★★★★☆ The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, by Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi (translator)
Pre-Copernican speculative fiction
The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso
Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi (translator)
Pre-Copernican speculative fiction
I think I read The Divine Comedy more for the sake of John Ciardi than Dante Alighieri. I first become acquainted with Ciardi at around the age of six through The Man Who Sang the Sillies. We owned a copy, and every member of my family was familiar with every one of the poems in it. We even felt a bit of personal connection with him because he, like us, had a house on Drake's Island, Maine, that we used to walk past on our way to the beach. (Yeah, I know -- lame!) Of course at the age of six I had no idea how prominent a poet he was. I began to get some idea when he was discussed in my High School English class. And he later appeared in my consciousness when he co-authored three books of limericks with Isaac Asimov.
Thus, at some point I decided I should acquaint myself with Ciardi's serious poetry. Reading about him I learned that he was perhaps most famous for his translation of The Divine Comedy. And since I had never read the entire Divine Comedy, that was the obvious choice. Let's take note that translating poetry is not like translating prose -- to translate poetry you must write original poetry. And it is extraordinarily difficult to translate poetry into poetry in a way that reproduces both the poeticism and sense of the original. Ciardi makes a smart choice -- he translates The Divine Comedy into blank verse -- his translation doesn't rhyme. This gives him the freedom to accurately convey the meaning. (So he says -- I personally don't read Italian, especially not 14th-century Italian, so I have to take others' word for this.)
One could of course fill a library with opinions of The Divine Comedy -- it's been done. But what surprised me most about it was the physicality of Dante's religious realm. A colleague of mine once remarked that religion had always seemed remote to her -- it was something that existed in Israel. This startled me, because I had never imagined religion as existing in any physical location.
Dante does. Hell is literally underground -- under the surface of a spherical Earth. Lucifer and Judas are literally at the center of the Earth, which is the center of the universe, where the direction of gravity changes. Heaven is literally in the sky, or above it. Eden has a definite location on Earth's surface, and Purgatory occupies a kind of column that ascends from Eden to Heaven. The architecture of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven are essential to Dante's story of their function. Because they DO function -- they are a sort of machine that takes in sinners, processes them, and finally disgorges them at their proper destinations.
Well, it was certainly interesting, and not what I expected. More like science fiction than anything else written before Frankenstein.
The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso on Amazon