Customer Reviews

The Divine Comedy Part 3: Paradise (Penguin Classics) (v. 3)

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This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
"The Divine Comedy" describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and another of his works, "La Vita Nuova." While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin or Greek (the languages of Church and antiquity). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be comedic in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, the progression of Dante's pilgrim from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: Each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternate meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem (see the "Letter to Can Grande della Scala"), he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory (the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical). The structure of the poem, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of "L'Inferno", allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" added later in the 16th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were of everyday or vulgar subjects, while High poems were for more serious matters. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of man, in the low and vulgar Italian language and not the Latin language as one might expect for such a serious topic.

Paradiso
After an initial ascension (Canto I), Beatrice guides Dante through the nine spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, similar to Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see. Thus, the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's own personal vision, ambiguous in its true construction. The addition of a moral dimension means that a soul that has reached Paradise stops at the level applicable to it. Souls are allotted to the point of heaven that fits with their human ability to love God. Thus, there is a heavenly hierarchy. All parts of heaven are accessible to the heavenly soul. That is to say all experience God but there is a hierarchy in the sense that some souls are more spiritually developed than others. This is not determined by time or learning as such but by their proximity to God (how much they allow themselves to experience him above other things). It must be remembered in Dante's schema that all souls in Heaven are on some level always in contact with God.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

please read the life and works of Dorothy L. SAyers to appreciate fully the effort she made here, her final writing, posthumously completed (no, not with any seance, which she adequately lambasted in her detective stories).

Her total translation of the Commedia is worth the price of admission (Do not abandon all hope, as she will bring you home to the beatific vision).

There are several translations of varying usefulness and grace, but Dorothy is the rock upon which to stand when comparing the rest.

Dante deserves 5 stars and the translators 4, but the current Kindle edition deserves 1. It seems to have been sloppily OCRed with little editorial attention. Problems include,

1. Ugly formatting (compared to the paper book). The verse numbers intrude into the text, the useful page headings are gone (except where they've been accidentally and intrusively included), and the indentation is inconsistent. On most devices it is hard to get lines to not wrap, but in the paper book this is handled well.

2. Typos/errors. Especially in the italicized comments at the beginning of each chapter. Clumsy, no attention to detail.

3. No table of contents and no good way to navigate between text, notes, and glossary. There should be *more* hyperlinking opportunities in the electronic text. But instead it's clumsier to use than the actual book, which responds well to thumb and finger. Also on the Kindle Touch anyway it's impossible to look up a phrase, for example to google "mosaic of Justinian at San Vitale" which was mentioned in the notes.

I can't believe I paid $9.59 for such a barbarically edited book. Where are your standards, Penguin? It's distracting and disappointing.

This is not the most up - to - date translation: however, it is one of the more worthy bits of the history that has grown up around the Comedy, and its perspective is still of practical use. (She actually tries to avoid Freud, for example). Her misunderstandings are ones we can overlook, and she could even help to correct any new ones (not that I do not have full faith in our, er, "currentness", of course!) that might arise.
As for the work of the Master himself, what can one say? Its the best book in world history (have not read any better: and I am, in all humillity, considered something of a reader).
Simply put, its Heaven.

Dorothy Sayers's translation of Dante is an important addition to the numerous translations of Dante currently available, and worth reading. Sayers manages to do what few English translators can, or even attempt: she renders the text in tirza rima. Tirza rima is notoriously difficult to write in English anyway, but the prospect of writing a translation in the form would make even the best poet tremble. However, Sayers pulls it off, giving readers a taste of Dante's original poetic form. Sayers's accomplishment comes at a price, however. Often she must contort the syntax in order to get the rhymes to fit, making an already-demanding poem even harder to comprehend in places. She also has to fall back on English archaisms and other tricks to make the form work, and some passages read much rougher than others.

I would recommend that a first-time reader of Dante not begin with Sayers's translations. I do not read Italian, so I cannot comment on the extent to which the translation is accurate. But there are several other well-regarded translations in print, such as Ciardi's and Esolen's, both of which are much easier to read, without sacrificing poetic quality. The experienced reader of Dante will want to read Sayers's translation at least once.

For myself, the real value of Sayers's editions is her notes, which are thorough and lucid. Paying special attention to philosophy and theology, Sayers unpacks and explains Dante in a way that few translators (or critics!) have been able to do. Even when her verse is stilted or cramped, her notes are enlightening. That is why Sayers's translation belongs on the bookshelf of the serious Dante reader, alongside some more readable translations.

A window into the medieval world. Read it: the minds of the Middle Ages were not nearly so befuddled as those that claim it to be.

The elevated sound of poetry are here heard. Not fisical reality, but the ideal; In the Paradiso, ideas and feelings are visible. Dante sees God's unexpressible force: love.