Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima
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The translation, as explained in the Foreword, is an English approximation of the terza rima of the Italian original, a difficult form invented by Dante and rarely used by later poets. This is no incidental aspect of the poem, for its interlinking of rhymes throughout each canto is fundamental to its movement. No translation can of course be perfect, especially in so difficult a meter from so different a language; and some previous English-language efforts have foundered on excessively many awkward archaisms, inversions, and forced rhymes. Yet the attempt to substitute an alliterative so-called terza rima more theoretical than audible (and only discernible, if at all, by close scrutiny of the page), has proved barely distinguishable, when read aloud (as all poetry should be read), from plain prose in which some very fine translations exist with no claim to being verse. In so far as the present translation dares hope to transmit, however incompletely, integration of the poems elevated style and subject matter with the grace of its subtly fluid verse form, it might boldly hazard a claim to be the best translation of Dantes great poem yet made in English.
At the very least, anyone who knowingly undertakes so forbidding, if not indeed so impossible, an endeavor must never lasciare ogni speranza (abandon all hope), as those do who enter the gates of Hell! For to convey even a little of Dantes poetic power and beauty is already much.
Robert M. Torrance
Robert M. Torrance is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. He received his B. A. summa cum laude in Greek and English from Harvard in 1961, followed by a year in Europe on a Frederick Sheldon traveling fellowship. He took his M. A. at UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature in 1963, and his Ph. D. at Harvard in 1970. After further teaching at Harvard and at Brooklyn College of CUNY, he came to UC Davis in 1976. During 25 years at Davis as associate and full professor, he served several terms as director of the Comparative Literature Program, and played a key role in designing the undergraduate curriculum and instituting the Ph. D. program. His book-length publications are (1) verse translations of two plays of Sophocles, Philoctetes and The Women of Trachis (Houghton Mifflin, 1966); (2)The Comic Hero (Harvard University Press, 1978), examining embodiments of this variable character in different ages from Homer to Joyce and Mann; (3) Ideal and Spleen: The Crisis of Transcendent Vision in Romantic, Symbolist, and Modern Poetry (Garland, 1984); (4) The Spiritual Quest: Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science (University of California Press,1994; translated into Modern Greek in 2005 and Spanish in 2006); and (5) Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook (Counterpoint, 2008), a vast collection of literary, religious, philosophical and scientific primary sources demonstrating widely diverse experiences and developing concepts of nature in both Western and non-Western cultures throughout the centuries, with extensive original introductions and commentaries as well as poetic translations from Greek, Latin, Italian (including a canto from Dante’s PURGATORIO), Spanish, and French. This 1200-page “sourcebook” has been called the finest anthology of nature writing to have appeared, containing texts hard to find elsewhere from earliest times through harbingers of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. The original introductions and summaries alone constitute a balanced and incisive 500-page history of complexly changing relations between the worlds of humans and of nature — a term of multiple and shifting meanings in different times and places. A former Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Woodrow Wilson scholarship winner, he is a member of the Modern Language Association. His widespread achievements have been recognized by inclusion in the Marquis Who’s Who in America 2011, as well as in Wikipedia. His new translation of Dante’s INFERNO — with a Foreword on “The Poet and the Poem”; an individual note briefly recapitulating each of the 34 Cantos and explaining names and terms important for the reader’s understanding; and an Epilogue on the ascent to the Terrestrial Paradise — reflects long familiarity with this medieval classic and assumes, as the Preface emphasizes, that far from being an inaccessibly distant monument, it speaks compellingly to contemporary readers both through graphic portrayal of horrors all too familiar to our own age, and by vividly presenting its central character (who is at once the 14th-century Florentine Dante Alighieri and each one of us traveling the journey of “our life’s way”) as a wandering exile, and the one living person, subject to feelings ranging from tearful pity to outraged horror, in the dead world of the eternally damned. To this extent, it is in part a “Human” as well as of a “Divine Comedy”. And although it is only the first of the three major segments of that “comedy” of movement from the sorrows and sufferings of Hell up the steep slopes of Purgatory to the eternal bliss of the Celestial Paradise, INFERNO can be read, as it has often been read from its own time through many centuries since, as a whole in itself. Its travelers ultimately find that their long and terrifying descent to the lowest depths of the world turns suddenly into ascent up through the previously unknown opposite hemisphere to a new world where they once again see the stars. The translation, as explained in the Foreword, is an English approximation of the terza rima of the Italian original, a difficult form invented by Dante and rarely used by later poets. This is no incidental aspect of the poem, for its interlinking of rhymes throughout each canto is fundamental to its movement. No translation can of course be perfect, especially in so difficult a meter from so different a language; and some previous English-language efforts have foundered on excessively many awkward archaisms, inversions, and forced rhymes. Yet the attempt to substitute an alliterative so-called “terza rima” more theoretical than audible (and only discernible, if at all, by close scrutiny of the page), has proved barely distinguishable, when read aloud (as all poetry should be read), from plain prose — in which some very fine translations exist with no claim to being verse. In so far as the present translation dares hope to transmit, however incompletely, integration of the poem’s elevated style and subject matter with the grace of its subtly fluid verse form, it might boldly hazard a claim to be the best translation of Dante’s great poem yet made in English. At the very least, anyone who knowingly undertakes so forbidding, if not indeed so impossible, an endeavor must never lasciare ogni speranza (“abandon all hope”), as those do who enter the gates of Hell! For to convey even a little of Dante’s poetic power and beauty is already much.
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Dante's Inferno, a New Translation in Terza Rima - Robert M. Torrance
Dante’s INFERNO,
A New Translation
in Terza Rima
Robert M. Torrance
Copyright © 2011 by Robert M. Torrance.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011911389
ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4628-4518-7
Softcover 978-1-4628-4517-0
Ebook 978-1-4628-4519-4
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
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Contents
Preface
Foreword: The Poet And The Poem
Canto I
Note To Canto I
Canto II
Note To Canto II
Canto III
Note To Canto III
Canto IV
Note To Canto IV
Canto V
Note To Canto V
Canto VI
Note To Canto VI
Canto VII
Note To Canto VII
Canto VIII
Note To Canto VIII
Canto IX
Note To Canto IX
Canto X
Note To Canto X
Canto XI
Note To Canto XI
Canto XII
Note To Canto XII
Canto XIII
Note To Canto XIII
Canto XIV
Note To Canto XIV
Canto XV
Note To Canto XV
Canto XVI
Note To Canto XVI
Canto XVII
Note To Canto XVII
Canto XVIII
Note To Canto XVIII
Canto XIX
Note To Canto XIX
Canto XX
Note To Canto XX
Canto XXI
Note To Canto XXI
Canto XXII
Note To Canto XXII
Canto XXIII
Note To Canto XXIII
Canto XXIV
Note To Canto XXIV
Canto XXV
Note To Canto XXV
Canto XXVI
Note To Canto XXVI
Canto XXVII
Note To Canto XXVII
Canto XXVIII
NOTE ON XXVIII
Canto XXIX
Note To Canto XXIX
Canto XXX
Note To Canto XXX
Canto XXXI
Note To Canto XXXI
Canto XXXII
Note To Canto XXXII
Canto XXXIII
Note To Canto XXXIII
Canto XXXIV
Note To Canto XXXIV
Epilogue: Ascent To The Earthly Paradise
Note
For
Donna
loving wife,
sometime
Francesca,
and Beatrice evermore
Acknowledgment
The cover design, showing Dante lost in the woods as he begins his long journey, was a lithograph by Gustave Doré first published in his edition of the Inferno in 1861, and reproduced in The Doré Illustratons for Dante’s Divine Comedy (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1976). My thanks to Richard Ogle for reminding me of this volume.
ROBERT TORRANCE’s BOOK-LENGTH
PUBLICATIONS ARE:
Translations from Greek of two Tragedies by Sophocles
(Houghton Mifflin)
Ideal and Spleen (Garland)
The Comic Hero (Harvard University Press)
The Spiritual Quest (University of California Press)
Encompassing Nature (Counterpoint)
PREFACE
Dante’s Commedia, or Divine Comedy—of which INFERNO, the first and by far best known and most read of its three major sections from his time till now (see Foreword: The Poet and the Poem)—is widely recognized as the greatest poem of the European Middle Ages. Because of this towering reputation, its extreme complexity, and its stature (especially in its final section, PARADISO), as a classic of Roman Catholic religiosity, it very often seems remote or intimidating to modern readers of more secular bent: a monument to be honored rather than a book to be read. To many, including myself, the more humanly centered classics of ancient Greece or the Renaissance—Homer or Sophocles, Shakespeare or Cervantes, to say nothing of the rich traditions of the novel in more recent times—will at first be far more accessible and appealing. Yet INFERNO, in particular, continues to fascinate and engage on many levels. Its horrors strike home in an age all too accustomed to our own. Its often grotesque scenes and actions amid the engulfing circles of Hell outdo in fantastic imaginings even the grimmer forms of today’s science fiction in extraterrestrial worlds; it is a gripping adventure story of stalwart advance through a very bad neighborhood. And most important, perhaps, the central character—whose path through these nightmarish realms is that of both the exiled Florentine poet Dante Alighieri and potentially of us all—is fully human: alone except for his disembodied spiritual guide from the distant past of a different culture and religion. As the only living figure of the poem, he is subject to a wide range of human feelings from pity and fear to repulsion and rage. In such ways, this section of Dante’s masterpiece is at its core a Human Comedy in which the imaginative reader can identify with the narrator amid the perils and hardships of his journeying on our life’s way.
After some earlier partial encounters, I first read the complete Divine Comedy in English prose translation in the excellent edition of John D. Sinclair. His perceptively concise notes and comments to INFERNO, supplemented by the much extended commentary of Charles S. Singleton in the second volume of his magisterial six-volume edition, is first among many sources I have drawn on for the brief one-page notes I have written for each of the 34 cantos of the poem. Each note provides partial recapitulation of the canto, along with brief comments on some major events and characters referred to. Instead of numbered footnotes, I have highlighted in bold type most names the reader needs to know to make sense of the canto, and have given brief explanation for these.
I first read the Italian text of the Divina Commedia in the revised text of C. H. Grandgent, which is another important source of commentary. My translation, in the terza rima which I view as an essential aspect of the poem, as explained in my Foreword, is not based exclusively on any one text among those available to me (mainly in Grandgent, Sinclair, and Singleton’s first volume). In approximating the poetic form of the original in a very different language, closely following the line numbering of the Italian, I have necessarily taken some liberties in the form, such as occasional off-rhymes, preserving long vowels as much as possible. No poetic translation aims to be literal, though I have stayed as close to the sense as a rhymed translation suggesting an elevated style can do. Not even the most meticulously literal prose translation can, of course, achieve perfect fidelity to the original: this would be achievable, if at all, only by the method of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,
in Jorge Luis Borges’ story of that name, who translates
Cervantes’ masterpiece by leaving it in the original Spanish: since every age reads the same words differently! To leave INFERNO only in Italian would little serve Anglophone readers, who I hope will try to follow the original text along with my version. Translation is an art that invites critique and requires humility; the beauty and power of Dante’s poetry can only be remotely suggested. But even that is not nothing.
Among the many other works that I have consulted or drawn on to some extent over the years are the Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed translation and commentary; Michele Barbi’s Life of Dante; Charles S. Singleton, Dante Studies 1: Commedia, Elements of Structure; Thomas G. Bergin’s Dante; Francis Fergusson’s Dante; Irma Brandeis’s The Ladder of Vision: A Study of Dante’s Comedy; De Sanctis on Dante (selections from Francesco De Sanctis’ Saggi Critici); Erich Auebach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World and his chapter on Dante in Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature; and the two collections Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays and American Critical Essays on the Divine Comedy.
Finally, my deepest gratitude to my inestimable wife Donna for help with the notes and preface, and many thanks to Richard Ogle for his valuable advice on self-publication.
FOREWORD: The Poet and The Poem
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, the principal city of Tuscany, in 1265 at a time of confusing conflicts: between Guelfs and Ghibellines, and between Whites and Blacks. Moreover, German Holy Roman Emperors,
who claimed secular rule, vied with a Papacy located, against the protest of Dante and many others, in the French city of Avignon. After having served his native city both as a soldier—at the 1289 victory of the Guelf League of Florence and Lucca over the Ghibellines of Arezzo and Pisa—and as a counsellor, envoy, and Prior, he was banished, when the Blacks took power, both from public office and from Florentine territory, ultimately for life and threatened with public burning should he violate the terms; his two sons were later included in the condemnation. During his exile he lived in various cities of Italy, notably in Verona under the protection of the Ghibelline leader Can Grande della Scala (Big Dog of the Ladder
) and in Ravenna, where he died in 1321 and is buried. The bitter conflicts of this period recur prominently throughout Dante’s vision of hell.
Dante’s Latin prose in this period includes the unfinished De Vulgari Eloquentia, a defense of the vulgar
(vernacular) Tuscan or Italian language as equal to Latin, then still considered the sole dignified language for literary works. His political treatise, De Monarchia (On Monarchy) assigns maintaining peace and establishing world empire to the secular authority of a patriarchal king, and limits the church’s role to the spiritual realm; Popes who violated that trust appear in hell, and space is reserved for others not yet dead. He fervently hoped the German king Henry VII would achieve millennial empire, and was bitterly disappointed when these hopes came to an end when Henry died in 1313 near Siena three years after entering Italy with his armies.
Before undertaking his masterpiece, Dante and his friends Lapo Gianni and above all Guido Cavalcanti (whose father despairs in INFERNO X when he mistakenly thinks his son is dead) wrote love poems in the new forms of the sonnet and the canzone. Dante celebrates their collaboration in the image of a magic boat ride in a sonnet beginning:
Guido, I wish that Lapo, you, and I
were spirited by some enchanter’s spell
into a boat that bobbed with every swell
across whatever seas we choose to try,
so neither howling tempests could deny
our hopes, nor other gloomy weather quell,
but such unanimous desire would well
within, that hope would ever soar more high.
But the central experience of Dante’s life and poetry was not such casually conventional loves, nor his arranged marriage with Gemma Donati, the mother of his children, but his brief encounter at age 9, in 1274, with Beatrice Portinari, whom he met again at least once before her death at 25 in 1290. The experience of a purely spiritual love transformed his life, as he movingly wrote in his major early work, La Vita Nuova (The New Life), a mixture of prose and of poetry in the sweet new style
(dolce stil nuovo), as in this sonnet beginning:
So gentle and so circumspect appear
my lady’s features greeting passers-by,
that tongues all tremble mutely in reply
and eyes look not upon her out of fear.
She passes, hearing praises of her worth,
benignly clothed in pure humility,
and seems to have descended here, set free
by heaven, to show a miracle on earth.
Not only the poet, then, but all who see her with pure heart are elevated by her. For Dante she would remain the image of beatitude who would be his guide through the heavenly paradise after the long upward journey from the depths of hell.
INFERNO (HELL) is the first major section (canticle) of Dante’s masterpiece, the Commedia, or Divine Comedy
. The second is PURGATORIO; in the third, PARADISO, he fulfills the intention promised in the Vita Nuova to celebrate Beatrice in the heavens. The name Commedia indicates comic
progression from a bleak beginning to a fortunate end (though there is also much black humor in the first canticle!). But though this larger context should be kept in mind amid the gruesome horrors of hell, INFERNO can stand alone. From Dante’s time to the present it has been by far the most famed and often read of the three parts; and to readers of the last two centuries, acquainted with repeated massacres and genocides, hell is again familiar territory. Most readers need not be concerned with all the multiple layers of meaning distinguished by Dante in a letter to Can Grande, and by countless commentators since (the foremost of whom among recent scholars in English is Charles S. Singleton). But awareness of the interaction between the literal or visible and the allegorical or invisible is fundamental: the visible reality embodies God’s Will. Thus the descent from the dark wood where the straight path is lost down through the depths of earth is literally Dante’s, but also allegorically humankind’s. It is we, as well as he, who emerge, after horrifying encounters, on the far side of the world to see again the stars (the last word of all three canticles).
There were many predecessors or analogues to Dante’s journey to the land of the dead, going back millennia to the Sumerian and Babylonian stories that took form in the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, and to the texts compiled as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. None of these could have been heard of by Dante, and even the first renowned account in Western poetry, the trip of Odysseus (Ulysses) in Book XI of The Odyssey to the border of the shadowy world—where he encounters the prophet Tiresias, meets some of his comrades killed at the siege of Troy, and vainly tries to embrace the shade of his mother, who died for love of him—could have been known only indirectly, despite Dante’s elevation of Homer as unsurpassed
in the Limbo of INFERNO IV, since Dante read no Greek, and the Odyssey had not yet been translated into Latin. His main precedent was of course the descent of Aeneas in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid to the underworld (where not only are wrongdoers punished, however, but the virtuous may recline in peaceful Elysian fields); and Virgil appropriately acts as his guide below. Scenes of hell were also often graphically portrayed in the Middle Ages and later, as in grotesque paintings in the Campo Santo of Florence’s hated rival and foe Pisa; by Luca Signorelli in the cathedral of Orvieto; and, centuries after Dante, in the Last Judgment painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel of Saint Peter’s in Rome. Its terrors were very real.
Though often anticlerical, as the populace of his hell makes wholly clear, Dante remained a practicing Roman Catholic who largely accepted the doctrines of his age—in his own way. In contrast to the practice of many medieval poets, the literal is typically predominant over the allegorical, and the invisible is made indelibly visible. The vivid characters of INFERNO are a primary instance; as Erich Auerbach writes in Dante: Poet of the Secular (or more literally, Earthly) World, he undertook to portray the human beings who appear in the Comedy in the time and place of their ultimate self-realization, where their essence is fulfilled and made manifest for ever.
Each inhabitant of hell will eternally remain what he most essentially was on earth. And no character is more fully realized than the living traveler, Dante himself, as he leaves the dark wood where he had lost his way and responds with deeply human emotions to the sufferings he sees, sometimes fainting or weeping with pity, but later voicing rage at sins of viciousness and betrayal. He does place some personal enemies in hell, it is true, as will Michelangelo, but by means of his journey he transcends the personal in the universal. And among the many other earthly aspects of his poetic masterpiece is his richly varied imagery, drawn both from close observation of nature and from the homeliest human activities, such as sewing and farming. Even in a poem set in Hell, the sights and sounds of daily life abound.
The meter of the poem, terza rima, which Dante invented (and which this translation follows as well as possible in so different a language) is also intrinsic to it, binding each canto into an uninterruptedly flowing, closely interconnected whole, without stanzaic breaks, and with each tercet (three-line unit) linked to the one before and after: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on throughout each canto. It is a difficult form to write, followed by few poets after him in Italian or other languages (sections of Lope de Vega’s comedies in Spanish, and Shelley’s Triumph of Life
and Ode to the West Wind
in English, are rare examples or variations), and by none so masterfully and extensively as by Dante.
These are but a few of the aspects of the Commedia that have occupied erudite commentators since his time; among those not here considered are numerology, chronology and location of the journey with reference to positions of the heavens, detailed historical and social allusions to the troubled history of his time and place, and others too many and esoteric to name in this context. The poem is inexhaustible, yet need not be exhausting: encyclopedic, yet simple at its movingly human core. And it remains, as it has been from the first, a gripping imaginative vision and an absorbingly told reading experience.
INFERNO is the first of three parts of his pilgrimage, but between darkness and stars it foreshadows and encapsulates the whole.
CANTO I
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte 5
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;
ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,
dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.
Io non so ben ridir com’ i’ v’intrai 10
tant’ era pien di sonno a quel punto
che la verace via abbandonai.
Ma poi ch’i’ fui al piè d’un colle giunto,
là dove terminava quella valle
che m’avea di paura il cor compunto, 15
guardai in alto e vidi le sue spalle
vestite già de’ raggi del pianeta
che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle.
Allor fu la paura un poco queta,
che nel lago del cor m’era durata 20
la notte ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta.
E come quei che con lena affannata,
uscito fuor del pelago a la riva,
si volge a l’acqua perigliosa e guata,
così l’animo mio, ch’ancor fuggiva, 25
si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo
che non lasciò già mai persona viva.
Poi ch’èi posato un poco il corpo lasso,
ripresi via per la piaggia diserta,
sì che ‘l piè fermo sempre era ‘l più basso. 30
Ed ecco, quasi al cominciar de l’erta,
una lonza leggera e presta molto,
che di pel macolato era coverta;
e non mi si partia dinanzi al volto,
anzi ‘mpediva tanto il mio cammino, 35
ch’i’ fui per ritornar più volte vòlto.
Halfway through the journey of our life’s way,
I found myself in a dark wood, and here
was lost, uncertain where the straight path lay.
Ah, it is hard to make this matter clear,
how rugged, harsh, and wild this wooded lair 5
seemed, the mere thought of which renews my fear:
so bitter, death itself can scarce compare!
But, to speak of the good I there did find,
first I must tell what other things were there.
How I arrived, I cannot call to mind, 10
so full of sleepiness did I depart
from my true path, and leave it far behind.
But, where a hillside rose, I left apart
the now upward sloping valley—fright
of which had pierced and terrified my heart, 15
and toward the hill’s high shoulders raised my sight,
which that bright planet’s rays already dressed
that guides each man by every path aright.
Now could the terror find a little rest,
that in my palpitant heart’s lake did keep 20
me all night long incessantly distressed.
For, as a half drowned, panting man might creep
out from the sea, and safe ashore arrive,
then turn around to view the perilous deep,
so did my mind, though fleeing still, contrive 25
to turn and look back on the pass behind
through which none ever yet had come alive.
To rest my weary limbs I first reclined,
then made my way across the desert shore,
keeping firm lower foot and slope aligned. 30
Just as the ground began ascending more
steep, behold, a she-leopard lean and fleet
that on her back a spotted mantle wore,
before me made no motion to retreat,
but so completely did my course confine 35
that more than once I backward turned my feet.
Temp’ era dal principio del mattino,
e ‘l sol montava ‘n sù con quelle stelle
ch’eran con lui quando l’amor divino
mosse di prima quelle cose belle; 40
sì ch’a bene sperar m’era cagione
di quella fiera a la gaetta pelle
l’ora del tempo e la dolce stagione;
ma non sì che paura non mi desse
la vista che m’apparve d’un leone. 45
Questi parea che contra me venisse
con la test’ alta e con rabbiosa fame,
sì che parea che l’aere ne tremesse.
Ed una lupa, che di tutte brame
sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza, 50
e molte genti fé già viver grame,
questa mi porse tanto di gravezza
con la paura ch’uscia di sua vista,
ch’io perdei la speranza de l’altezza.
E qual è quei che volontieri acquista, 55
e giugne ‘l tempo che perder lo face,
che ‘n tutti suoi pensier piange e s’attrista;
tal mi fece la bestia sanza pace,
che, venendomi ‘ncontro, a poco a poco
mi ripigneva là dove ‘l sol tace. 60
Mentre ch’i’ rovinava in basso loco,
dinanzi a li occhi mi si fu offerto
chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco.
Quando vidi costui nel gran diserto,
«Miserere di me», gridai a lui, 65
«qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo!».
Rispuosemi: «Non omo, omo già fui,
e li parenti miei furon lombardi,
mantoani per patrïa ambedui.
Nacqui sub Iulio, ancor che fosse tardi, 70
e vissi a Roma sotto ‘l buono Augusto
nel tempo de li dèi falsi e bugiardi.
Morning’s first rays had just begun to shine,
and upward surged the sun with all those bright
stars that attended him when Love Divine
first set in motion that resplendent sight, 40
so that both season and the time of day
gave me good reason to believe I might
escape this beast of coloring so gay:
till the appearance of a lion brought
stark fear, when suddenly he blocked my way. 45
Charging he came against me, as I thought,
rabidly hungry, holding high his head,
while the air quivered with his fierce onslaught.
Then a she-wolf, whose meager leanness fed
her insatiately ravenous desire 50
turning whole multitudes to living dead,
burdened my heart so heavily with dire
terror, occasioned by her very sight,
that I abandoned hope of climbing higher.
And, as a gamester easily makes light 55
of gains, till time converts his winning spree
to loss: then wretchedly laments his plight,
such did that unrelenting beast make me,
driving me, bit by bit, far from the peak
to where no silenced sunlight could I see. 60
While I was hurtling downward toward those bleak
shadowy depths, before my eyes, began
to rise one through long silence seeming weak.
Seeing him in that desert’s boundless span,
"Miserere on me," to him I cried, 65
whether a shade you be, or living man!
No man—though man I was once,
he replied:
"from Lombardy my parents claimed high worth,
of Mantuan lineage on either side.
Sub Julio, though late, I had my birth, 70
and under good Augustus made my name
in Rome, when false deceiving gods ruled earth.
Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto
figliuol d’Anchise che venne di Troia,
poi che ‘l superbo Ilïón fu combusto. 75
Ma tu perché ritorni a tanta noia?
perché non sali il dilettoso monte
ch’è principio e cagion di tutta gioia?».
«Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte
che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?», 80
rispuos’ io lui con vergognosa fronte.
«O de li altri poeti onore e lume,
vagliami ‘l lungo studio e ‘l grande amore
che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.
Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ‘l mio autore, 85
tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi
lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore.
Vedi la bestia per cu’ io mi volsi;
aiutami da lei, famoso saggio,
ch’ella mi fa tremar le vene e i polsi». 90
«A te convien tenere altro vïaggio»,
rispuose, poi che lagrimar mi vide,
«se vuo’ campar d’esto loco selvaggio;
ché questa bestia, per la qual tu gride,
non lascia altrui passar per la sua via, 95
ma tanto lo ‘mpedisce che l’uccide;
e ha natura sì malvagia e ria,
che mai non empie la bramosa voglia,
e dopo ‘l pasto ha più fame che pria.
Molti son li animali a cui s’ammoglia, 100
e più saranno ancora, infin che ‘l veltro
verrà, che la farà morir con doglia.
Questi non ciberà terra né peltro,
ma sapïenza, amore e virtute,
e sua nazion sarà tra feltro e feltro. 105
Di quella umile Italia fia salute
per cui morì la vergine Cammilla,
Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute.
Poet I was, and sang the righteous fame
won by Anchises’ son, who fled from Troy
after proud Ilium went up in flame. 75
Why do you come where countless woes destroy?
Why not ascend the pleasurable mount
that is the source and cause of every joy?"
"Are you that Virgil, then—are you that fount
that pours forth copious cataracts of speech?" 80
I answered, feeling shame on my account.
"O light and glory of poets, I beseech:
may my long study and my boundless love
help me now; all I know, your volumes teach.
My master, and my author, too, above 85
all others, you: from whom alone I take
the splendid style men think me worthy of.
Behold the ravening predator for whose sake
I turned away: protect me, famous seer,
for, seeing her, my veins and pulses shake!" 90
"Another road now must you enter here,
if from this savage place you wish to flee,"
he answered, when he saw me shed a tear;
"for that wild beast, of which you mournfully
complain, allows none past her mountain door, 95
but hinders each, then kills him instantly.
So vicious is her nature, furthermore,
that never can she satisfy her will
but, after food, is hungrier than before.
With many animals she mates, with still 100
more shall mate, till the Greyhound of great worth
shall come, and painfully this beast shall kill.
(Not on pelf shall he feed and not on earth,
but wisdom, love, and valor; in between
felt and felt he shall celebrate his birth. 105
In him, low Italy’s savior shall be seen—
for which slain Turnus, virgin Camilla died,
and Nisus and Euryalus, warriors keen.)
Questi la caccerà per ogne villa,
fin che l’avrà rimessa ne lo ‘nferno, 110
là onde ‘nvidia prima dipartilla.
Ond’ io per lo tuo me’ penso e discerno
che tu mi segui, e io sarò tua guida,
e trarrotti di qui per loco etterno;
ove udirai le disperate strida, 115
vedrai li antichi spiriti dolenti,
ch’a la seconda morte ciascun grida;
e vederai color che son contenti
nel foco, perché speran di venire
quando che sia a le beate genti. 120
A le quai poi se tu vorrai salire,
anima fia a ciò più di me degna:
con lei ti lascerò nel mio partire;
ché quello imperador che là sù regna,
perch’ i’ fu’ ribellante a la sua legge, 125
non vuol che ‘n sua città per me si vegna.
In tutte parti impera e quivi regge;
quivi è la sua città e l’alto seggio:
oh felice colui cu’ ivi elegge!»
E io a lui: «Poeta, io ti richeggio 130
per quello Dio che tu non conoscesti,
acciò ch’io fugga questo male e peggio,
che tu mi meni là dov’ or dicesti,
sì ch’io veggia la porta di san Pietro
e color cui tu fai cotanto mesti.» 135
Allor si mosse, e io li tenni dietro.
Her shall he hunt through cities far and wide,
till he precipitates her back to hell 110
whence envy formerly thrust her outside.
In your best interest, then, I deem it well
you follow me wherever I shall lead,
even to where eternal spirits dwell.
There you shall hear despairing shrieks indeed, 115
see ancient souls suffering pains so dire,
laments for second death are paid no heed;
see others next, who are content with fire
because they hope, when tribulations end,
to soar above and join the blessèd choir— 120
to which, if afterward you will ascend,
a worthier soul than I must lead you there,
whom as your guide, departing, I’ll commend.
That heavenly emperor beyond compare,
whose sacred law I kept dishonoring, 125
denies me, in his city, any share.
Everywhere he is emperor; there, king.
There is his city, there his lofty seat.
Happy whom he elects his praise to sing!"
Then I to him: "Poet, I now entreat 130
you, by that God whom you could never know:
this bane, and worse, assist me to defeat!
Show me the way you urge me on to go,
so that Saint Peter’s portal I may find,
and those who suffer such enormous woe." 135
He started, and I followed on behind.
NOTE TO CANTO I
Astray in a dark wood and blocked from climbing a sunny hill, the pilgrim meets the shade of Virgil, who will show him another road.
The poem begins in medias res as the pilgrim—halfway through the 70-year way of human life (the three score years and ten
of Psalm 90:10)—wakens in a dark wood. Dante, in the year 1300, was 35, yet throughout the COMMEDIA he is named but once, when Beatrice addresses him late in PURGATORIO. From the first, the way through life is also that of our life, since all may awake in darkness astray from the straight path toward salvation, the goal of all born in sin. In this case the darkness precedes Good Friday, and Dante will spend three days among the dead before arising. He sees a