DANTE ALIGHIERI was born in Florence, Italy, in 1265. His early poetry falls into the tradition of love poetry that passed from the Provençal to such Italian poets as Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s friend and mentor. Dante’s first major work is the Vita Nuova (New Life), 1293–1294. This sequence of lyrics, sonnets, and prose narrative describes his love, first earthly, then spiritual, for Beatrice, whom he had first seen as a child of nine and who had died when Dante was twenty-five. Dante married about 1285, served Florence in battle, and rose to a position of leadership in the bitter factional politics of the city-state. As one of the city’s magistrates, he found it necessary to banish leaders of the so- called Black faction, and his friend Cavalcanti, who like Dante was a prominent White. But after the Blacks seized control of Florence in 1301, Dante himself was tried in absentia and was banished from the city on pain of death. He never returned to Florence. We know little about Dante’s life in exile. Legend has it that he studied in Paris, but if so, he returned to Italy, for his last years were spent in Verona and Ravenna. In exile he wrote his Convivio, or Banquet, a kind of poetic compendium of medieval philosophy, as well as a political treatise, Monarchia. He probably began his Comedy (later to be called the Divine Comedy and consisting of three parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso) around 1307–1308. On a diplomatic mission to Venice in 1321, Dante fell ill, and returned to Ravenna, where he died. “An exciting, vivid Inferno by a translator whose scholarship is impeccable.”—Chicago magazine “Lovers of the English language will be delighted by this eloquently accomplished enterprise.”—Book Review Digest “Tough and supple, tender and violent … vigorous, vernacular … Mandelbaum’s Dante will stand high among modern translations.”—The Christian Science Monitor CONTENTS Introduction INFERNO Dante in His Age Dante as Ancient and Modern Notes INTRODUCTION D ante is an exiled, aggressive, self-righteous, salvation-bent intellectual, humbled only to rise assured and ardent, zealously prophetic, politically messianic, indignant, nervous, muscular, theatrical, energetic—he is at once our brother and our engenderer. We may ponder the divide between the modern and the medieval or profess our distance from Dante, but that profession only masks proximities more intimate than those that link us to antiquity. Even our recovery of the judgmental, ethical aspect of Dante, our anathemas against any Romantic falling prey to (heaven forbid) over-sympathy with Francesca, Farinata, or Ulysses, carries sanctimonious overtones only too easily available to us. Indeed, some contemporary Paraphrasts are more ready to bludgeon homiletically, to damn again the already damned, than even Dante himself—the greatest of execrators —is. And when we come to the allegorical efforts of the fourfolders, or to our frequent willingness to integrate even Dante’s lateral similes into overbearing structures, we have not ventured that far from our selves. Ours, too, is an age of allegoresis; Walter Benjamin is always there, his riches ready to be ransacked or counterfeited. In sum, however more cunning he is than we are, Dante is certainly much nearer to us than is his guide, his governor, his master (Inf. II, 140), Virgil. Therefore, the task of the modern translator of Dante is much more synonymic and much less metaphorical in kind than the task of the translator of Virgil. Virgil demands more de-selving of the modern translator—so much more that I was slow to hear all his demands. For I had begun by seeing Virgil from the Dante vantage during the six years I spent translating the Aeneid, a work which often interrupted my translation of the Comedy; I was seeking in the Aeneid what Macrobius (in his Saturnalia V, i, 19) called a style “now brief, now full, now dry, now rich…now easy, now impetuous.” That style (those styles) I reached with relative ease by the third draft. Only in the later drafts did I find a music that lay far beyond what I had first been seeking: measures where the violence of silence and the violence of speech are balanced and appeased in a uniquely Virgilian equilibrium (as in the Palinurus passage at the end of Book Five of the Aeneid). That equilibrium involves almost unlimited compassion and patient, unjagged breath—but, also, limited curiosity, tight verbal decorum, the most drastic lexical restraints. In my own work as a poet, the release from Virgil produced Chelmaxioms and the forthcoming Savantasse of Montparnasse. And my return, as translator, to Dante, at least in the Inferno, delivered me again to one who is almost wholly given to the violence of speech—even when that violence is directed to talking about the impossibility of talking about the untellable. For Dante is an Aeolus-the-Brusque, a Lord-of-Furibundus-Fuss, the Ur-Imam-of- Impetus. Or, for brutish Scrutinists, who reach for similes among the beasts and not among the gods, he is the lizard that, “when it darts from hedge/ to hedge beneath the dog days’ giant lash,/ seems, if it cross one’s path, a lightning flash” (Inf. XXV, 79–81). However seen, he is surely the swiftest and most succussive of savants, forever rummaging in his vast and versal haversack of soughs and rasps and gusts and “harsh and scrannel rhymes” (which, in Inf. XXXII, I, he claims he does not have—and then promptly produces). He is seeking those gusts that will most convince us of the credibility of his journey, the accuracy of his record, the trustworthiness of his memory. “Mistaking not” (Inf. II, 6), he would offer us evidence as undeniable as that of a historian, Livy, of whom we learn, twenty-six cantos later (Inf. XXVIII, 12), that he, too, “does not err.” Finally, he would convince us that his are the supreme fictions; and he would do so without contradicting his own claims to truth, because fictio for Dante does not mean “pure invention” or “fantastic creation” but—as Gioacchino Paparelli has shown—a poetic composition, constructed with the concourse of rhetoric and music, or—we should say—prosody. And in the construction of such fictions, he is not only a strenuous emulator and intrepid pirate, but a competitor and self-announced victor (Inf. XXV, 94–102): Taccia Lucano omai là dov’e’tocca del misero Sabello e di Nasidio, e attenda a udir quel ch’or si scocca. Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio, chè se quello in serpente e quella in fonte converte poetando, io non lo ’nvidio; chè due nature mai a fronte a fronte non transmutò sì ch’amendue le forme a cambiar lor matera fosser pronte. Let Lucan now be silent, where he sings of sad Sabellus and Nasidius, and wait to hear what flies off from my bow. Let Ovid now be silent, where he tells of Cadmus, Arethusa; if his verse has made of one a serpent, one a fountain, I do not envy him; he never did transmute two natures, face to face, so that both forms were ready to exchange their matter. That announcement of victory over Ovid and Lucan, who had so collegially welcomed Dante to Limbo, is strategically abetted by Virgil’s own incitement of Dante in the canto just before, when Dante had sought brief respite from his breathless impetus, a sedentary truce for his triste chair. And Virgil’s prodding links the journey of the voyager to the journey of the telling of the tale, in Inf. XXIV, 47–51: …….. seggendo in piuma, in fama non si vien, nè sotto coltre; sanza la qual chi sua vita consuma, cotal vestigio in terra di sè lascia, qual fummo in aere e in acqua la schiuma. ……. for he who rests on down or under covers cannot come to fame; and he who spends his life without renown leaves such a vestige of himself on earth as smoke bequeaths to air or foam to water. However, that self-announcement rings its unique changes at the very beginning of the second canto of the Inferno: “The day was now departing; the dark air/released the living beings of the earth/ from work and weariness, and I myself/ alone prepared to undergo the battle/ both of the journeying and of the pity/that memory, mistaking not, shall show./O Muses, o high genius, help me now …” (Inf. II, 1–7). The canto in which Dante protests, “I am not Aeneas, am not Paul,” is the same canto in which he also says “io sol uno,” “I myself alone,” the first triple repetition of an “I” that we have in Western writing. That triplet is even more steeped in the certainty of fame than are the proclamations of either Sulmona’s son, Ovidius-the-Garrulous, Amir-of-Metamorphosists and Sad-Seigneur-of-Scrutinists, at the end of the Metamorphoses, or Lucan in Book Nine of the Pharsalia (ll. 980–986), the same book in which some two hundred lines earlier, Lucan had sung of Sabellus and Nasidius. And if Dante proclaims his own victory over Lucan in Canto XXV, much later he will also appropriate the epithet “sacred” from Lucan’s description of the poet’s labor, twice calling his own poem a “sacred poem” in the Paradiso (a designation that may also echo Macrobius’s term for the Aeneid), just as twice he calls his work a “comedy” in the Inferno. Dante’s “aloneness” casts a shadow, I believe, on attempts to read him as an Everyman, an exemplary pilgrim. If the first line of the Inferno carries with it what Leo Spitzer called the “possessive of human solidarity” in “our life’s way,” that is much more than counterbalanced by the resonances of “io sol uno” throughout the Comedy. But the two most arduous emulations of the Comedy involve not Lucan or Ovid (though any Aeolus is perforce a closet Ovidian) but Virgil and Aquinas. The first, Virgil, is involved in the most complex relation the Comedy presents. Dante is always with Virgil from the time he finds him “faint because of the long silence” (that strange amalgam of vision and sound, compounded by the “speechless” sun of Inf. I, 60) and hears him move from that silence into frequent, if not garrulous, speech, to the end of the Inferno and through much of the Purgatorio, until Virgil crowns and miters Dante over his own self (Purg. XXVII, 142). This finding of Virgil and this crowning of Dante are best seen against earlier way-stations in the natural history of literary affiliations. Plato creates his relation to Socrates by annulling his own explicit voice and becoming the secret sharer and ambiguous transformer of one who had not written, devising or appropriating and developing a genre, dialogue, which has proved to be more inimitable than either tragedy or epic. Even one partial aspect of Platonic dialogue, the circumbendibus of its narrative framework—I am thinking especially of the beginning of the Symposium, where memory shuttles so uncertainly yet hauntingly—is so intricate, that we wait millenia before we find its match. But Dante, however much he knew of Platonism and neo- Platonism, knew no dialogue of Plato except—possibly—the Latin translation of the Timaeus. Lucretius, with Dante, is the most moving exemplar of affiliation—although he was affiliated with a philosopher, Epicurus, not a poet: Against the darkness you raised such bright light and first made clear the uses of this life; glory of the Greeks, I follow you and set my footsteps now on your sure way, and not as a contender but a lover who longs to imitate: how could a swallow sing against the swan, or could a young goat with trembling limbs outrun the strong stallion? You are my father, finder of things as they are, and give to us a father’s teachings: in your pages, Epicurus, as bees in flowering fields sip every plant, we graze on every golden saying, gold and always worthy of unending life. (Lucretius also shares one ancient/modern problem with Dante: the passage from the more conceptually supple Greek to Latin is not wholly unlike Dante’s vying, in the vulgar, modern tongue, with Latin.) But, despite Par. XIV, 112– 117, Dante surely shares the general medieval ignorance of all except snatches of Lucretius. Virgil himself is often involved in tacit dialogue with Homer in the Aeneid. But it is tacit; and Dante, with Homer mute for him, could hardly have heard it. Statius, at the end of the Thebaid, calls the Aeneid “divine” (an epithet that finally joins Comedy in the title of Dante’s work in 1555), praying for his Thebaid to accompany—without rivaling—the Aeneid. That Virgil-Statius affiliation will be recuperated by Dante in the Purgatorio. And, of course, we have the affiliation between two books and two sets of authors or One Author in two guises—and with many scribes—implicit, for some, in the Old and New Testaments. However passionate these previous affiliations may have been, Dante is the first to welcome directly not only himself but his “author,” “lord,” “governor,” “master,” “father,” into an epic. (Where Curtius and Auerbach reject that term, “epic,” for the Comedy, both Hegel and Lukács accept it. For me, Dante’s radical newness, one that does require the Biblical warrant of the first-person prophet, does not destroy but complements the epic intent. The journey to the underworld of Book VI of the Aeneid is magnified into a new whole: new wanderings and wars, “the battle/ both of the journeying and of the pity” of Inf. II, 4–5. That battle and that journey offer us both the arms and the man—Dante himself—of whom Dante sings.) Virgil’s presence is so indispensable that when one meets the first and only time that “father” is used with reference to him in the Inferno, in Canto VIII (the appelation will become frequent in the Purgatorio), one is tempted to gloss the unglossable lines in that canto (VIII, 97–100), “O my dear guide, who more than seven times/ has given back to me my confidence/ and snatched me from deep danger that had menaced,/ do not desert me when I’m so undone,” thus: the “seven times” are the seven cantos before this eighth. Without Virgil, those seven cantos would not have been written. But perhaps the most paternal moment is Virgil’s maternal semblance in Inf. XXIII, 37–42: Lo duca mio di sùbito mi prese, come la madre ch’al romore è desta e vede presso a sè le fiamme accese, che prende il figlio e fugge e non s’arresta, avendo più di lui che di sè cura, tanto che solo una camiscia vesta … My guide snatched me up instantly, just as the mother who is wakened by a roar and catches sight of blazing flames beside her, will lift her son and run without a stop— she cares more for her child than for herself— not pausing even to throw on a shift … In prefacing the Aeneid, I had noted that critics’ “variations on the theme of Homer versus Virgil, using the father to club the son,” were “coupled at times with some variations on the theme of Dante versus Virgil, using the son to club the father. Whichever way one turned in the line of affiliation (Homer-Virgil- Dante)—toward parricide or filicide—the middleman Virgil lost.” But Dante’s own tears at Virgil’s departure and his triple invocation of Virgil’s name in Purgatorio XXX, 49–51, after quoting words of Dido, tell a more provocative,