Both these books consider how Dante’s Divine Comedy has been transmitted to and through later readers but they do so in radically different ways. One explores the poem’s influence on a selection of later writers and artists. The other republishes a single, historically important translation which the introduction flags as ‘An American Voice for Dante’. This republication is introduced by a scholarly introduction and accompanied by interpretative illustrations. I’ll look at both books in terms of what I think they can offer non-specialist literary readers, though it’s only fair to say that the republication of Charles S. Singleton’s translation seems primarily aimed at specialist academic students.

To take the broader study first, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi is both scholarly and highly accessible: it offers vivid narrative, clear accounts of changing cultural contexts, clear explanations of complex ideas and a light touch in using textual detail to illuminate broad points. Illustrating the richness of Dante’s work by showing how differently it’s been read in different periods and what diverse inspirations artists have found within it, the author is able to zoom in on particular episodes and passages, giving enough context for them to be understood in themselves without demanding prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Illuminating both the Commedia itself and the writers it has influenced, Luzzi’s ideas will interest both people who already know Dante and lovers of these other writers. Many of the latter, I suspect, will be drawn into reading Dante for themselves.

There’s something of a shifting balance between the two kinds of appeal. In terms of their basic subject matter, chapters 1 – 4 will mean most to people who already have at least some interest in the Commedia, whether from a literary or historical point of view. However, Luzzi’s gift for seeing facts and situations in terms of their concrete meaning for those involved adds a human depth that more narrowly academic studies can miss. So does the agility with which he moves among ideas and makes connections between them. For example, Chapter 1 – ‘Inventing “Italian” Literature’ – revolves round well-established ideas about Dante’s immediate impact and about how the vastness of his achievement influenced the subsequent development of the Italian language. However, I can’t remember an equally vivid presentation of the novelty and scale of ambition involved in his use of the vernacular when ‘Basically, he sought to forge, ex nihilo, a literary tradition [of vernacular love poetry] in an “Italian” tongue that did not yet exist’, and wrote his epic of unprecedentedly universalist scope in the Tuscan dialect rather than the Latin that would have made his work accessible throughout Europe. The decision to do this limited his contemporary readership even within Italy. In a deft application of anecdote, Luzzi tells us that ‘as late as the nineteenth century, Milanese nobles traveling to Sicily were mistaken for Englishmen, so incomprehensible was their dialect to locals’. Against such a cost, though, Luzzi sets the poetic and humane value Dante found in what he called the ‘lingua materna’: ‘In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante developed his views on the necessity of the vernacular by describing how poets preserve what is lasting and lovely in everyday speech …he knew that no mere scholarly or “dead” language could capture the intimate rhythms, cadences and meanings of everyday speech and, by extension, the resonances and experiences of everyday life.’ Reading this, we feel how Dante’s embrace of the vernacular gave his writing its astonishingly concrete, specific power of dramatic evocation. At the same time, I think, we feel how crucial it was to the power and poignancy of his religious vision that it brought together these evocations of concrete, local and ephemeral earthly life and the eternity such life confronts.

The balance changes with Chapter 5. From here on, what Luzzi has to say will draw in readers with no prior knowledge of Dante as well as being full of interest for people who do know the Commedia itself well. Crucial to both kinds of appeal is the sensitivity with which he focuses on the artistry of Dante’s work, and his ability to present it in ways that draw the reader directly into particular situations. An example would be his comments on Dante’s influence on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. First he shows how Victor Frankenstein’s speech urging the sailors not to abandon pursuit of the monster develops from Ulysses’ report of his speech to his own sailors in Inferno 26; then he reflects eloquently and suggestively about what Shelley and Dante seem to be saying about their respective heroes’ pursuit of knowledge without constraint, and the egotistical manipulativeness of their rhetoric.

This comes in Chapter 5, ‘Romantic Apotheosis’. I think that’s where the book will most fully catch fire for the general reader. Luzzi’s own prose, lively though it is in the first four chapters, seems to glow more brightly as this and the following chapter show how excitedly Romantic writers responded both to Dante himself as a heroic figure and to the intense passions and larger-than-life characters he described in his work. Chapter 6 focuses mainly on Byron and the great Dante translator Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Again, Luzzi’s comments are as illuminating about these two as about Dante’s poem, and his account of Longfellow is particularly moving, at least to someone who knows as little about him as I do.

Chapter 7 moves on to ‘The Modernist Dante’ and a sharp contrast with the Dante of the Romantics. Luzzi’s skill as a communicator appears in the ease with which he moves between lucid outlines of such larger contexts, generously illustrated by quotation, and the sensitive but lightly touched close reading of particular passages. For example, he points out how the epigraph to ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – a quotation from Guido da Montefeltro’s speech in Inferno 27 – uses a triple subjunctive followed by a conditional. He makes his point clear by quoting the passage in both Dante’s Tuscan and English, using a change of font to isolate the subjunctives and conditionals. Anyone can feel how in its original language the passage’s strange maze of sounds and slippery syntactical repetitions and its hovering indeterminacy make it unforgettable – I’ve been haunted by it since studying Eliot at A Level, well before I could read Italian – but Luzzi extends this immediate sensation into a striking commentary first on how Guido’s use of such subjunctives reflects his character and then on the radical expansion of such subjunctive being in Prufrock:

He [Guido] is the ultimate backroom operator who sells his words and actions to the highest bidder. His language thus articulates a series of hedged bets predicated on hiding the cards he has been dealt and hopes to redistribute to his advantage.

     Protagonist of the eponymous poem, Eliot’s Prufrock is fully a creature of the subjunctive. The poem is everywhere a disavowal of agency and direct action.

So far we’re dealing with a contrast of fictional characters. On this scale, as Luzzi says, it’s astonishing that

Dante’s verse could fuel the impassioned eloquence of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein as he exhorted a crew of sailors to pursue the monster and the involuted paralysis of T.S. Eliot’s narrator as he contemplates as anodyne an act as parting his hair or eating a piece of fruit.

As a whole, though, the chapter offers a much larger contrast between the Romantic assertion of subjectivity, on the one hand, and Modernists’ embrace of sheer poetic technique –both as experimental poetics and as evolving tradition. Again the point is that the vastness and originalityof Dante’s achievement make it bear very different kinds of fruit in the work of subsequent artists:

In a testament to the variety of readings that Dante could inspire, the Commedia, which had served to bolster the self in the Romantic age, became in Eliot’s Modernist age a vehicle for occluding it.

Subsequent chapters illustrate this fecundity in other ways and contexts, bringing us right up to modern times and the papacy of Pope Francis. Altogether, though the book is quite short it’s interesting and illuminating in many different directions, the more so for presenting ideas and perspectives in a concise and suggestive manner rather than trying to nail them down too exhaustively. It has a great deal to offer, both to those who already know the Commedia itself and to those who don’t but who do have an interest in comparative literature and the processes of literary influence.

If Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography is above all a study of Dante’s artistry and the inspiration it has provided for subsequent artists, Simone Marchesi’s introduction to the Singleton translation is an essentially academic presentation of its relation to earlier literary tradition and the theological ideas of its own time. Marchesi refers in vivid terms to different scenes and episodes but his references will only makes sense to readers already familiar with them. When it comes to Dante’s artistic technique, Marchesi’s focus is on relatively abstract considerations, like the author’s implicit contract with the reader (‘The reading contract Dante proposes rests on a number of coordinated strategies’), or Virgil’s status as ‘a metaphorical and metonymical representative of the classical world’. He has very interesting things to say on such scores, but they’re of a kind that will appeal to the professional or at least fairly advanced dantist. The real question for readers of the kind I’m thinking of in this review will be whether or not Singleton’s actual translation presents Dante in a way that will be meaningful for them.

Even for someone like me, whose Italian is limited and who needs the help of an English parallel text to read much of Dante’s Tuscan, there’s no substitute for reading the Commedia in the original, however laborious the process may be. Most fundamentally, this is to do with the double action of the terza rima form: as Dante’s stories, situations and reflections evolve, details are framed, isolated and defined within tercets at the same time as they’re drawn into the continuous onward movement between tercets by the rhyming of the second line of each with the first and third lines of the following one.

Verse translations can at least faintly echo this effect because their line and stanza divisions focus attention on small units of meaning while the developing narrative carries us forward. If they’re by poets, those details will be vividly expressed in themselves. What I’d look for in a prose translation of the Commedia is clear, sensitive and expressive evocations of scene and mood, character and idea, in a style that made each separate impression as distinct, impressive and memorable as it could be.

Singleton rises to the occasion magnificently in Ulysses’ last words in Inferno xxvi:

Five times the light beneath the moon had been rekindled and as many quenched, since we had entered on the passage of the deep, when there appeared to us a mountain dark in the distance, and to me it seemed the highest I had ever seen. We rejoiced, but soon our joy was turned to grief, for from the new land a whirlwind rose and struck the forepart of the ship. Three times it whirled her round with all the waters, and the fourth time it lifted the stern aloft and plunged the prow below, as pleased Another, till the sea closed over us.

Here, departures from normal English word order and vocabulary give an impression of solemnity that not only lends scale to the disaster but also suggests that it’s an inevitable consequence of the mariners’ blasphemous approach to the island mountain of Purgatory, which is only to be reached by the judgement of God. By throwing emphasis on a series of key phrases, these departures both slow the action and create suspense as to what comes next, in an effect approaching the double action of Dane’s terza rima form. Heightening grandeur of style combines with concrete vividness of detail to bring home the symbolic import of what’s happening. In the wider context of the Commedia as a whole, it’s important that this moment stands out in the reader’s mind, contrasting Ulysses’ failed journey with Dante’s successful one. At this point, Singleton has given an expressive rhythm to his prose that captures a good deal of the feeling of the original and seems almost to insist on being read and savoured aloud.

This isn’t often the case, at least on first reading. On such reading, two things make great stretches of Singleton’s version seem both cumbersome and indistinct. One is the absence of the framing effect of verse that I’ve discussed above. The other is that too often his archaic phrasing creates a sense of imaginative distance and his elaborately periphrastic constructions dissipate meaning. He tends to follow the ordering of the Italian in a very close, literal way that may be motivated by an idealistic desire to represent the original as faithfully as possible but that sounds stilted and clumsy in English. In a parallel text format this approach might have been useful to someone using Singleton’s words as a crib to the Italian but that isn’t the situation here.

I said ‘on first reading’ advisedly, though. For someone who already knows the Commedia and enjoys approaching it from different angles, deepening appreciation by seeing how differently different translators refract the original, Singleton still has much to offer. For example, in Canto 30 of the Paradiso Dante is initiated into the light of eternity. His initiation develops through several stages. He sees it first as a blinding lightning flash, then as a river of light with sparks flying between it and its flowery banks, then in a series of further images which take him closer and closer to the ineffable heart of the celestial vision. Compare Singleton’s version of six tercets describing the river, sparks and flowers with that by Robert and Jean Hollander for Anchor Books:

Singleton:

“Ever does the love which quiets this heaven receive into itself with such like salutation, in order to prepare the candle for its flame.” No sooner had these brief words come within me than I comprehended that I was surmounting beyond my own power, and such new vision was kindled in me that there is no light so bright that my eyes could not have withstood it. And I saw a light in form of a river glowing tawny between two banks painted with marvellous spring. From out this river issued living sparks and dropped on every side into the blossoms, like rubies set in gold. Then, as if inebriated by the odors, they plunged again into the wondrous flood, and as one was entering another was issuing forth.

Robert and Jean Hollander:

‘The love that calms this heaven
always offers welcome with such greetings,
to make the candle ready for its flame.’

No sooner had these few words reached my mind
than I became aware of having risen
above and well beyond my powers,

and such was the new vision kindled within me
that there exists no light so vivid that my eyes
could not have borne its brightness.

And I saw light that flowed as flows a river,
pouring its golden splendor between two banks
painted with the wondrous colors of spring.

From that torrent issued living sparks
and, on either bank, they settled on the flowers,
like rubies ringed in gold.

Then, as though intoxicated by the odors,
they plunged once more into the marvelous flood,
and as one submerged another would come forth.

The Hollanders’ version is much clearer than Singleton’s, partly for lexical and syntactical reasons and partly because of its division into lines. However, it does seem to me that the clarity comes at some cost in intensity. Singleton’s first sentence – spoken by Beatrice – is clumsy in a way that almost buries the idea that it’s trying to express. The Hollanders’ wording has a simple beauty. However, Singleton’s ‘From out this river issued living sparks and dropped on every side into the blossoms, like rubies set in gold’ seems to me a flash of the purest poetry, albeit in prose. The heightened register of ‘From out this river issued’ lends the sentence a stateliness appropriate to the exalted nature of the vision, but the moment is given piercing force and sensuous intensity in the words that follow. Where in the Hollanders’ version the actions of issuing and settling are separated by a parenthesis, in Singleton’s there’s an unbroken flow of energy bringing together the action of the verbs and the being of the living sparks, the blossoms, the rubies and the gold.

This is just one example of what I felt overall – that a reader first approaching Dante through Singleton’s version would struggle with its archaic diction and often find himself sliding over important impressions because they weren’t registered distinctly enough or were actually obscure, but that a reader approaching Singleton’s text as a supplement to what he had already absorbed from other versions would find it full of enhancing details.

Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi, $24.95/£20.00. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691156774

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by Charles S. Singleton, introduced by Simone Marchesi, illustrated by Roberto Abbiati, $29.95/£25.00. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691212777

I would like to thank David Cooke for permission to repost this piece, originally written for  The High Window.