Ciardi aptly puts it, “... a sense of the right-choice-always-being-made”; and this applies to everything from the smallest word to the harmonious interrelation of the principal divisions.
This awareness of intelligence at work is dearly felt throughout the Inferno. This is the realm—or condition—of the “dead people,” those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen. As subject matter it is the lowest, ugliest, most materialistic of the whole poem. Now in his unfinished treatise on the vernacular, De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante had established a basic rule that the poet must make his style match his material. In accordance with this we should expect the style of the Inferno to be lower than that of the other divisions-and that is exactly what we find. The poet has used throughout it a low level of diction, common, everyday words and constructions and relatively simple figures. Yet with this prosaic equipment he has obtained incomparable effects, from the poignant sensuality of Francesca (V), the dignity of Farinata (X), the pathos of Ser Brunetto (XV), to demoniac farce (XXI) and revolting ugliness (XXIX). He employed not only ordinary words but, where he thought it useful, those which in our language seem to require only four letters.
It is Mr. Ciardi’s great merit to be one of the first American translators to have perceived this special quality of the Inferno and the first to have reproduced it successfully in English. In order to achieve this he has abandoned any attempt to reproduce Dante’s complicated rhyme scheme and has even had to do some slight violence to conventional poetic usage. The resulting effect to the ear, which must be the supreme judge in these matters, is a good likeness of the original. It may also be something of a shock to those who insist on a uniformly hieratic approach to all things Dantesque; let them come really to know the vigorous, uncompromising Florentine who, even in Paradise, wrote:
“E lascia pur grattar dov’e la rognal”
(“And let them go ahead and scratch where it itches.”)
Archibald T. MacAllister
Princeton, New Jersey
July 14, 1953
Canto I
The Dark Wood of Error
Midway in his allotted threescore years and ten, Dante comes to himself with a start and realizes that he has strayed from the True Way into the Dark Wood of Error (Worldliness). As soon as he has realized his loss, Dante lifts his eyes and sees the first light of the sunrise (the Sun is the Symbol of Divine Illumination) lighting the shoulders of a little hill (The Mount of Joy). It is the Easter Season, the time of resurrection, and the sun is in its equinoctial rebirth. This juxtaposition of joyous symbols fills Dante with hope and he sets out at once to climb directly up the Mount of Joy, but almost immediately his way is blocked by the Three Beasts of Worldliness: THE LEOPARD OF MALICE AND FRAUD, THE LION OF VIOLENCE AND AMBITION, and THE SHE-WOLF OF INCONTINENCE. These beasts, and especially the She-Wolf, drive him back despairing into the darkness of error. But just as all seems lost, a figure appears to him. It is the shade of VIRGIL, Dante’s symbol of HUMAN REASON.
Virgil explains that he has been sent to lead Dante from error. There can, however, be no direct ascent past the beasts: the man who would escape them must go a longer and harder way. First he must descend through Hell (The Recognition of Sin), then he must ascend through Purgatory (The Renunciation of Sin), and only then may he reach the pinnacle of joy and come to the Light of God. Virgil offers to guide Dante, but only as far as Human Reason can go. Another guide (BEATRICE, symbol of DIVINE LOVE) must take over for the final ascent, for Human Reason is self-limited. Dante submits himself joyously to Virgil’s guidance and they move off.
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say
what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
But since it came to good, I will recount
all that I found revealed there by God’s grace.
How I came to it I cannot rightly say,
so drugged and loose with sleep had I become
when I first wandered there from the True Way.
But at the far end of that valley of evil
whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear!
I found myself before a little hill (15)
and lifted up my eyes. Its shoulders glowed
already with the sweet rays of that planet
whose virtue leads men straight on every road,
and the shining strengthened me against the fright
whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart
through all the terrors of that piteous night.
Just as a swimmer, who with his last breath
flounders ashore from perilous seas, might turn
to memorize the wide water of his death—
so did I turn, my soul still fugitive
from death’s surviving image, to stare down
that pass that none had ever left alive.
And there I lay to rest from my heart’s race
till calm and breath returned to me. Then rose
and pushed up that dead slope at such a pace (30)
each footfall rose above the last. And lo!
almost at the beginning of the rise
I faced a spotted Leopard, all tremor and flow
and gaudy pelt. And it would not pass, but stood
so blocking my every turn that time and again
I was on the verge of turning back to the wood.
This fell at the first widening of the dawn
as the sun was climbing Aries with those stars
that rode with him to light the new creation.
Thus the holy hour and the sweet season
of commemoration did much to arm my fear
of that bright murderous beast with their good omen.
Yet not so much but what I shook with dread
at sight of a great Lion that broke upon me
raging with hunger, its enormous head (45)
held high as if to strike a mortal terror
into the very air. And down his track,
a She-Wolf drove upon me, a starved horror
ravening and wasted beyond all belief.
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