From Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:

“And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed:”

It is a comfort when our lease on so much, our very planet, seems to have “all too short a date” and indeed “too hot the eye of heaven shines”, to read a great epic, to find a place where the mind can soar. I found such a place one recent hot day when I pulled from the shelf Dante’s Divine Comedy in Dorothy Sayers’ translation. Since 1314 (the publication date as near as is known) Dante’s “il dolce stil nuovo - sweet new style”, his terza rima, the poetic form that he invented, has been a voice speaking for us all, the poem that he himself referred to in the Paradiso (XXIII l. 62) as a ‘poema sacro’ - sacred poem - although it wasn’t until the 16th Century that it came to be called The Divine Comedy.

Here are the opening lines - the dark wood, the ‘selva oscura’ that is so familiar.

“Nel mezzo de cammin de nostra vita

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.

Ché la diritta via era smarrìta.”

(Inferno: Canto 1: ll:1-3)

And Dorothy Sayers translation:

“Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”

Then in line 8, “Yet there I gained such good,” Dante offers the note of hope and promise that is the signature feature of his Comedy as he sets out on his great journey, supported by the wise and gentle Virgil, spurred on by his vision of Beatrice, his beloved.

This is how Ruskin describes Dante in one of his many writings:

“Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness…. Hence, I suppose that the powers of the imagination may always be tested by accompanying tenderness of emotion: and thus (as Byron said,) there is no tenderness like Dante’s.”

(Comments of John Ruskin on the Divina Commedia: compiled by George P. Huntington, pub. Houghton, Mifflin 1903 p.9)

And, as an example of this tenderness, here is the famous passage in The Inferno, Canto V, when Francesca da Rimini tells Dante how she and her brother-in-law Paolo fell in love - over a book!

“One day,

For our delight we read of Lancelot,

How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no

Suspicion near us. Oft-times by that reading

Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue

Fled from our alter’d cheek. But at one point

Alone we fell. When of that smile we read,

The wished smile so raptorously kiss’d

By one so deep in love, then he, who ne’er

From me shall separate, at once my lips

All trembling kiss’d. The book and writer both

Were love’s purveyors. In its leaves that day

We read no more.”

(Tr. Henry F. Cary, 1909, Harvard Classics)

And then, Dante, overcome with emotion -

“And all the while one spirit uttered this,

The other one did weep so, that, for pity,

I swooned away as if I had been dying,

And fell, even as a dead body falls.” (ll. 139-142 Tr. Robert Hollander.)

And here is the Italian -

“Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto

di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;

soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse

quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;

ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso

esser basciato da cotanto amante,

questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.

Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:

quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”. ll.128-142

Even if, like me, one cannot read Italian, it seems to bring the poem alive to have a ‘facing page’ translation. Having that makes it possible to experience the effect of the terza rima, with its energy and forward movement, and which, as it says in the Very Short Introduction to Dante, “makes the poem easier to memorize and binds its texture together” (p. 61) and “is a celebration of the underlying order of the universe.” (p. 63). It is, too, a reflection of the tenderness of which Ruskin speaks that Dante insisted in breaking with tradition and writing in the Italian vernacular rather than Latin, so that everyone could read it. As Dorothy Sayers says in her introduction, ’he wrote for the ’common reader.’” (p. 49).

For ‘the common reader’ there are many guides and commentaries - several in the Library collection -even though, as is often pointed out, one can gain much joy from just reading the poem, a voice for our times, for all times. It was as an exile for much of his life, that Dante, with deep empathy, wrote in the Paradiso, Canto XVII ll: 58-60

“Thou shalt make trial of how salt doth taste another man’s bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount another man’s stairs.”

(Tr. The Rev. Philip Wicksteed, Temple Classics 1899.)

(“Tu proverai sì come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle

Lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.”)

The American theologian Frederick Buechner, in an essay titled “The Mystery of Words”, wrote “Here then is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: that not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. … They move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human.”

From A Room Called To Remember.

It is this very power of words that is described in the opening to the VSI to Dante, in a discussion of Dante’s encounter with Ulysses.

“Fatti non foste a viver come bruti

ma per seguir virtue e conoscenza.”

(You were not made to live like brute beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.) Inferno XXVI ll: 119-20. In If This Be A Man Primo Levi recounts that it was these lines that he recalled at one of his worst moments in Auschwitz.” p.1.

Finally, talking of “great distances of time and space,” here are some lines from a poem that Boccaccio, the 14th Century author of The Decameron, wrote to his friend the poet, Petrarch, he who brought us the sonnet, on sending him a copy of Dante:

“Sure ornament of Italy, whose temples

The Roman leaders crowned, receive this work

Which pleases learned men, amazes common,

Its like composed in no prior age.

The verses of an exiled, uncrowned poet,

Resounding merely in his native tongue –

His studies drew him to the snowy heights,

Through nature’s secret spots and hiding places

And through the ways of heaven and earth and sea,

Hence virtue gave him the illustrious name

Of poet, theologian and philosopher.”

(Tr. by David Thompson, Everyman’s Pocket Poets: Books and Libraries)

Belinda deKay is the emeritus director of Stonington Free Library.