Inferno

Dante Alighieri, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486112619
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia

"Here at last that much suffering reader will find Dante's greatness manifest, and not his greatness only, but his grace, his simplicity, and his affection."—William Dean Howells, The Nation
"As a crown to his literary life, Longfellow combines his exquisite scholarship and his poetic skill and experience in the translation of one of the great poems of the world."— Harper's Monthly
Enter the unforgettable world of The Inferno and travel with a pair of poets through nightmare landscapes of eternal damnation to the very core of Hell. The first of the three major canticles in La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), this fourteenth-century allegorical poem begins Dante's imaginary journey from Hell to Purgatory to Paradise. His encounters with historical and mythological creatures--each symbolic of a particular vice or crime--blend vivid and shocking imagery with graceful lyricism in one of the monumental works of world literature.
This acclaimed translation was rendered by the beloved nineteenth-century poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A skilled linguist who taught modern languages at Harvard, Longfellow was among the first to make Dante's visionary poem accessible to American readers.

NOTES

THE DIVINE COMEDY.—The Vita Nuova of Dante closes with these words: “After this sonnet there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I beheld things that made me propose to say no more of this blessed one, until I shall be able to treat of her more worthily. And to attain thereunto, truly I strive with all my power, as she knoweth. So that if it shall be the pleasure of Him, through whom all things live, that my life continue somewhat longer, I hope to say of her what never yet was said of any woman. And then may it please Him, who is the Sire of courtesy, that my soul may depart to look upon the glory of its Lady, that is to say, of the blessed Beatrice, who in glory gazes into the face of Him, qui est per omnia sœcula benedictus.”

In these lines we have the earliest glimpse of the Divine Comedy, as it rose in the author’s mind.

Whoever has read the Vita Nuova will remember the stress which Dante lays upon the mystic numbers Nine and Three; his first meeting with Beatrice at the beginning of her ninth year, and the end of his; his nine days’ illness, and the thought of her death which came to him on the ninth day; her death on the ninth day of the ninth month, “computing by the Syrian method,” and in that year of our Lord “when the perfect number ten was nine times completed in that century” which was the thirteenth. Moreover, he says the number nine was friendly to her, because the nine heavens were in conjunction at her birth; and that she was herself the number nine, “that is, a miracle whose root is the wonderful Trinity.”

Following out this idea, we find the Divine Comedy written in terza rima, or threefold rhyme, divided into three parts, and each part again subdivided in its structure into three. The whole number of cantos is one hundred, the perfect number ten multiplied into itself; but if we count the first canto of the Inferno as a Prelude, which it really is, each part will consist of thirty-three cantos, making ninety-nine in all; and so the favorite mystic numbers reappear.

The three divisions of the Inferno are minutely described and explained by Dante in Canto XI. They are separated from each other by great spaces in the infernal abyss. The sins punished in them are,—I. Incontinence. II. Malice. III. Bestiality.

I. INCONTINENCE: 1. The Wanton. 2. The Gluttonous. 3. The Avaricious and Prodigal. 4. The Irascible and the Sullen.

II. MALICE: 1. The Violent against their neighbor, in person or property. 2. The Violent against themselves, in person or property. 3. The Violent against God, or against Nature, the daughter of God, or against Art, the daughter of Nature.

III. BESTIALITY: first subdivision: 1. Seducers. 2. Flatterers. 3. Simoniacs. 4. Soothsayers. 5. Barrators. 6. Hypocrites. 7. Thieves. 8. Evil counsellors. 9. Schismatics. 10. Falsifiers.

Second subdivision: 1. Traitors to their kindred. 2. Traitors to their country. 3. Traitors to their friends. 4. Traitors to their lords and benefactors.

The Divine Comedy is not strictly an allegorical poem in the sense in which the Faerie Queene is; and yet it is full of allegorical symbols and figurative meanings. In a letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante writes: “It is to be remarked, that the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary one may say manifold. For one sense is that which is derived from the letter, and another is that which is derived from the things signified by the letter. The first is called literal, the second allegorical or moral.... The subject, then, of the whole work, taken literally, is the condition of souls after death, simply considered. For on this and around this the whole action of the work turns. But if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, how by actions of merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he justly deserves reward or punishment.”

It may not be amiss here to refer to what are sometimes called the sources of the Divine Comedy. Foremost among them must be placed the Eleventh Book of the Odyssey, and the Sixth of the Æneid; and to the latter Dante seems to point significantly in choosing Virgil for his Guide, his Master, his Author, from whom he took “the beautiful style that did him honor.”

Next to these may be mentioned Cicero’s Vision of Scipio, of which Chaucer says:—

Chapiters seven it had, of Heven, and Hell,
And Earthe, and soules that therein do dwell.

Then follow the popular legends which were current in Dante’s age; an age when the end of all things was thought to be near at hand, and the wonders of the invisible world had laid fast hold on the imaginations of men. Prominent among these is the Vision of Frate Alberico who calls himself “the humblest servant of the servants of the Lord”; and who

Saw in dreame at point-devyse
Heaven, Earthe, Hell, and Paradyse.

This vision was written in Latin in the latter half of the twelfth century, and contains a description of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, with its Seven Heavens. It is for the most part a tedious tale, and bears evident marks of having been written by a friar of some monastery, when the afternoon sun was shining into his sleepy eyes. He seems, however, to have looked upon his own work with a not unfavorable opinion; for he concludes the Epistle Introductory with the words of St. John: “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and if any man shall take away from these things, God shall take away his part from the good things written in this book.”

It is not impossible that Dante may have taken a few hints also from the Tesoretto of his teacher, Ser Brunetto Latini. See Canto XV. Note 30.

See upon this subject, Cancellieri, Osservazioni Sopra l’Originalità di Dante;— Wright, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, an Essay on the Legends of Purgatory, Hell, and Paradise, current during the Middle Ages;—Ozanam, Dante et la Philosophie Catholique au Treizième Siècle;—Labitte, La Divine Comédie avant Dante, published as an Introduction to the translation of Brizeux;—and Delepierre, Le Livre des Visions, ou l’Enfer et le Ciel décrits par ceux qui les ont vus.

Canto I

1. The action of the poem begins on Good Friday of the year 1300, at which time Dante, who was born in 1265, had reached the middle of the Scriptural threescore years and ten. It ends on the first Sunday after Easter, making in all ten days.

2. The dark forest of human life, with its passions, vices, and perplexities of all kinds; politically the state of Florence with its factions Guelf and Ghibelline. Dante, Convito, IV. 25, says: “Thus the adolescent, who enters into the erroneous forest of this life, would not know how to keep the right way if he were not guided by his elders.”

Brunetto Latini, Tesoretto, II. 75:—

Pensando a capo chino
Perdei il gran cammino,
E tenni alla traversa
D’ una selva diversa.

Spenser, Faerie Queene, IV. ii. 45:—

Seeking adventures in the salvage wood.

13. Bunyan, in his Pilgrim’s Progress, which is a kind of Divine Comedy in prose, says: “I beheld then that they all went on till they came to the foot of the hill Difficulty.... But the narrow way lay right up the hill, and the name of the going up the side of the hill is called Difficulty.... They went then till they came to the Delectable Mountains, which mountains belong to the Lord of that hill of which we have spoken before.”

14. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress: “But now in this valley of Humiliation poor Christian was hard put to it; for he had gone but a little way before he spied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back or stand his ground.... Now at the end of this valley was another, called the valley of the Shadow of Death; and Christian must needs go through it, because the way to the Celestial City lay through the midst of it.”

17. The sun, with all its symbolical meanings. This is the morning of Good Friday.

In the Ptolemaic system the sun was one of the planets.

20. The deep mountain tarn of his heart, dark with its own depth, and the shadows hanging over it.

27. Jeremiah ii. 6: “That led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt.”

In his note upon this passage, Mr. Wright quotes Spenser’s lines, Faerie Queene, I. v. 31,—

There creature never passed
That back returned without heavenly grace.

30. Climbing the hillside slowly, so that he rests longest on the foot that is lowest.

31. Jeremiah v. 6: “Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces.”

32. Worldly Pleasure; and politically Florence, with its factions of Bianchi and Neri.

36. Più volte volto. Dante delights in a play upon words as much as Shakespeare.

38. The stars of Aries. Some philosophers and fathers think the world was created in Spring.

45. Ambition; and politically the royal house of France.

48. Some editions read temesse, others tremesse.

49. Avarice; and politically the Court of Rome, or temporal power of the Popes.

60. Dante as a Ghibelline and Imperialist is in opposition to the Guelfs, Pope Boniface VIII., and the King of France, Philip the Fair, and is banished from Florence, out of the sunshine, and into “the dry wind that blows from dolorous poverty.”

Cato speaks of the “silent moon” in De Re Rustica, XXIX., Evehito luna silenti; and XL., Vites inseri luna silenti. Also Pliny, XVI. 39, has Silens luna; and Milton, in Samson Agonistes, “Silent as the moon.”

63. The long neglect of classic studies in Italy before Dante’s time.

70. Born under Julius Cæsar, but too late to grow up to manhood during his Imperial reign. He flourished later under Augustus.

79. In this passage Dante but expresses the universal veneration felt for Virgil during the Middle Ages, and especially in Italy. Petrarch’s copy of Virgil is still preserved in the Ambrosian Library at Milan; and at the beginning of it he has recorded in a Latin note the time of his first meeting with Laura, and the date of her death, which, he says, “I write in this book, rather than elsewhere, because it comes often under my eye.”

In the popular imagination Virgil became a mythical personage and a mighty magician. See the story of Virgilius in Thom’s Early Prose Romances, II. Dante selects him for his guide, as symbolizing human science or Philosophy. “I say and affirm,” he remarks, Convito, V. 16, “that the lady with whom I became enamored after my first love was the most beautiful and modest daughter of the Emperor of the Universe, to whom Pythagoras gave the name of Philosophy.”

87. Dante seems to have been already conscious of the fame which his Vita Nuova and Canzoni had given him.

101. The greyhound is Can Grande della Scala, Lord of Verona, Imperial Vicar, Ghibelline, and friend of Dante. Verona is between Feltro in the Marca Trivigiana, and Montefeltro in Romagna. Boccaccio, Decamerone, I. 7, speaks of him as “one of the most notable and magnificent lords that had been known in Italy, since the Emperor Frederick the Second.” To him Dante dedicated the Paradiso. Some commentators think the Veltro is not Can Grande, but Ugguccione della Faggiola. See Troya, Del Veltro Allegorico di Dante.

106. The plains of Italy, in contradistinction to the mountains; the humilemque Italiam of Virgil, Æneid, III. 522: “And now the stars being chased away, blushing Aurora appeared, when far off we espy the hills obscure, and lowly Italy.”

116. I give preference to the reading, Vedrai gli antichi spiriti dolenti.

122. Beatrice.

Canto II

1. The evening of Good Friday.

Dante, Convito, III. 2, says: “Man is called by philosophers the divine animal.” Chaucer’s Assemble of Foules:—

The daie gan failen, and the darke night
That reveth bestes from hir businesse
Berafte me my boke for lacke of light.

Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. 240, speaking of Dante’s use of the word “bruno,” says:—

“In describing a simple twilight—not a Hades twilight, but an ordinarily fair evening—(Inf. II. 1), he says, the ‘brown’ air took the animals away from their fatigues;—the waves under Charon’s boat are ‘brown’ (Inf. III. 117); and Lethe, which is perfectly clear and yet dark, as with oblivion, is ‘bruna-bruna,’ ‘brown, exceeding brown.’ Now, clearly in all these cases no warmth is meant to be mingled in the color. Dante had never seen one of our bog-streams, with its porter-colored foam; and there can be no doubt that, in calling Lethe brown, he means that it was dark slate-gray, inclining to black; as, for instance, our clear Cumberland lakes, which, looked straight down upon where they are deep, seem to be lakes of ink. I am sure this is the color he means; because no clear...