Forese is seen here chiefly as intimate friend of Dante; but his exchange of sonnets with Dante was so intemperate and scurrilous that Dante, recalling that and obviously much more in their years of friendship together, can only feel shame (XXIII, 115–117). But certainly the energies of invective, venom, and execration share place with the energy of love in Dante’s descent and ascent.
The remorse of both Forese (who died in 1296)—distant relative of Dante’s wife, Gemma Donati—and Dante, and Forese’s tenderness with respect to his widow, Nella (XXIII, 85–93) and sister Piccarda (XXIV, 10–16), whom we shall meet in Canto III of Paradiso, are followed by his prophecy of the death of his brother, Corso Donati. Corso (c. 1250–1308), one of the most arrogant and violent protagonists of Florentine politics, did not participate directly in the bloody brawl of May Day, 1300, between the White Guelphs (“the party of the woods” of Inf. VI, 60–72, and Dante’s own party) and the Black Guelphs (Corso’s party), but he was the principal conspirator in the Black cabal that followed that brawl. He had conspired from a distance and was condemned to death in contumacy. With the entry of Charles de Valois into Florence in 1301, the exiled Blacks—abetted, as always, by Boniface VIII—regained control of Florence. By April, 1302, more than six hundred Whites were exiled, among them Dante himself. Corso was the chief power in the city after that, and the figure most hated by the banished Whites. But it was the hatred of those within Florence that finally overthrew him in 1308. In flight, he was caught by Catalan mercenaries and may indeed have been killed in the way Dante describes, dragged at the tail of a horse (XXIV, 82–87).
In the Earthly Paradise, Virgil talks no more. Only his smile speaks in XXVIII, 147, and only his eyes speak in XXIX, 55–57. His words concluding Canto XXVII were indeed his valediction, as Dante will see when he turns around to share with Virgil the awesome wonder of re-encountering Beatrice, only to find that Virgil has vanished (XXX, 43–54, where the “ancient mother” is, of course, Eve):
I turned around and to my left—just as
a little child, afraid or in distress,
will hurry to its mother—anxiously,
to say to Virgil: “I am left with less
than one drop of my blood that does not tremble:
I recognize the signs of the old flame.”
But Virgil had deprived us of himself,
Virgil, the gentlest father, Virgil, he
to whom I gave my self for my salvation;
and even all our ancient mother lost
was not enough to keep my cheeks, though washed
with dew, from darkening again with tears.
The chief speaker of the Earthly Paradise is Beatrice, the “soul more worthy than I am” of Virgil’s account in Inf. I, 122. Born in 1266, the year after Dante’s birth, Beatrice is loved by Dante from his boyhood and celebrated by Dante—after her death in 1290—in his Vita Nuova. If that is already a saint’s life, with Beatrice as implicit incarnation of the divine way of the power of grace, the Vita Nuova did not yet contain polemic against the way of self-sufficient reason, a way “distant from the divine” (XXXIII, 85–90); nor was the Vita Nuova subject to political imperatives, which here make Beatrice prophesy “a time in which, dispatched by God, a Five / Hundred and Ten and Five will slay the whore / together with that giant who sins with her” (XXXIII, 43–45—and see below for the giant and the whore), where the Roman numerals for five-hundred and ten and five yield D.X.V., probably to be transposed to D.V.X. (leader), and possibly to be identified with a secular political figure, Henry VII—the last Imperial hope of Dante—who descended into Italy in 1311 but died suddenly, at Buonconvento, in 1313.
But it is Beatrice’s companion whom Dante meets first in the Earthly Paradise, though he and we learn her name, Matilda, only toward the very end of Purgatorio (XXXIII, 119). Identifying Matilda with a historical personage is an attempt that, however assiduously pursued, remains problematic. And no allegorical accounting for her matches the haunting sense of her initial presence under the aegis of namelessness (XXVIII, 34–42 and 52–55):
I halted, and I set my eyes upon
the farther bank, to look at the abundant
variety of newly-flowered boughs;
and there, just like a thing that, in appearing
most suddenly, repels all other thoughts,
so great is the astonishment it brings,
I saw a solitary woman moving,
singing, and gathering up flower on flower—
the flowers that colored all of her pathway.
and
As, when she turns, a woman, dancing, keeps
her soles close to the ground and to each other
and scarcely lets one foot precede the other,
so did she turn……………………….
The limited population of the Earthly Paradise allows life-space for a procession of emblematic presences, moving behind a standard made up of seven candelabra, or—some would have it—one candelabrum with seven candles. For this procession, one can more easily use the equation words “is” and “are” and “may be” and “represent.” In Canto XXIX, 43–150, the seven candelabra may be the seven churches of Asia, with the seven pennants as the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. The twenty-four elders represent the twenty-four books of the Old Testament; the four animals, the books of the four Evangelists; the chariot, the Church; the griffin—with the head of a lion and body and wings of an eagle—Christ, with his two natures; and of the seven women, the three to the right of the chariot are the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity, dressed in white, green, and red) and the four to the left, the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, with prudence having three eyes—to see past, present, and future). The final seven elders represent: the Acts of the Apostles, whose author was St. Luke, a physician; the Epistles of St. Paul, who had urged the faithful to wear “God’s armor” and take up “the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6: 11 ff.); the four Epistles of Peter, John, James, and Jude; and Revelation, with an elder “as if in sleep,” that is, visionary, and “keen,” that is, prophetic.
In Canto XXXII, still other emblematic actors are involved in a tableau of Church history: the eagle, emblem of the Roman Empire, persecutor of the Church from Nero to Diocletian; the fox, emblem of heresy; the dragon, for whom the Anti-Christ is only one of many readings; the giant, probably the dynasty of France; and the whore, the corrupted Church.
In the Earthly Paradise, Virgil vanishes and Statius is silent; and though other emblematic members of the sacred procession do hymn or sing or chant, the only emblems that speak are the seven handmaids. Indeed, through all six cantos of the Earthly Paradise, only women—Beatrice, Matilda, and the handmaids—speak to Dante. Nine female presences—though eight of them dance—do not always reinforce mystery, and certainly not in some of the harsh rebukes leveled by Beatrice; but they certainly do so in the first apparition of Matilda and in the approach to Eunoe, where “the seven ladies halted at the edge / of a dense shadow such as mountains cast / beneath green leaves and black boughs, on cold banks” (XXXIII, 109–111).
Often, in the Comedy, Dante’s lucidities and relentless analysis and cartography might remind us of an anecdote about Aeschylus, who, when accused of revealing the mysteries, may—like other distracted scribes—have won his acquittal by replying: “I said the first thing that occurred to me—I did not know it was a secret.” But some of the rites of Purgatory, not least, the drinking of Eunoe’s waters, do mime the mystery of Augustine’s “pacem quietis, pacem sabbati, pacem sine vespera,” “peace of quiet, sabbath peace, peace that knows no twilight.” Here, at least, for the most restless of poets, there is provisional rest before the ascent through Paradise.
Prior to that ascent, Dante sums up and transcends all the many changes rung on the word “new” by the thirteenth-century Italian poets who preceded him and by his own use of “new” in the title of his Vita Nuova (just as in his transmutation of Dido’s line into his own awareness of Beatrice—“I recognize the signs of the old flame” in XXX, 48—he had offered a summative epigraph for his many uses of “antico,” “old”): “Remade, as new trees are / renewed when they bring forth new boughs, I was / pure and prepared to climb unto the stars” (XXXIII, 143–145).
Most of this Purgatorio translation was completed in Orta San Giulio and Boulder, Colorado. I thank Luigi Alberti, Luciana Lamperti, and Carlo Carena, who live, above Orta, in the house that honors the “cantor de’ buccolici carmi,” for the blessings their presence has brought to me over many years; and Margherita Bogat, whose love of Orta has been ardor and seme and favilla. I am grateful to many colleagues and students who, in Boulder and Denver and on Bellyache Ridge, complemented the skies of Colorado, which indeed “a li occhi miei ricominciò diletto” when translating Inferno lay behind me. Ruth Hein, as always, edited copy with needling, fruitful care; my son Jonathan lent me his precious skills at a crucial time in revisions, and Ellen E. Martin worked probingly and unstintingly in the preparation of the final drafts. Paul Mariani, Bruce Bassoff, and James Hans were constant sources—not least, through their own work—of the spirit that engenders.
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