The Inferno Read Online

And I have foregone the use of Dante’s triple rhyme because it seemed clear that one rendering into English might save the rhyme or save the tone of the language, but not both. It requires approximately 1500 triple rhymes to render The Inferno and even granted that many of these combinations can be used and re-used, English has no such resources of rhyme. Inevitably the language must be inverted, distorted, padded, and made unspeakable in order to force the line to come out on that third all-consuming rhyme. In Italian, where it is only a slight exaggeration to say that everything rhymes with everything else or a variant form of it, the rhyme is no problem: in English it is disaster.

At the same time some rhyme is necessary, I think, to approximate Dante’s way of going, and the three line stanzas seem absolutely indispensable because the fact that Dante’s thought tends to conclude at the end of each tercet (granted a very large number of run-on tercets) clearly determines the “pace” of the writing, i.e., the rate at which it reveals itself to the reader. These were my reasons for deciding on the present form. Moreover, I have not hesitated to use a deficient rhyme when the choice seemed to lie between forcing an exact rhyme and keeping the language more natural.

For my interpretation of many difficult passages I have leaned heavily on the Biagi commentaries, and even more heavily on the Vandelli-Scartazzini. A number of these interpretations are at odds with those set forth in some of the more familiar English versions of The Inferno, but, subject to my own error, this rendering is consistent at all points with Vandelli’s range of arguments.

I have also leaned heavily on the good will and knowledge of a number of scholars. Dudley Fitts read patiently through the whole manuscript and made detailed, and usually legible, notes on it. Professor A. T. MacAllister not only gave me the benefit of another complete set of detailed notes, but agreed to undertake the historical introduction so important to a good understanding of Dante, and so brilliantly presented here.

Professor Giorgio di Santillana gave me sound and subtle advice on many points. My major regret is that he left for Italy before I could take further advantage of his patience and of his profound understanding of Dante. I wish to thank also Professor C. S. Singleton for some useful disapproval at a few points, Professor Irwin Swerdlow and Professor Richard W. B. Lewis for hours of patient listening, and my sister, Mrs. Thomas W. Fennessey, for typing through many drafts. I think, too, I should acknowledge a debt of borrowed courage to all other translators of Dante; without their failures I should never have attempted my own.

Introduction

The Divine Comedy is one of the few literary works which have enjoyed a fame that was both immediate and enduring. Fame might indeed be said not to have awaited its completion, shortly before the author’s death in 1321, for the first two parts, including the Inferno here presented, had already in a very few years achieved a reputation tinged with supernatural awe. Within two decades a half-dozen commentaries had been written, and fifty years later it was accorded the honor of public readings and exposition-an almost unheard-of tribute to a work written in the humble vernacular.

The six centuries through which the poem has come to us have not lessened its appeal nor obscured its fame. All of them have not, of course, been unanimous in their appreciation: for a fifteenth-century Latinist, Dante was a poet “fit for cobblers”; eighteenth-century worshipers of Reason could not be wholly sympathetic to a poet who insisted on the limitations of reason and philosophy. It was the effete mid-sixteenth century which in spite of certain reservations, first proclaimed “divine” the work its author had called simply his “Comedy.” The significant fact is that the Divine Comedy has demanded critical consideration of each successive age and every great writer; and the nature of their reaction could well serve as a barometer of taste and a measure of their greatness.

By that standard the present age should prove truly great, for its interest in the Comedy has rarely been matched. Credit for the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Dante in the English-speaking world belongs to Coleridge, who was ably seconded in this country by Long-fellow and Norton. Contemporary enthusiasm was touched off by T. S. Eliot’s Essay on Dante and has grown, in some quarters, to the proportions of a cult.

What is this work which has displayed such persistent vitality? It is a narrative poem whose greatest strength lies in the fact that it does not so much narrate as dramatize its episodes. Dante had doubtless learned from experience how soporific a long narrative could be. He also firmly believed that the senses were the avenues to the mind and that sight was the most powerful (“noblest,” he would have said) of these.