Dante’s everlasting influence
“In the middle of the path of this our life, I found myself in a dark wood, and the way ahead was lost.”
This is not my sentiment for the times – apposite though it is – but the opening of one of the greatest epic poems. As every Italian student will know, those stanzas are the curtain raiser for the epic poem The Divine Comedy by the Florentine Dante Aligheri. Oven-baked as they might appear for these days, they were written 720 years ago.
Next year we mark the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death – and in our plague-ridden season, it is worth dwelling on the meaning his life and work holds for the present. A philosopher, essayist, politician, mystic and polemicist, he was above all a brilliant innovator in language and poetry. At times his thought and faith may seem remote and obscure, but the directness of his language is like that of a contemporary reporter – and he was a brilliant recorder of the scene around him. His insight and bold language – descending to the sexual and scatological with dramatic effect in The Divine Comedy – make him ever relevant.
Dante was born in 1265 in Florence. Florence was the city of his culture and clan, and the object of deep yearning in the bitter exile of the last 18 years of his life. He was an accomplished scholar, a poet about town known for his lyrical verse, a counsellor, philosopher and politician. He was a Prior, one of the governors of Florence for the White Guelph party and a prominent guildsman, a major figure in the city’s elitist, highly controlled democracy. In 1302 it all went sour: The White Guelphs and their allies were defeated and thrown out of Florence. For the rest of his life, Dante railed against the injustice, and the terrible state of politics in Italy.
Dante had begun The Divine Comedy, his galactic masterwork, in about 1300, when he was still in active politics in Florence. It was written as he wandered through Italy and France in his exile. He is thought to have attended universities in Bologna and Paris, and crucially he worked in the library of the great Can Grande della Scala of Verona. He died at the court of the Polenta family in Ravenna, where he was buried.
By then his poem was well known across the courts of Italy. It seems to have been distributed canto by canto. The Divine Comedy is full of up-to-date reflections and comment on real living people. In a way, it is a Who’s Who of the Europe of the 14th and early 15th centuries, and a description of what a fun and scary time it was too. The Comedy, in 100 Cantos and some 20,000 lines, is full of hundreds of personalities, many are known to Dante and his ilk; some are historic, others mythological.
The scheme, or layout, is a journey through the afterlife – inspired, no doubt by the author’s acquaintance with epic journeys through the cosmos and heavens described in Islamic, Persian and Arabic literature. But his great voyage is written to the plan of Christian redemption. The pilgrims, first Dante and Virgil, then Dante and the idealized Beatrice, move through Limbo and Inferno/Hell to Purgatory and finally to Paradise.
This might sound a touch dry at first. It isn’t. The descriptions of people, faces, demeanours, the colours and settings of landscapes, the music and science, which beguiled the likes of Einstein and Carlo Rovelli, shift and change all the time. And there’s no-one better at constructing a real sense of drama in so few words, or in so few lines. He immediately places you right at the centre of the scene.
In Purgatorio he describes the fate of his friend Buonconte Montefeltro at the battle of Campaldino; his body was lost in the riverbed of the Arno, where it is bathed in the mists of the Casentino hills. I walked the scene forty years ago. It was exactly as described; Dante the reporter.
The Comedy, later dubbed “Divine” by his great contemporary Bocaccio, has been referenced and used for inspiration down the ages. Most obviously is the quotation, directly or by analogy, in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, drawings by Botticelli, engravings by Doré and sculpture by Rodin. It is a journey of inspiration, discovery, reconciliation and redemption – and there is even a bit of Dante in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Harry Potter.
He has inspired poets by the score – most notably TS Eliot in The Wasteland, which is completely infused with The Divine Comedy. Eliot said, for him, the greatest place for poets was reserved for only two – Dante and Shakespeare.
Translators and aficionados include Byron, Shelley and Keats, Dorothy L Sayers, and most recently one of the most successful of all, Clive James.
Like Shakespeare, his phrases and motifs have become clichés. Most notably the warning on the lintel before Hell, “Abandon hope all ye who enter.” The very term Dante’s Inferno has become one of the most hackneyed in the art of war correspondence.
There is, however, a difficulty at the heart of translation of Dante – as Clive James explains brilliantly in the introduction to his version, which appeared in 2012. Dante almost singlehanded invented a poetic form and language – and this makes him virtually untranslatable. He worked native Tuscan into what is the foundation of modern Italian. He deployed a triple line scheme of rhymes known as the terza rima (Tri Rhyme). He is so deft on this that almost all attempts to imitate fall short. Clive James chose, instead, the four-line quatrain to get to the power and punch of the original.
Another trick in Dante’s use of the terza rima, admired by Philip Larkin, was the bouncing internal rhythm which he said, “made it rhyme all along the line.”
The power in a few words appears early, with the encounter with the lovers Paolo and Francesca of Rimini at the beginning of Inferno. Here they are numbered among the “carnal sinners”.
“There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in wretchedness,” Francesca explains (Wicksteed trans.). She then conjures the time she and Paolo sat together reading a book about Lancelot. They smiled; their eyes met.
“La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante…” No more reading was done that day, the rhyme concludes. The five words of the mouth (bocca) being kissed /baciò, and the “all trembling: (tutto tremante) have a power hard to translate. Clive James takes four times the words, with a quarter of the effect – “This one so quiet now, made my mouth still – / Which loosened by those words, had trembled so — / With his mouth. And right then we lost the will –.” More impactful, perhaps, is Rodin’s take on the scene, his famous marble sculpture “The Kiss.”
One of my enduring favourites, which speaks so much to Dante’s terrible sadness in the last and most creative years of his life, is his encounter with his Florentine ancestor Cacciaguida in the higher levels of the Paradiso. He mourns exile from Florence. His kinsman warns, “You will test how salty is the bread of others, and how hard is the climb and descent of another’s stairs.” This misses the pure music of:
Tu proverai sì come sa di sale,
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale (Par XVII 58-60)
It was a time of turmoil, pestilence and crop failure, insurgencies and wars, heretics and new world orders. Some of Dante’s wilder mystical excursions are hard to follow, and some will be a closed secret forever, I suspect. He was close to the Spiritual Franciscans, whose apocalyptic visions and anticipation of the Millennium of grace were brilliantly depicted by Joachim of Floris, the mystic abbot in Calabria. His musings have informed the visions of millenarians to this day, including hard-line communists and neo-Nazi groups.
Dante lived in a turbulent era. Its history was forged by Popes, Emperors, great war captains, and wandering anarchists such as the Benandanti. It was all carefully observed at the time by Dante’s fellow Florentine, Giovanni Villani, a lawyer, in his chronicle.Villani recorded Dante’s death in 1321. He recognized his fame as a philosopher and poet, but he also noted his reputation for being “somewhat haughty, reserved and disdainful – careless of graces.” Unlike Shakespeare, he was not quite the man to invite to the pub.
In between the catalogue of wars and politics high and low, Villani gives eye-opening descriptions of upheaval in nature. He describes the terrible storms that hit Florence and the Arno valley in 1315, and most noticeably in 1335, the worst until the colossal flood of November 1966. Bridges were swept down, only one pillar of the Ponte Trinità left standing. The earth seemed poisoned, grass turned orange and perished, and there were no harvests.
This is the preamble to the disaster of the Plague, or Black Death, which almost halved much of Europe’s population in 1346-1349. It was depicted in clinical detail by Dante’s admirer, Giovanni Bocaccio, in the introduction to the tales he compiled in Fiesole, the Decameron, as the pandemic raged in the city below. “Its first sign here in both men and women was a swelling in the groin or beneath the armpit, growing sometimes in the shape of a simple apple, sometimes an egg, more or less: a bubo was the name commonly given to such a swelling.”
Bocaccio and Villani are drawn together by their sense of foreboding and their courage. And indeed, Dante’s reflection on his exile, moral, spiritual, and physical speaks in similar terms to our pandemic times.
Perhaps a suitable bookend to the physical and mental tribulations of Dante and his times on the threshold of the Black Death is to be seen in the townhall, the Palazzo Pubblico, of Siena. Siena was hit terribly by the plague – Agnolo the chronicler and his friends buried their families in mass graves laid in trenches: “We thought the world had come to an end.”
Among the victims were the wellborn painters and officials Ambrogio and Piero Lorenzetti.
A few years before the plague came around 1347/48, Ambrogio completed his fresco cycle for the City and Commune of Siena – The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. The pictures are a message for our time, if ever there was one.
On one side we see the fruits of good government, citizens, artisans, magistrates, labourers going about their work – to the benefit of all, and the community as a whole. On the other walls we see the effects of bad government in the town and countryside – townspeople are starved and swindled, robbers and bandits are abroad in the countryside and there is famine.
Both scenes are complemented by allegorical depictions of the administration of bad and good government. The allegorical figures at first seem to reflect the conventional roster of pagan and Christian vices and virtues of the time – the seven deadly sins, the classical virtues and so forth. But the arrangement and the individual figures themselves have a strange originality.
The courts of the bad governors are presided over by a towering figure of “Superbia” – Pride – and all the little devils, mischief makers and sprites play around beneath him. Doubtless today in the times of Trump, Johnson, Putin, Macron, Bolsonaro, Erdogan and their like, Pride/ Superbia would be rebranded as “Narcissismo” the cult of Narcissus.
The glory is in the symbolic depiction of good government, presided over by a magnificent kingly figure. He is no king, but the personification of the people of the Commune (republic) of Siena. Virtues of all kinds attend. The most extraordinary is a reclining female, lithe and luminous in a white shift, like a sixties pop star. She is Pax, peace, a true original depiction.
To the left a figure presides over a desk etched, with the word “Concordia”. From her and her bureau, subtly depicted so you can hardly see it, is the “corda”, the rope that binds a group of citizens of all stations in life, builders, millers, couriers, hawkers, lawyers and magistrates. It is the cord that symbolizes the ties, the obligations, duties and rewards of community.
In this Ambrogio Lorenzetti is as much our contemporary as Dante. Both speak very directly to our fractured and plague-ridden present. Dante spoke with a poetic magic and power unsurpassed, with genius out of time. Ambrogio’s legacy for us in the Siena Town Hall is literally, for us and for them, the writing on the wall.