The New Criterion

The ineffability of mystical experience is an ancient commonplace. Not surprisingly, Dante alludes to it often with baffled exasperation throughout his Paradiso. In Canto 3, he states that “the sweetness of eternal life” can never be understood by the intellect; rather, it must be “tasted.” This is a reference to a verse from Psalm 33, often cited by medieval mystics, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” A century before Dante, Richard of St. Victor, among others, had adduced it to illustrate “the tasting of inner sweetness,” that dulcedo Dei which is the sweetness of God Himself. For such mystics, the experience of God was not verbal but gustatory, at once intimate and incommunicable. Hearing and seeing, touching and smelling, might play a part but they too were “spiritual senses.” God can be seen but only with “the eyes of the heart.” For Dante, when he set about composing the Paradiso, sometime around the year 1317, the inexpressibility of blessedness presented a seemingly insoluble difficulty. For the final cantica of the Divine Comedy is above all, and avowedly, a narrative of intellect; its drama arises from the struggle of “a mind emparadised” first to conceptualize, and then to articulate, the inherently indescribable. By now, Inferno and Purgatorio stood complete (though he continued to revise them), but there Dante had traversed readily imaginable terrains. We all have a sense of hell; even purgatory is as gnawingly real as our next best intention. Heaven remains the unimaginable kingdom.

In his efforts not so much to overcome this impossibility as to dramatize its effects, Dante has recourse both to the formulations of Scholastic theology and to the supple inventiveness of language itself. The originality of his language can hardly be overstated. By means of multiple allusion, wordplay, puns, and acrostics, as well as the entire repertoire of medieval rhetoric, he pushes his beloved vernacular to the limit. He draws on Latin and on Provençal, and even rhymes at one point in Hebrew. He revives old words and invents a score of new ones. At the outset, in Canto 1, he coins a new verb and pairs it with a Latin phrase to make the audacity of his unprecedented venture plain. In the new translation by Jean and Robert Hollander, the lines read, “To soar beyond the human cannot be described/ in words.”[1] The Italian is terser: “Trasumanar significar per verba/ non si poria.” The translation—to which I’ll return—doesn’t quite catch the effect of those two rhyming four-syllable infinitives capped by a Latin tag. (Longfellow was more literal as well as more accurate, in his 1865 version, when he rendered it as “To represent transhumanize in words/ Impossible were.”) The odd verb trasumanar is Dante’s invention and at first sight it mystifies. It compounds the deliberate obduracy of the verse; we are brought up short by the word just as the poet is brought up short by the boldness of his own ambition.

Dante deals with this dilemma by a masterstroke: he makes the inadequacy of human language one of the grand themes of the work. He uses the continual failure of language to convey something beyond language. And he does so per verba. But he may have had a strategic motive in mind as well. If I begin a story by telling you, “You’ll never believe what I have to say,” you are liable to sit up and pay attention. Poe exploited this device in his tales. “The Black Cat” opens with the sentence, “For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief,” and we are at once agog. Of course, Dante has other, profounder concerns in elaborating this theme but there is a certain bravado in his forays into the ineffable; this cannot be expressed, he insists, but he then goes on to do just that.

The Paradiso has an unfortunate reputation. It is thought to be tedious, excessively abstract, bland and pallid, by comparison with the two preceding cantiche. In his introductory remarks, Robert Hollander calls it “an impossible poem,” and rightly so. He describes it further as “theology set to music,” a description not likely to attract modern readers. We can just about accept the plausibility of a “singing detective,” but the prospect of a singing theologian sets our skin crawling. But in fact, though neither Hollander nor any other commentator, to my knowledge, mentions it, doesn’t Dante’s characteristic terza rima carry echoes of the tripartite form of the syllogism, so beloved of Scholastic logicians?

Even the signal device of the entire Commedia—the constant recourse to dialogue and interchange between Dante and Virgil or Dante and Beatrice—may owe something to the viva voce disputations of the medieval theologians, with their “if it is said” followed by “then I respond” vividly transposed into the recurrent Dantescan formulae “and so I said to him” and “he made answer thus.” Scholastic theology permeates not only the content, but the very form and style of the whole work. With what suggests a sinking feeling, Hollander states that the Paradiso’s “endless-seeming theological disquisitions … have addled many a reader” and furthermore, that few readers “will claim (or admit) that it is their favourite cantica.” Well, count me among the addled, but happy, few. For me, the Paradiso stands as Dante’s supreme achievement.

Here an obvious point is in order. The Paradiso—indeed, the entire Divine Comedy —is a literary work and not principally, or even necessarily, an account of Dante’s own private experience of “transhumanized” vision. Whether or not Dante himself enjoyed a foretaste of final blessedness, he had no more need to do so, in order to write his poem, than Dostoevsky needed to sink an axe into the skull of an old woman to write Crime and Punishment.

Dante the poet stands in the same relation to Dante the narrator of the Divine Comedy as Proust stands in relation to the Marcel of A la recherche du temps perdu. Like Proust, Dante drew on the vicissitudes of his own life—and especially on his exile from Florence—but he turned these to conscious artistic effect. In this way he enables us all to become spectators of the ascent; he is humanity’s interlocutor in the courts of heaven, and as puzzled and astonished as we would be to find ourselves there.

The eminent dantista Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, in her superb commentary to the Mondadori edition of the Paradiso, makes this obvious, but too often overlooked, point well. In explaining Dante’s surprising appeal to Apollo at the outset of the Paradiso, she notes that his invocation of a pagan god “signifies that here we are dealing with a work of poetry which requires the use of art, along with inspiration. Therefore, this is not a mystical text in the true sense of the word. The vision is narrated as true but in the form of a poetic fiction.” The Paradiso, she concludes, is “a work of literature which conveys a genuine experience of the divine.”

Though Robert Hollander doesn’t mention Chiavacci Leonardi’s fundamental caution—or even cite her authoritative edition and commentary (which first appeared in 1997)—he does treat the Paradiso in his canto-by-canto and line-by-line commentary first and foremost as a literary work; the strength of this approach shines through in every note. His commentary is magisterial, and easily the finest available in English. As with his and Jean Hollander’s earlier versions of the Inferno (2002) and Purgatorio (2004), the Italian text established by Giorgio Petrocchi is presented facing the English translation, each canto is prefaced by a clear and useful outline and followed by extensive verse-by-verse annotations, there is an excellent diagram of celestial topography, indexes of subjects as well as of names and places, and a very full bibliography.

Hollander’s introduction manages to be at once erudite and witty, and his commentary reveals the same light but authoritative touch. The fact that Hollander has taught Dante for over forty years at Princeton shows to advantage; he is adept at explaining obscure historical imbroglios, abstract theological wrangles, or the baffling intricacies of medieval astronomy, among many other topics, and does so with enviable lucidity. There are occasional factual errors. Thus, with reference to Canto 9:39, Badakhshan is not “today … in Iran,” as Hollander claims, but a Central Asian province straddling Afghanistan and Tajikistan, but such lapses are rare. Sometimes, it is true, a seemingly uncontrollable pedagogic impulse seizes him; when he first mentions Dante’s Empyrean, he cannot resist inserting a bracketed nudge (“[pronounced em-PEER-ian]”), but I suppose he’s had to endure “em-PIE-rian” once too often in his seminars.

The most conspicuous merit of Hollander’s commentary lies not only in his close familiarity with Dante and his works but also in his extraordinary mastery of the secondary literature. By this, I mean not only the long tradition of textual commentary on the Divine Comedy—Hollander has consulted some seventy-three individual commentaries, extending from Dante’s son Jacopo Alighieri in 1322 down to Nicola Fosca in 2006—but also the vast, and ever growing, body of contemporary scholarship on everything from Scholastic metaphysics to medieval clocks. Whether his comments take the form of brief glosses on individual words or deal with larger, and more intractable, issues, Hollander is deft at weaving apt and up-to-date references into his discussion. Some of his comments form sleek little essays in their own right. For example, in discussing Canto 28:91–93, and the hotly disputed question of possible Islamic influence on Dante, Hollander skilfully traces the controversy sparked by the Spanish Arabist Miguel Asín Palácios (whose claims of an Arabic precedent enraged Italian scholars in the 1920s) down to the more nuanced, but no less passionate, discussions of the present day. Sometimes his observations are unexpectedly humorous, as when, amid allusions to Chaucer and Boccaccio, Svevo and Nietzsche, he adduces the example of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot or calls attention, with reference to Canto 2, verses 13–15, to Dante’s audacity as being “far beyond … what in Yiddish is referred to as chutzpah.” The cumulative effect is to make Hollander seem a sort of hovering professorial Beatrice, guiding the perplexed reader firmly but gently towards yet another unsuspected illumination.

Hollander is especially good at identifying and explaining the rhetorical devices which Dante uses throughout the Paradiso. No instance of anaphora or chiasmus or hysteron proteron passes unnoticed and he has an expert eye for Dante’s puns, palindromes, and verbal patternings. Hollander glosses Dante’s invented words, such as incielare (“to enheaven”) or imparadisare (“to emparadise”), competently enough but doesn’t always go beyond their mere mechanics, even though they reveal the poet at his most original. The most extreme coinages occur in Canto 9. There Dante says to the troubadour Folchetto di Marsiglia, in the Hollanders’ translation, “God sees all, and your sight is so in-himmed,” using a newly coined verb (inluiarsi, to be “in him”). Dante complicates this further, eight lines later, when he says to Folchetto (again in the Hollander version), “I would not await your question/ if I in-you’d me as you in-me’d you” (s’io m’intuassi, come tu t’inmii); here he is transforming personal pronouns into reflexive verbs. In his marvellous notes to the Paradiso, Longfellow rendered this, more literally, as “If I in-theed myself as thou in-meest thyself,” but in his actual translation he smoothed out the pronominal tangles to read, “If I in thee were as thou art in me.” Hollander calls this “fancy rhetoric” on Dante’s part, but it’s more than that. The coinages intertwine subject and predicate in a way which simultaneously intensifies and annuls them. The blessed are telepathic and here Dante shows how their minds and his mystically intertwine.

Like most academic commentators, Hollander is dogged at elucidation but seldom comments on the way in which Dante achieves his unusual poetic effects; he almost never notes the extraordinary sound of the verses. In Canto 14, for example, Dante writes:

Quell’uno e due e tre che sempre vive
e regna sempre in tre e’n due e’n uno,
non circunscritto, e tutto circunscrive.

The Hollanders translate this as:

That ever-living One and Two and Three
who reigns forever in Three and Two and One,
uncircumscribed and circumscribing all.

In his notes, Hollander explains how the verses encapsulate the doctrine of the Trinity in a kind of palindrome but says nothing of their remarkable cadences in the original. In his 1955 edition and commentary, by contrast, the great dantista Natalino Sapegno drew attention to their “melodious movement” and the way in which the “almost staccato” words create a perfect circle of reversing echoes. Longfellow, whose commentary ranges over all of Latin and Italian as well as English poetry to illumine Dante’s artistry, simply quotes Chaucer’s adaptation in Troilus and Cressida (a parallel Hollander doesn’t mention):

Thou One, and Two, and Thre! eterne on live,
That raignest aie in Thre, and Two, and One,
Uncircumscript, and all maist circumscrive!

In the Middle English, as in the Italian, the verses dance. This is the Trinity presented in triple-time, a doctrinal waltz. Throughout the Commedia, but most conspicuously in the Paradiso, the sound of the verses is as important as their meaning and structure. Of course, few academic commentators on Dante dwell on his purely poetic effects (Longfellow is the great exception but then he was a superb poet as well); their task is to make the poem possible of approach. It is left for the translator to grapple with the ultimate impossibility, that of conveying in English some sense of the incomparable beauty of the original.

Unlike the commentary, the Hollanders’ translation is a collaborative effort, for which Jean Hollander, herself a poet, is presumably in large part responsible. As with their earlier versions of Inferno and Purgatorio, the translation is, wisely, in unrhymed terza rima; in this respect they follow the examples set by Longfellow and C. H. Sisson. Rhyming versions of Dante, however clever, prompt the uneasy sensation of watching a performer on a high-wire; we know the spill into padded phrases and tortured syntax is coming—and it always does—we just don’t know when. But a swift, clear, uncluttered version, like the Hollanders’, allows us to concentrate less on the ingenuity, or the pratfalls, of the translators and more on Dante. Inevitably, of course, much is lost. Throughout the Paradiso, Dante’s singing cadences impel the verses forward while the interlacing three-fold rhymes provide brief intervals of rest, like pauses in a melody; the effect is one of woven momentum.

No translator can really capture this but the Hollanders come close. In Canto 31, when Dante and Beatrice reach the Empyrean, they see the angels moving like bees in the white rose of paradise:

as a swarm of bees that in one instant plunge
deep into blossoms and, the very next, go back
to where their toil is turned to sweetness—

these descended to the splendid flower,
adorned with its many petals, and then flew up
to where their love forever dwells.

Their faces were of living flame,
their wings were gold, the rest
was of a whiteness never matched by snow.

This isn’t conspicuously “poetic.” The language and the diction are plain. It doesn’t try to reproduce the effect of the Dantescan verb s’infiora (“enflowers itself”). But it is quite faithful to both the meaning of the verses and their music. Dante’s economy of expression is at times so extreme that even the Hollanders must resort to a bit of padding. The famous verses which conclude Canto 13 contain a caution as well as a celebrated simile which encapsulates the whole Commedia, which they render as follows:

Let the people, then, not be too certain
in their judgments, like those that harvest in their minds
corn still in the field before it ripens.

For I have seen the briar first look dry and thorny

right through all the winter's cold,
then later wear the bloom of roses at its tip.

We might find it a bit rich of Dante to warn against making absolute judgments; he’d stripped his own mental corn-field bare two canticles back. But the translation shows how the very avoidance of rhyme can work to suggest the music of the original. The long second line, which catches a certain tentative falter in the Italian, comes up hard against the five single-syllable words of the next line. The rhythm changes abruptly and that small shift conveys the characteristic motion of Dante’s verse. Unfortunately, the Hollanders pad the last verse quoted. In the Italian, it reads “then later bear the rose upon its tip” (poscia portar la rosa in su la cima), not “the bloom of roses.” This isn’t as trivial as it may seem. The tercet summarizes the whole Commedia, from the icy thorn of hell to the white rose of paradise, but this is blurred in the translation. Happily, such occasional lapses do not mar what is by any measure a splendid translation.

Now that the Hollanders have completed their annotated translation of the whole Commedia, readers who have shied away from its final canticle may be able to appreciate its full magnificence. Neither Dante’s hell nor his purgatory can really be grasped except in the light of heaven. The damned have forfeited “the good of the intellect” and the souls in purgatory are laboring to regain it, but the full meaning of that good is only made manifest in paradise; there all is “intellectual light.”

And Paradiso is as rich in vivid characters—from the fulminating St. Peter to the grandfatherly Cacciaguida, Dante’s prophetic ancestor—as either the Inferno or the Purgatorio. Beatrice, who dominates the narrative, is an incomparable creation, at once scolding and cajoling, ecstatic and peremptory, fish-wife and philosopher, the embodiment of sacred theology and the love of Dante’s life; in the highest heaven, his yearning for her is sexual as well as mystical. Barbara Reynolds, a rather provocative dantista, has even suggested that Dante experiences a heavenly tumescence in her presence, a notion Hollander firmly corrects. So far as I can see, the only thing Beatrice stiffens in Dante is his resolve. But Reynolds has a point. Dante draws on all forms of love, sexual and parental, mystical and metaphysical, to come as close as he can to the inexpressible. The love that moves the sun and the other stars moves his language too.

Notes
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1. Paradiso by Dante Aligheri, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander; Doubleday, 944 pages, $40.00. Go back to the text.