The Purgatorio Read Online

The Purgatorio

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Canto I

Canto II

Canto III

Canto IV

Canto V

Canto VI

Canto VII

Canto VIII

Canto IX

Canto X

Canto XI

Canto XII

Canto XIII

Canto XIV

Canto XV

Canto XVI

Canto XVII

Canto XVIII

Canto XIX

Canto XX

Canto XXI

Canto XXII

Canto XXIII

Canto XXIV

Canto XXV

Canto XXVI

Canto XXVII

Canto XXVIII

Canto XXIX

Canto XXX

Canto XXXI

Canto XXXII

Canto XXXIII

How To Read Dante

“A sensitive and perceptive translation.”

—Archibald MacLeish

“Fresh and sharp . . . I think [Ciardi’s] version of Dante will be in many respects the best we have seen.”

—John Crowe Ransom

DANTE ALIGHIERI was born in 1265. Considered Italy’s greatest poet, this scion of a Florentine family mastered the art of lyric poetry at an early age. His first major work, La Vita Nuova (1292), was a tribute to Beatrice Portinari, the great love of his life. Dante’s political activism resulted in his being exiled from Florence, and he eventually settled in Ravenna. It is believed that The Divine Comedy—comprising three canticles, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso—was written between 1308 and 1320. Dante Alighieri died in 1321.

JOHN CIARDI was a distinguished poet and professor, having taught at Harvard and Rutgers universities, and a poetry editor of The Saturday Review. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1955, he won the Harriet Monroe Memorial Award, and in 1956, the Prix de Rome. He died in 1986.

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Published by Signet Classic, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. Previously published in a Mentor edition.

Acknowledgment is made to Venture, Italian Quarterly, The Saturday Review, Between Worlds, The Massachusetts Review, New World Writing, and Arbor, in which excerpts from the present work first appeared.

First Signet Classic Printing, July 2001

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Introduction

One of the qualities which distinguish Dante’s ,Divine Comedy from most other long narrative poems is the individual character and, as it were, physiognomy peculiar to each of its three great divisions. Readers of the Inferno will recall its frequently harsh materialism, the great variety of intonation, the vivid realism, in which its ghostly figures rapidly seem to become people and the whole scene appears the “hell on earth” Dante probably wished it to represent.

To understand the Inferno, some historical background was obviously essential. It was important to know that Dante, by being born an upper-middle-class Alighieri in the independent commune of Florence in 1265, had inherited the political loyalties of a Guelph and that he had also acquired hereditary enemies called Ghibellines. The history of the civil strife between these parties was of equal importance, for, even if it culminated in a Guelph victory just after Dante’s birth, talk of it and of fears lest it flare up again, filled his mind during his formative years. Outstanding members of the preceding generation of both parties such as the great Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti, and the Guelph statesman and scholar Brunetto Latini, were to supply a number of his infernal figures, and allusions to victories, exiles, and defeats fill its pages.

Since participation in public life would determine Dante’s fate, we had to be aware of new dissension among the Guelphs, now divided among themselves into “Blacks” and the “Whites” to which he belonged, and to follow the strange fatal parallel between his political progress and the growth of this new partisan strife. We saw the irony of his rise to the highest magistracy just as violence broke out in 1300, so his prominence made him a prime target for his foes.

What happened next, however, was of fundamental importance for all parts of the Comedy and, indeed, for all Dante’s thinking thereafter. The Blacks schemed to interest the pope in intervening in the dispute. Boniface VIII, ever alert for an opportunity to strengthen his political influence, ignored the protests of the Whites, and invited a supposedly neutral third party, Charles of Valois, to enter Florence in the role of impartial arbitrator and peacemaker. What the pope’s secret orders had been became instantly apparent when Charles was admitted in November 1301. After seizing and disarming the Whites, he opened the gates to the banished Blacks, and stood by as they gave themselves over to murder and pillage. Dante was absent on a political mission and, fortunately for him and for posterity, he preferred exile to the sort of justice he would have faced had he returned.

This experience, crushing and embittering to most of its victims—and Dante’s share of bitterness can be tasted in the Comedy’s invectives and many ironic allusions—launched Dante’s mind on one of its greatest drives: to understand the problem of evil, and to try to solve it. What could lead the head of the church, of all Christendom, vicar of the Christ who scorned the hypocrites and drove the money-changers and shopkeepers from the Temple, to engage in the fraud and perfidy of the Florentine conspiracy? How could such a man rise to such a position? What hope was there that men in general might be persuaded to a just life in this world and salvation in the next when they saw their spiritual leaders behave in such a way? Surely such a marvelously ordered physical universe, created for man’s enjoyment, must contain somewhere a clue . to a better political organization or government than that of Dante’s day.

Exploration of these questions led Dante through the Scriptures with their commentators, the Church Fathers, notably Anselm, Bonaventure, and Augustine, to Boethius and beyond to Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Horace, and his beloved and revered Virgil. Cicero’s treatises were a wonderful discovery (“like happening upon gold while looking for silver”) but bristling with difficulties both stylistic and conceptual. This was the new and alien material—philosophy—that the church had repeatedly proscribed until the recent appearance of Aquinas’ Christian explanation of Aristotle.

The fruits of his long and painstaking exploration of the problem of evil formed the substance of Dante’s Inferno. In this remarkable amalgam of the Nicomachaean Ethics and Cicero there is little that is peculiarly Christian except for a few borrowings from St. Thomas and the implicit application of St. Paul’s “Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas” as the principle underlying the worst categories.