writing of the Purgatorio, also—by way of likeness—a sea-voyage: “To course across more kindly waters now / my talent’s little vessel lifts her sails, / leaving behind herself a sea so cruel” (I, 1–3).

The lower slopes of the island are a waiting place, the Ante-Purgatory (II–IX), where those who delayed their repentance until the end of life must wait longest before they are allowed to enter Purgatory.

Purgatory proper, occupying eighteen cantos of Purgatorio, is entered by a gate at the top of a three-step stairway (IX, 76–145) and consists of seven terraces. These are level indentations in the tall mountain; they are joined to each other by stairways carved through the rifted rock, with the ascent growing easier as one moves upward. Each of the terraces punishes a sin; and the hierarchy of sins places the most grievous sins on the lower terraces. In ascending order, the seven terraces punish—remedially—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice (coupled with its counter-sin, prodigality), gluttony, and lust.

The Earthly Paradise occupies the summit of the island mountain and the last, and rather autonomous, six cantos of Purgatorio (XXVIII–XXXIII). (Indeed, this mountain may also be called the Mountain of Earthly Paradise, the mountain foreshadowed by the “mountain of delight” that Dante cannot climb in Canto I of the Inferno—and it is probably the same peak Ulysses sees at the end of Canto XXVI of the Inferno, the summit in sight of which Ulysses, unaided by grace, shipwrecks.)

Time is charted with equal care: Dante the voyager moves through these three regions of Purgatory in an ascent that most paraphrasts explain as lasting from the morning of Easter Sunday, April 10, 1300, to noon of Wednesday, April 13. Where the Inferno begins at night in the “shadowed forest,” with the entry into Hell, or, more precisely, to the Ante-Inferno, on the evening of Good Friday (Inf. II, 1–3), Purgatorio begins shortly before dawn, the entry to Purgatory proper, two hours after dawn, and to the Earthly Paradise at dawn.

But Dante climbs only by day. The first night is spent in that portion of the Ante-Purgatory called the Valley of the Rulers, where men of state who, in life, delayed their repentance through negligence wait (IX); the second night is spent on the fourth terrace, the terrace of sloth, at the end of his climb through the terraces of the four weightier sins, at the threshold of the fifth terrace (XVIII, 143 to XIX, 36). The third night is spent, after Dante’s passage through fire on the seventh terrace (this is the “temporary fire,” as Hell’s fire is the “eternal fire” of XXVII, 127–128), the terrace of the lustful, at the threshold of the Earthly Paradise (XXVII). On each of these equidistant nights, Dante dreams: first the dream of the Eagle (IX, 13–32); then the dream of the Siren and the nameless “alert and saintly” woman, (XIX, 7–33); and finally the dream of Leah, exemplar of the active life, and Rachel, exemplar of the meditative life (XXVII, 91–114).

The movements of heavenly bodies, somewhat clairvoyantly referred to by Virgil but never directly present in Hell, punctuate Purgatorio throughout. References play between the southern skies of Purgatory, present there for Dante, and our skies, the skies of the northern hemisphere, present to us and to Dante returned from his voyage. Here, in our world, Jerusalem marks the center, and the mouth of the Ganges marks the eastern limit; while the western limit is marked by the Straits of Gibraltar or, in its stead, either Gades (our Cadiz) or the River Ebro. Reading the hands of his Earth clock, Dante can amplify the hour of sunset in Purgatory thus: “Just as, there where its Maker shed His blood, / the sun shed its first rays, and Ebro lay / beneath high Libra, and the ninth hour’s rays / were scorching Ganges’ waves; so here, the sun / stood at the point of day’s departure…” (XXVII, 1–5).

The planets (of which the sun, for Dante, is one), the constellations, the hours—all participate in these recordings.

Sometimes Dante’s recordings are direct, even when allegorical, as in the vision of the four stars that symbolize the four “natural” virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance). There his most memorable juxtaposition of Purgatorial skies and our skies concludes his first scanning of Purgatory’s skies (I, 13–27):

The gentle hue of oriental sapphire

in which the sky’s serenity was steeped—

its aspect pure as far as the horizon—

brought back my joy in seeing just as soon

as I had left behind the air of death

that had afflicted both my sight and breast.

The lovely planet that is patroness

of love made all the eastern heavens glad,

veiling the Pisces in the train she led.

Then I turned to the right, setting my mind

upon the other pole, and saw four stars

not seen before except by the first people.

Heaven appeared to revel in their flames:

o northern hemisphere, because you were

denied that sight, you are a widower!

Sometimes he is obsessively periphrastic; at a pole far from plain style (and Dante experiments with all styles), he lets us know that it is 3 p.m., the beginning of vespers, “there” in Purgatory by a likeness that measures the morning span between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m.: “As many as the hours in which the sphere / that’s always playing like a child appears / from daybreak to the end of the third hour, / so many were the hours of light still left / before the course of day had reached sunset; / vespers was there; and where we are, midnight” (XV, 1–6).

And at times Dante records the skies not through the movements of stellar bodies but through the motions of the soul, as in the six lines for which Paget Toynbee, in 1900, could total up sixteen translations into English independent of translations forming part of full translations of the Purgatorio or the Comedy: “It was the hour that turns seafarers’ longings / homeward—the hour that makes their hearts grow tender / upon the day they bid sweet friends farewell; / the hour that pierces the new traveler / with love when he has heard, far off, the bell / that seems to mourn the dying of the day” (VIII, 1–6).

The heavens serve not only to measure time there; Dante will also use our skies here as likenesses of what he saw there, most indelibly in reinforcing his first vision of Beatrice in the Comedy (XXX, 22–39):

I have at times seen all the eastern sky

becoming rose as day began and seen,

adorned in lovely blue, the rest of heaven;

and seen the sun’s face rise so veiled that it

was tempered by the mist and could permit

the eye to look at length upon it; so,

within a cloud of flowers that were cast

by the angelic hands and then rose up

and then fell back, outside and in the chariot,

a woman showed herself to me; above

a white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs;

her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red.

Within her presence, I had once been used

to feeling—trembling—wonder, dissolution;

but that was long ago. Still, though my soul,

now she was veiled, could not see her directly,

by way of hidden force that she could move,

I felt the mighty power of old love.

This tight construct of space and time serves as container for a cantica less dispersive and digressive than the Inferno, with its crowded population and its percussiveness.

Of course, even in Purgatorio, Dante can, with Infern-al velocity, in thirty lines, examine the nature of attentiveness, refute the Platonic doctrine of the plurality of souls, offer us the vision of a farmer preventing thieves from entering his field, conjure hard ascents and descents in four Italian hilly terrains, and define Virgil as “the guide who gave me hope and was my light” (IV, 1–30).

And he can dart, in his dance of likenesses, from “a fledgling stork” to the “iron of the arrow” touching the “bowstring,” to “leavings left on the table”—a likeness of the blood the veins have not drunk up—to seeing the fetus as a “sea-sponge,” to invoking “the sun’s heat that, when combined / with sap that flows from vines, is then made wine,” to summoning “the saturated air,” which, reflecting “the rays the sun has sent, / takes rainbow colors as its ornament,” and then to conjuring the flame that follows after “the fire whenever fire moves” (with the poet’s own pace not unlike the flame’s)—justifying, as much as does the combustible thread of exposition along which these flames run, the conclusion: “This is the cause of your astonishment” (XXV, 10–108). The end of the previous canto is not much less various (XXIV, 94–154), as Dante’s likenesses move from a horseman who “sometimes gallops out, / leaving behind his troop of riders, so / that he may gain the honor of the first / clash,” to “little, eager, empty-headed children / who beg—but he of whom they beg does not / reply, but to provoke their longing, he / holds high, and does not hide, the thing they want,” to seeing himself as “a scared young animal,” to the red glow of “glass or metal…seen within a furnace,” to the “breeze of May that—heralding / the dawning of the day—when it is steeped / in flowers and in grass, stirs fragrantly,” in a passage that ends by blessing those “whose hungering is always in just measure” but belies that “just measure” with Dante’s own measureless hungering for metaphor.

But, generally, the similes of Purgatorio share the tighter “curb of art” and sense of rite that rein the actions, rhetoric, spacings, and timings of Purgatorio: a gravity, a concentration, that relies on prefatory announcement and alerting, on formal greetings and valedictions, on strategies of stylization and sacralization.

The line of rite begins in the first canto, with its formal preannouncement by Cato: “Go then; but first / wind a smooth rush around his waist and bathe / his face to wash away all of Hell’s stains” (I, 94–96), and then its emblematic etching of a shore where only pliant rushes can grow (I, 100–105):

This solitary island, all around

its very base, there where the breakers pound,

bears rushes on its soft and muddy ground.

There is no other plant that lives below:

no plant with leaves or plant that, as it grows,

hardens—and breaks beneath the waves’ harsh blows.

That line of rite continues in the angelic apparition of Canto II, the first of a series (Cantos VIII, IX, XII, XVII, XIX); in the formal entry to Purgatory with its three steps and seven P’s (for peccato, sin) traced on Dante’s forehead; in the astonished shades’ repeated recognitions of Dante’s having a material body; in the sequence of dreams noted above (Cantos IX, XIX, XXVII), each dream preceded, in the sentence announcing it, by the time of its occurrence, pre-dawn; in the embeddings, within this verbal artifact, of artifacts that include the wall reliefs and pavement reliefs of the first terrace; in the double immersion of Dante, first in Lethe, the classic river of forgetfulness, erasing the memory of misdoing, then with Eunoe, the river of recall, Dante’s invention, restoring memory of the good we have done; in the retinue of Beatrice, with her seven handmaids, four for the “natural” virtues, three for the theological; and in the vast processional in the Earthly Paradise.

That line will be reinforced by two complementary aspects of Purgatorio: its more frequent intervals of solitude or shared solitude—of Dante or of what he sees (Cato, Sordello, Matilda)—and the choral sense that makes its terraces, as Francesco D’Ovidio had it, a “colossal monastery,” with its hymns and psalms, rapid Biblical and liturgical inserts, its Latin and paraphrases of Latin joined by citation and translations (and a mistranslation) of Virgil, and, twice, by Dante’s own Latin inserts.

Rite will also find support in rhetorical symmetries, as in the sequence of thirteen tercets (XII, 25–63) in which four tercets beginning with “I saw” are followed by four beginning with exclamatory “O” ’s and four beginning with “it showed,” with that sequence followed by a summative thirteenth tercet, where the lines begin, respectively, “I saw,” “o,” and “it showed”: “I saw Troy turned to caverns and to ashes; / o Ilium, your effigy in stone— / it showed you there so squalid, so cast down!” (XII, 61–63).

However sardonically placed it is, even Dante’s designation of his long polemic against Italy and Florence as “digression” (VI, 128), his only use of the word in all the Comedy, involves some self-conscious sense of transgression and reinforces our sense of art as rite in Purgatorio.

For similes that—unlike the staccato, nervous examples cited above—participate in the formal ritual climate, witness the doves (II, 124–132 ), the sheep moving out of the fold (III, 79–87), even the elaborated street-scene of the dice-players (VI, 1–12), and the corbels (X, 130–135), and the likeness that embraces Virgil and Statius as herdsmen and Dante as goat (XXVII, 76–87):

Like goats that, when they grazed, were swift and tameless

along the mountain peaks, but now are sated,

and rest and ruminate—while the sun blazes—

untroubled, in the shadows, silently,

watched over by the herdsman as he leans

upon his staff and oversees their peace;

or like the herdsman in the open fields,

spending the night beside his quiet flock,

watching to see that no beast drives them off;

such were all three of us at that point—they

were like the herdsmen, I was like the goat;

upon each side of us, high rock walls rose.

If Purgatorio is more circumscribed than Inferno, it is because of the “immense desire” that it abets and must contain (IV, 29 ). Dante’s constant intellectual and visual curiosity now has “natural thirst,” the thirst to know and to know that which grace alone can offer, as its source: “The natural thirst that never can be quenched / except by water that gives grace—the draught / the simple woman of Samaria sought— / tormented me” (XXI, 1–4).

Dante drives and is driven beyond the melancholia of Virgil’s injunction, Virgil’s questioning of questing, his reasoning’s self-delimiting sadness, its awareness that it can describe what is but cannot supply the why (III, 37–45):

“Confine yourselves, o humans, to the quia;

had you been able to see all, there would

have been no need for Mary to give birth.

You saw the fruitless longing of those men

who would—if reason could—have been content,

those whose desire eternally laments:

I speak of Aristotle and of Plato—

and many others.” Here he bent his head

and said no more, remaining with his sorrow.

Dante’s need to array thirsts and hungerings and longings is as “limitless” as his thirst for the waters of Eunoe in the final canto (XXXIII, 138–139). When Dante receives an answer, he continues: “I am more hungry now for satisfaction” (XV, 58). His soul tastes “that food which, even as / it quenches hunger, spurs the appetite” (XXXI, 129–130).

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