I would warmly recommend D. M. Black’s translation of Dante’s Paradiso, both to people who already know and love Dante and to those who don’t but are ready to take on a long poem of medieval religious vision. I hope my discussion will show the nature of the work’s contents to people who haven’t read Paradiso in any translation, and that my quotations will give those who do know it already a flavour of Black’s particular style. I’ll say a bit more about this at the end of the piece.

Paradiso is of course the third and culminating section or cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It shows how Dante the pilgrim, having travelled down through the increasingly dreadful circles of Hell (in Inferno) and climbed the mountain of Purgatory (in Purgatorio) ascends through the various heavens to reach the Empyrean and be granted a vision of the saved souls, the angels and God himself, beyond space and time in eternity. Being the third and last, it’s also the least read; readers who don’t stay the course never reach it. It also offers different satisfactions to the preceding cantiche. Inferno,where Dante meets the souls of those who died hopelessly at odds with God’s will, is the most obviously and often terrifyingly dramatic. It also offers the most compellingly tragic or bitterly ironic stories of the dead souls’ actions on earth. In Purgatorio, drama is of a gentler and less intense kind because everyone Dante now meets wills the same thing and is on course to achieve it. However, we’re still deeply engaged on a human level because sympathetic and loving emotions are sharpened and hauntingly entwined with acceptance of sacrifice and loss, above all when Virgil, Dante’s beloved guide and almost father, must return to Hell. In Paradiso, Dante ascends through the various heavens towards a vision of the divine. Guided by Beatrice, he receives lessons on the way from souls representing different forms and degrees of holiness. The glory of this cantica is not in stories of life on earth but in the ravishing poetry with which it presents stupendous visions of order, love and light.

This poetry draws power from opposing sources. In the first canto of Paradiso Dante invents a word – ‘trasumanar’ – to signify the passing beyond the human condition that he says enabled him to receive visions superhuman in scale and purity. However, what makes these visions so moving is that they’re continuously infused with sensitively evoked human feeling, whether in the way the saved souls are presented or in the ongoing stories of Dante the pilgrim’s reactions to what he sees and Dante the narrator’s struggles to recall and express his experience. Similarly, Dante is a highly visual poet, but passing beyond the human involves passing beyond what we can visualise, and some of the most memorable passages intensely activate the visual imagination in order to force it into trying to conceive the inconceivable.

Sublime conceptions are present from the start. In the heaven of the moon, Dante meets the humblest of the blest. When Dante asks one of them – Piccarda Donati – if souls like her desire a ‘higher place / to see more and to be yet more beloved’,

…She and the other shades first smiled a little –
and then she answered me with so much joy
she seemed ablaze with the first fire of love:

She explains that it is impossible for them or any of the saved to desire more than they have because that would be discordant with the will of God:

 ….And in his will is found our peace: it is
that sea to which all beings move that are
by it created or by nature made.

This last tercet is often quoted, whether in Dante’s Italian or in different translations. What quiet power there is in the simple phrases, both in terms of their psychological and metaphysical meanings. What I find most stunning, though, is the imaginative reach that unites these vast ideas to the delicate humanity of ‘She and the other shades first smiled a little’. Love in the most absolute sense, the creative love of God, is brought together with the simple human joys of shared knowledge, shared feeling, and the ability to communicate these things, so that we feel how such emotions in this world offer glimpses of the divine.

Revelation follows revelation till the final four cantos, which present a rapidly evolving crescendo of vision as Dante sees more and more deeply into ultimate reality and for an instant sees into the mind of God as angels and blessed souls do. At first these visions are brilliantly visual. He tells us he saw

…………………………light flowing like a river
of radiant gold between two banks, both painted
with all the marvelous blossoms of the spring;
….and from that river came forth living sparks
that settled in the flowers on every side,
like rubies clasped within a golden setting,
….and then, as if made drunk with perfume, they
dived back again into that marvelous torrent,
and as one entered it, another came out.

Dante dips his eyes into this river and it becomes the circle of eternity. Dante now sees that the flowers are human souls and the sparks are angels. He sees the court of eternity as a stupendously vast theatre in which the souls of the blessed are arranged in tiers according to their rank:

….And therefore in the shape of a white rose
there was displayed to me the saintly host
Christ made his bride with his most precious blood;
….but the other host which, flying, sees and sings
the Glory of him on whom their love is set,
and by whose Goodness it is made so vast,
….like a task force of bees that at one moment
in-flower themselves, and at the next return
to where their labour will acquire its sweetness,
….descended into that great flower, adorned
with petals in such multitude – and then
flew up to where their love forever lives.
 ….And all their faces were like living flame,
their wings were golden, and the rest so white
no snow has ever equalled that perfection.

Vivid visual description continues as Dante looks at the highest saints in reverence and love and as Beatrice is replaced as Dante’s teacher by Saint Bernard, renowned for his dedication to the Virgin Mary. And then he is granted a vision of God himself, a vision beyond anything visual description can convey, beyond his power to express in words or even to recall. Almost magical images express the elusiveness of the vision itself:

….Like one who has a vision in a dream,
and when the dream has passed the passion wakened
remains, but nothing else comes back to mind –
….like such am I, for now my vision has
almost entirely ceased, yet still there trickles
into my heart the sweetness born of it.
….Thus in the sun snow loses its sharp imprint;
thus in the wind the fluttering leaves disperse
the Sibyl’s utterance and it is lost.

(In Virgil’s Aeneid the Cumaean Sybil’s prophecies are recorded on leaves which are blown about and lost.)

….O overflowing grace by which I dared
to fix my vision on eternal Light
till in it all my seeing was consumed!
….And in its depth I saw, contained within,
and bound by Love into a single volume
what in the universe are scattered pages:
….substance and accident and their relations
all, as it seemed, in such a way united
that what I speak of is a simple light;
….and I believe I saw the universal
form of this unity, for even as
I speak of it I sense my joy expand.

Further attempts to find images for what he ‘sees’ break down but he’s left with a direct ineffable experience of insight into and oneness with divine Love:

….And here my high imagining failed in power;
yet now already wish and will together,
like a wheel that spins with even motion, turned
….with the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.

What I’ve said so far seems particularly geared to giving people who don’t know the Paradiso a sense of why it’s worth their time. Now I want to say why I’d recommend this specific translation, both to them and to those who do already know the work. I’m no Dante scholar and can’t judge Black’s version on purely scholarly grounds but I have enjoyed the Paradiso in several different translations, and wrestled with it in Italian. Black’s version is the one that’s given me the most intense imaginative experience and sheer reading pleasure. This is because he writes as a poet translating a poem into poetry for a wide readership, less concerned with word for word accuracy than an academic Dantist needs to be.

Dante’s sheer conception in the passages I’ve quoted so far is so powerful that it’s hard to know how to divide admiration between him and his translator. A few lines from the beginning of Canto xxx seem a fairer basis for comparing Black’s translation with two other versions to illustrate what I think is his special strength. The passage is an extended simile, and in the original goes:

….Forse semilia miglia di lontano
ci ferve l’ora sesta, e questo mondo
china già l’ombra quasi al letto piano,
….quando ‘l mezzo  del cielo a noi profondo,
comincia a farsi tal, ch’alcuna stella
perde il parere infino a questo fondo;
….e come vien la chiarissima ancella
del sol più oltre, così ‘l ciel si chiude
di vista in vista infino a la più bella.

Black gives us this:

….Maybe six thousand miles remote from us
the sixth hour burns, and here this world already
inclines earth’s shadow almost to the level,
 ….when deep above us the mid-sky begins
to change, and here and there some stars no longer
send their appearance to the distant Earth –
….and as the radiant handmaid of the sun
advances further, so the sky shuts down
light after light, including the most lovely:

Robert and Jean Hollander give:

About six thousand miles away from here
the sixth hour burns and even now this world
inclines its shadow almost to a level bed,

when, deep in intervening air, above us,
begins such change that here and there,
at our depth, a star is lost to sight.

And, as that brightest handmaid of the sun advances,
the sky extinguishes its lights,
even the most beautiful, one by one.

Robert Durling has:

….Perhaps six thousand miles away the sixth
hour is burning, and our world is lowering its
shadow down almost to the level bed
 ….when the transparency of the sky, deep
above us, begins to become such that some
stars no longer appear as far as this floor,
….and as the brilliant handmaid of the sun
comes further up, so the sky closes itself, light
after light, even to the most beautiful.

Each version has its own beauties, phrases that cast their own unique spells. One wouldn’t want to be without any of the three, and no doubt if they were forced to choose different people would have different preferences. To my mind, though, there’s at least one respect in which Black has a clear edge: the sensitivity with which he orchestrates his syntax and its punctuation by line endings makes for a smoother and at the same time more dynamic and emotionally charged unfolding than we find in the other two, harmonising the inflexions of emphasis with the patterns of breath. The heightened emotional charge depends on details of phrasing and placement that may seem small in themselves but cumulatively both heighten the clarity and impact of the picture presented and bring them more home to the reader. For example, ‘remote from us’ directly invites the reader into the scene, standing him or her beside Dante, as against the Hollanders’ more abstract ‘away from here’. The Hollanders’ ‘even now this world / inclines its shadow’ uses emphatic phrasing, but buries ‘even now’ within the line. Black’s ‘here this world already / inclines earth’s shadow’ uses rhythm and cadence rather than rhetorical phrasing to achieve a quieter but more potent emphasis simply by placing ‘already’ at the end of the line and creating suspense as to what is already happening. As for ‘so the sky shuts down / light after light, including the most lovely’, that final line has a fluid beauty that almost breaks into song, befitting the crescendo of joy and love and wonder filling the final cantos of the Paradiso. The Hollanders’ line, ‘even the most beautiful, one by one’, achieves its emphasis on the gradual fading of the stars at the cost of underplaying their beauty. Black’s arrangement gives the fullest possible life to both the gradual fading and the loveliness. Durling’s version is actually in prose, as the introduction to his and Martinez’s edition points out, but is laid out in lines – presumably for ease of cross-reference with the Italian – in a way that sometimes makes for awkward interruptions of the flow.

It’s above all this kind of smooth but dynamic unfolding that makes Black’s version so expressive and so satisfying for continuous reading. Although he doesn’t rhyme his lines have a strong forward impulse that goes some way to capturing the momentum of Dante’s terza rima rhyme scheme. Another factor is that he makes sure his notes don’t get in the way. They’re presented in a clear, non-academic style and kept to what is useful to the general reader. They don’t wander into specialist areas of historical or linguistic enquiry. In more scholarly editions, the weight of background information and analysis can make it difficult to settle into a relaxed but focused, imaginatively receptive state of mind. As Black puts it in the Acknowledgments, ‘My guideline in these notes has been to provide just enough information for the reader who is momentarily puzzled, who asks the question “What is going on here?” but whose real wish is to get back to reading the poem.’

Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, translated by D. M. Black. $22.95. New York Review Books. ISBN: 978-1-68137-943-2.