Dante's Inferno: A 13th-Century Scared Straight! (Inferno, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Dante's Inferno, we welcome translator Michael Palma to discuss Dante's life and the context in which he wrote the Inferno, the narrative structure of The Divine Comedy, and what makes the Inferno so durably compelling.  

Michael Palma is the award-winning translator of Diego Valeri and Guido Gozzano, among others, and he has published four collections of his own verse: The Egg Shape, Antibodies, A Fortune in Gold, and Beginning Gladness, and he has also published the title Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Inferno, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/InfernoNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/Inferno/part1/transcript.

Transcript

Inferno Part 1

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gttYJSpdZQ

Transcript:

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Chino with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Dante's Inferno with its translator Michael Palma. In part one, we discuss Dante's life and the historical and political times in which he lived. We discuss the design and structure of Dante's Divine Comedy and why we return to The Inferno as a timeless narrative of personal and religious crisis and search for redemption. Michael Palma is the award-winning translator of Diego Valeri and Guido Gozzano, among others, and he has published four collections of his own verse: The Egg Shape, Antibodies, A Fortune in Gold, and Beginning Gladness, and he has also published the title Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry. We are so happy to have him with us today. Michael Palma, welcome to the Norton Library podcast!

[Michael:] Thank you very much! It's a pleasure to be here and an honor as well, I might add.

[Mark:] Well it's an honor to have you and we're really looking forward to discussing your edition of Dante Alighieri's Inferno for the Norton Library, and Michael, maybe the best place to start is where we usually do, which is with the writer of the text. How much do we know about Dante as a historical person and what would be helpful to know as we approach this text?

[Michael:] Well first, I suppose we should locate him in time. He was born in the year 1265 and died in 1321 at the age of 56. Of course, lives in the 13th and 14th centuries were not documented with anything like the thoroughness that they are nowadays, so there are many things we don't know about Dante. We know that he was married and had four children with his wife, but he never mentions his wife anywhere in any of his voluminous writings, so it is assumed, perhaps unjustly, that theirs was not a particularly close relationship. And yet, in terms of his public life, we know a great deal and certainly in terms of his inner life, insofar as a work of literature can be considered a key to its author's personality, I think we can glean a great deal about the sort of person he was just by reading The Divine Comedy.

[Mark:] What kind of deduction would that be, what type of personality or figure does emerge through his writing?

[Michael:] One who certainly is quite learned on a variety of subjects. He's, as you would expect, he's thoroughly familiar with the Bible. He knows a great deal about religious, political, and military history. Even quite a bit, despite the left brain-right brain dichotomy, quite a bit about science, or what was considered science in his time. Certainly a great deal about literature and also mythology, most of it apparently gleaned from his thorough acquaintance with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And, he apparently was a quite observant person—that The Divine Comedy is famous for its extended similes and they are drawn from all areas of human experience: cooking even, other elements of domestic life, observation of the movements of the planets in the skies, and even his observation of the flight patterns of different species of birds. It's quite amazing the number of things that he seems to have been interested in and been able to seamlessly weave together into the extraordinarily complex and yet at the same time extraordinarily unified work that is The Inferno and more largely The Divine Comedy.

[Mark:] So what would Italy have been like during Dante's life? What was the day-to-day experience like politics, Italy as a nation?

[Michael:] Well, Italy did not exist as a nation, in fact did not exist as a nation until the 1860s when it was unified through the efforts of principally, of course, of Garabaldi, Risorgimento. It was a patchwork of city states, some of them republics, some of them with rulers who ruled with varying degrees of absoluteness. Florence in particular was a republic and yet it was far from a peaceful society. Throughout the 13th century it was riven by increasingly bitter struggles between two factions: the Guelphs and the Ghibellines as they're famously known, and the main issue of contention between them was the degree to which, if at all, the church should involve itself in the secular realm, in matters of governance. Now Dante was firmly a believer in rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; he was a strong believer in, as we would say nowadays, the separation of church and state which certainly put him at odds with the thrust of the papacy in his time, and particularly the pope who reigned, and the word is not metaphorical in this case, who reigned when Dante came to maturity, Pope Boniface VIII, who is the villain—I guess you would say Satan is of course the principal villain of The Divine Comedy, but Boniface runs him a close second and there are times when you'd almost think that Dante has a difficult time distinguishing between the two. But, the Pope was claiming power over secular matters that the Holy Roman Empire should, and its Emperor and other functionaries, should be subservient to the will of the church. 

[Mark:] So were there consequences to making the Pope the villain in a text when Dante wrote The Divine Comedy?

[Michael:] By the time he wrote The Divine Comedy the consequences had already befallen him. Dante was active in public life from a very early age in one capacity or another. In his 20s, he was a cavalryman in the Battle of Campaldino in 1289 when he was 24 years old. He interested himself quite a good deal in the civic life of the city, held various public offices in Florence, and ultimately in 1301, became one of the six priors, as they were called or members of the governing council of the city, each appointed for a two-month term, and it was here that Dante particularly enraged the Pope. When Boniface proposed to the council to raise a small military force from Florence and, well, when the matter was debated in the council there were some doubts and concerns expressed, but of the six priors, Dante was the only one who unequivocally opposed what the Pope wanted. Later in the year, he was called to Rome with as part of a three-man delegation to deal with the Pope and try to reconcile these difficulties. The Pope had him detained there and while he was, the Pope's faction took over the city and Dante was with a number of others was tried in absentia, on trumped up of charges of corruption and was ordered banished for life from the city. He never saw his home city again, wandered through Northern and Central Italy for the remaining 20 or so years of his life. So, the consequences were already there—you could say in effect that by this point, he pretty much had nothing to lose when he began writing The Comedy.

[Mark:] So he had scores to settle?

[Michael:] Oh yes, quite a few, and it has been pointed out that there do seem to be a disproportionate number of 13th-century Florentines among the damned in The Inferno, but of course you have to understand that Dante tries to preserve some sense of realism in the poem, and he does in a couple of places say, or at least imply, that he can only speak to the souls in Hell who speak Italian and which is why so many Italians figure so prominently. He is frequently reminding us that there are thousands and thousands of others besides people that he was personally acquainted with, but these are the ones, for obvious reasons, that he chooses to interact with. Now he's not always consistent in his attempt at realism. In this regard, he does carry on a bit of a discussion with Muhammad late in The Inferno and I assume Muhammad did not speak Italian, and also when Ulysses gives his famous monologue in the 26th canto of The Inferno which is definitely one of the high points of the poem. Dante seems to perfectly understand what this Greek speaker is saying, but for the most part, as I say, he attempts to observe the rule that he speaks to Italians because he speaks Italian.

[Mark:] Can I ask, Michael, if I were a curious literate Florentine in the 13th century, would I be able to read The Inferno at the time? How widespread was it and how did the poem get disseminated?

[Michael:] Well of course we're speaking about a time that is about 150 years before Gutenberg and the invention of movable type, so the manner of publication was to have copies made by hand by scribes and to circulate them. There was no small press distribution service then, just as unfortunately there isn't now, but there must have been some sort of network to circulate the manuscripts among those who would have been interested in reading them, and from the beginning the poem seems to have been a great success, was widely acclaimed and, of course you can't say that it was universally acclaimed as everyone no doubts know knows from reader reviews of movies on say IMDb, there's no masterpiece so sublime and transcendent that someone cannot be found to trash it. So I'm sure there were those who didn't see anything in Dante's work, but for the most part, it was recognized as a masterpiece from the beginning. And shortly after Dante's death, commentaries on the poem began to appear. Now insofar as there might have been controversy, one of the principal controversies could be considered those who took the text literally and those who saw it as a work of the imagination. I don't know of anyone who—actually there may have been some—but I don't know of anyone who actually claimed that Dante had physically experienced what is described in The Divine Comedy. Certainly there were many who felt that the poem was written through divine inspiration, that Dante had at least had a vision that he is recording in these 14,233 lines. Dante's son Pietro, who was one of the early commentators, maintains the view that it was indeed a work of the imagination.

[Mark:] Right. Can we establish what the plot of Inferno is? You mentioned that it's not the entire Divine Comedy, it's just a part of it, so what happens in The Inferno and how does it fit into the overall vision that Dante had? 

[Michael:] Well, this of course, as the name has come to suggest, it's a journey through Hell. At the very beginning of the poem, and perhaps we should emphasize that in the very first line of The Inferno, Dante says “midway through our life's journey,” not “my life's journey,” so therefore, it is a poem of what he hopes will be universal application and universal significance. But at the beginning of the poem Dante is lost, he has famously strayed into a dark wood, attempts to leave but finds his path blocked by three ferocious beasts whose symbolic meaning has been variously interpreted, but clearly they represent sins and temptations and all of the obstacles to following the straight path. And as he is about to despair at his plight, a vision appears to him which is the spirit of the ancient Roman poet Virgil, who as it turns out has been asked by Dante's muse and inspiration the late Beatrice to come and rescue Dante, and the rescue is not merely physical but spiritual as well, in that Virgil intends, at Beatrice's behest, to lead him through the afterlife, through successively hell, purgatory, and heaven, to show him what awaits those who do not straighten up and fly right in time, and what await those who do. So The Inferno is a kind of a 13th-century “Scared Straight” in which Dante is shown the torments of the damned in excruciating detail.

[Mark:] So Beatrice is the woman that you say is distinct from somebody who was actually Dante's wife, there was a historical person who's Beatrice?

[Michael:] Yes, a young woman about, insofar as can be determined, about eight or nine months younger than Dante himself named Beatrice Portinari, who in fact did marry someone other than Dante, had several children, and died at the age of 24 in the year 1290. She first appears in Dante's writing in an earlier work the Vita Nuova or The New Life, which is a series of 30 or so poems that are linked by connecting prose passages in which Dante describes his relationship, if you can call it that, with Beatrice and talks about how he has come to write these poems, and at the end says that he will not write of her again until he can do so in a manner that will be worthy of her, even though they had only the slightest of contacts—he saw her twice when they were children and then when they were older, he got to know her little better, but never really very well—and yet she had apparently had so powerful an effect upon him that she did become his muse and, if not the direct inspiration of the poem, certainly one of its most important figures.

[Mark:] The plot that you're describing as a journey through Hell, it would seem to be a dramatic, intense fraction of the overall trajectory that Dante the pilgrim takes. Why is Inferno more famous or more read than the other two canticles?

[Michael:] Several reasons, perhaps. One is that increasingly in the Purgatorio and especially in the Paradiso, there are long passages that would be considered rather abstract and intellectual and difficult to follow, whereas in The Inferno, there's much more emphasis on interaction between persons. There's also a much more varied range of personalities in The Inferno than in the other two canticles, especially the Paradiso, because saints basically are saints, but there are many different ways to be a sinner, and of course sin, crime, evil always makes for a better story than goodness and saintliness.

[Mark:] Good point! Good point, Michael. When I was reading the following, the plot, he meets innumerable characters, so I found myself clinging to your endnotes because, of course, these characters weren't very familiar to me. What is the challenge of reading this in the 21st century when perhaps some of these contemporary politicians and figures are not as known to us?

[Michael:] In fact, the great many of them are not known to us at all and quite possibly would be known only to a handful of scholars if they hadn't been immortalized in The Inferno. It is challenging certainly—it's almost impossible to read The Inferno without repairing to outside sources, without annotation, and well, as I've said in the introduction to the forthcoming translation of the entire Comedy, that even though several have appeared, an unannotated Divine Comedy is almost unimaginable, and certainly reading the notes to the poem in any edition and of course there are many editions in which the notes dwarf the text, but reading the annotations is an education in itself. One inevitably learns a great deal about the Bible which is of course no longer the common knowledge and common cultural coin that it was in past centuries, about mythology, about 13th-century Florentine politics and personalities. So, yes, we do need to go outside the poem. We can read and enjoy the poem on the first go through without turning to the notes, as T.S. Elliot famously suggested that one should first read a poem even if one doesn't understand, just for the experience of it, the interaction of it, the poetry of it. But of course, the more you understand who these people are and why they are in hell, and what were the controversies and the other motivations that animated them, the more your understanding of the poem is deepened, and the more, I think, you come to realize what an amazing work it is.

[Mark:] You can replace them with 21st-century figures.

[Michael:] As a number of writers have done, rewriting their own Infernos and populating them in some cases with names that would need no annotations for us!

[Mark:] In this journey to paradise that Dante takes. Is this a religious rebirth? Is it a psychological renewal? Is it both, one or the other, is there overlap there?

[Michael:] Oh definitely. I think to emphasize the one at the expense of the other, to the exclusion of the other, I should say, is really to not appreciate all that is going on in the text. Of course, the primary explicit thrust of the poem is religious in nature—that is undeniable—and yet at the same time it is also a personal journey, one in which Dante actually foregrounds himself in a way that is quite common nowadays but was really rather startling at the time that The Inferno and the other canticles were written. And again, if there is any key, I think, to the work on all of its multifarious levels, it is complexity in unity.

[Mark:] Maybe we can look at one illustration of how Dante goes about this narrative. Is there one episode or canto that you would highlight to sort of give us a sense of what Dante is doing?

[Michael:] Obviously there are many from which one could choose. Just in passing I would suggest one of the most familiar figures in the poem: Ulysses in Canto 26. It's interesting to contrast Ulysses as Dante presents him with Tennyson's Ulysses in the 1830s, where one is, in Dante's case, Ulysses is presented as an example of overweening human pride, exceeding the boundaries that God has properly set for us to stay within, whereas to Tennyson, Ulysses is the great hero and exemplar of the spirit of striving, the refusal to be content with what is, without which no human progress would ever take place. But to me, the most moving, the most wrenching passage in The Inferno comes appropriately enough very near the end in the character of Ugolino, a count who had conspired with the Archbishop Ruggieri, and in the end the Archbishop had turned upon him, and Ugolino, as Dante presents it, the actual facts of the situation were somewhat different, but as Dante presents it, Ugolino and his four young sons are imprisoned in a tower and then the door of the tower is nailed shut and it becomes obvious to Ugolino that the Archbishop means to starve him and his sons to death, and if I might just pick up the text at that point in the 33rd canto, when Ugolino has just had a very troubling dream that foretells his fate in a way: 

Day had not dawned, but I no longer slept. My sons were there with me, though still asleep they called to me to give them bread and wept. You are cruel indeed if you can know the deep dread that I felt and not yet shed a tear. If not this, what could ever make you weep? The time of our morning meal was drawing near. My children were awake, their dreams had stirred in each of them uneasiness and fear. From the horrible tower's base I heard the door being now shut and I looked into the faces of my sons without a word. I did not weep; I was turned to stone all through. They wept and Anselmuccio spoke up when he saw my face. ‘Father, what's troubling you?’ I shed no tears and gave no answer then, and all that day and night I sat like stone until the sun lit up the world again. As soon as a small ray of sunlight shone in the miserable cell, and I could see four faces show the aspect of my own, I bit my hands in grief and agony, and they, assuming that I acted thus for hunger, quickly rose and said to me, ‘Eat of us, father. It will hurt us less. From you we have this wretched flesh we wear—now it is yours to take away from us.’ I calmed myself to keep them from despair. Alas, hard Earth, you should have opened wide. Two more days passed while we sat silent there, and when it was the fourth day, Gaddo cried, ‘Father! Why don't you help me?’ I watched him fall outstretched before my feet and there he died. Just as you see me, now I saw them all between the fifth and sixth days, one by one, drop down and die. Now blindness cast its paw. For two more days I crawled from son to son, calling to them who were already dead, then fasting did what misery had not done.

[Mark:] Wow, what a brutal sequence. What do you observe in what you just read and what should we notice?

[Michael:] Man's cruelty to man, first and foremost; the pathos, the poignancy of the situation; the sense that obviously God's eye is on the sparrow, nothing escapes his notice, and those who have been cruel and not sufficiently repented before the curtain of their life is drawn will suffer in equal if not greater measure to the cruelty they have inflicted. But of course in this particular passage, it is the humanity, the pathos, that stands out and I suppose this is as good an explanation as to why The Inferno is by far the most popular of the three components, in that there is much more humanity in the sense of pain, suffering, frustration, hopes thwarted and frustrated, the desire to be better but the inability to achieve it, and so on.

[Mark:] In that passage you read, I'm wondering as a translator if there is a word or a phrase or a moment that you can explain how you rendered such a moving passage in English from the original?

[Michael:] Well, I don't know how my reading of it sounded—it may have been a bit more overwrought than it should have been, I'm not sure. But basically, I tried to do in this passage what I felt that Dante had done, which is, despite the occasional outbursts of torment and pain, to underplay, to not lay it on too thick, to not overstate the case and lose the effect thereby. So the passages that I find most stirring and most moving in this section are the ones that are the most simple, straightforward descriptions of what is happening, of his son's anguish, of their deaths, of his own helplessness to do anything to relieve them. At different places in the poem, I think different registers are called for, obviously. The monologue of Ulysses calls for a certain degree of soaring rhetoric, the monologue of Francesca much earlier in The Inferno calls for a combination of self-justification and over-soliciting of pity. So in addition to the obvious challenges presented by trying to keep the rhyme and the meter as much as possible and yet remain as literally faithful to the text as I could, it is also the challenge of deciding and then trying to fulfill what seemed to me the right approach to take at any given moment in the poem.

[Mark:] Michael Palma, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast to discuss your edition of Dante's Inferno. This has been fascinating.

[Michael:] Once again, it's been my pleasure and once again, thank you very much.

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Dante Alighieri's Inferno translated by Michael Palma is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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