So many versions of the Divine Comedy exist in English that a new one might
well seem needless. But most of these translations are in verse, and the
intellectual temper of our time is impatient of a transmutation in which
substance is sacrificed for form’s sake, and the new form is itself
different from the original. The conditions of verse in different languages
vary so widely as to make any versified translation of a poem but an imperfect
reproduction of the archetype. It is like an imperfect mirror that renders but
a partial likeness, in which essential features are blurred or distorted. Dante
himself, the first modern critic, declared that “nothing harmonized by a
musical bond can be transmuted from its own speech without losing all its
sweetness and harmony,” and every fresh attempt at translation affords a
new proof of the truth of his assertion. Each language exhibits its own special
genius in its poetic forms. Even when they are closely similar in rhythmical
method their poetic effect is essentially different, their individuality is
distinct. The hexameter of the Iliad is not the hexameter of the Aeneid. And if
this be the case in respect to related forms, it is even more obvious in
respect to forms peculiar to one language, like the terza rima of the Italian,
for which it is impossible to find a satisfactory equivalent in another tongue.
If, then, the attempt be vain to reproduce the form or to represent its effect
in a translation, yet the substance of a poem may have such worth that it
deserves to be known by readers who must read it in their own tongue or not at
all. In this case the aim of the translator should be to render the substance
fully, exactly, and with as close a correspondence to the tone and style of the
original as is possible between prose and poetry. Of the charm, of the power of
the poem such a translation can give but an inadequate suggestion; the musical
bond was of its essence, and the loss of the musical bond is the loss of the
beauty to which form and substance mutually contributed, and in which they were
both alike harmonized and sublimated. The rhythmic life of the original is its
vital spirit, and the translation losing this vital spirit is at best as the
dull plaster cast to the living marble or the breathing bronze. The
intellectual substance is there; and if the work be good, something of the
emotional quality may be conveyed; the imagination may mould the prose as it
moulded the verse,—but, after all, “translations are but as
turn-coated things at best,” as Howell said in one of his Familiar
Letters.
No poem in any tongue is more informed with rhythmic life than the Divine
Comedy. And yet, such is its extraordinary distinction, no poem has an
intellectual and emotional substance more independent of its metrical form. Its
complex structure, its elaborate measure and rhyme, highly artificial as they
are, are so mastered by the genius of the poet as to become the most natural
expression of the spirit by which the poem is inspired; while at the same time
the thought and sentiment embodied in the verse is of such import, and the
narrative of such interest, that they do not lose their worth when expressed in
the prose of another tongue; they still have power to quicken imagination, and
to evoke sympathy.
In English there is an excellent prose translation of the Inferno, by Dr. John
Carlyle, a man well known to the reader of his brother’s Correspondence.
It was published forty years ago, but it is still contemporaneous enough in
style to answer every need, and had Dr. Carlyle made a version of the whole
poem I should hardly have cared to attempt a new one. In my translation of the
Inferno I am often Dr. Carlyle’s debtor. His conception of what a
translation should be is very much the same as my own. Of the Purgatorio there
is a prose version which has excellent qualities, by Mr. W. S. Dugdale. Another
version of great merit, of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A.
J. Butler. It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I owe
much to Mr. Butler’s work. But through what seems to me occasional excess
of literal fidelity his English is now and then somewhat crabbed. “He
overacts the office of an interpreter,” I cite again from Howell,
“who doth enslave himself too strictly to words or phrases. One may be so
over-punctual in words that he may mar the matter.”
I have tried to be as literal in my translation as was consistent with good
English, and to render Dante’s own words in words as nearly correspondent
to them as the difference in the languages would permit. But it is to be
remembered that the familiar uses and subtle associations which give to words
their full meaning are never absolutely the same in two languages. Love in
English not only SOUNDS but IS different from amor in Latin, or amore in
Italian. Even the most felicitous prose translation must fail therefore at
times to afford the entire and precise meaning of the original.
Moreover, there are difficulties in Dante’s poem for Italians, and there
are difficulties in the translation for English readers. These, where it seemed
needful, I have endeavored to explain in brief footnotes. But I have desired to
avoid distracting the attention of the reader from the narrative, and have
mainly left the understanding of it to his good sense and perspicacity. The
clearness of Dante’s imaginative vision is so complete, and the character
of his narration of it so direct and simple, that the difficulties in
understanding his intention are comparatively few.
It is a noticeable fact that in by far the greater number of passages where a
doubt in regard to the interpretation exists, the obscurity lies in the
rhyme-word. For with all the abundant resources of the Italian tongue in rhyme,
and with all Dante’s mastery of them, the truth still is that his triple
rhyme often compelled him to exact from words such service as they did not
naturally render and as no other poet had required of them. The compiler of the
Ottimo Commento records, in an often-cited passage, that “I, the writer,
heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than he would, but
that many a time and oft he had made words say for him what they were not wont
to express for other poets.” The sentence has a double truth, for it
indicates not only Dante’s incomparable power to compel words to give out
their full meaning, but also his invention of new uses for them, his employment
of them in unusual significations or in forms hardly elsewhere to be found.
These devices occasionally interfere with the limpid flow of his diction, but
the difficulties of interpretation to which they give rise serve rather to mark
the prevailing clearness and simplicity of his expression than seriously to
impede its easy and unperplexed current. There are few sentences in the Divina
Commedia in which a difficulty is occasioned by lack of definiteness of thought
or distinctness of image.
A far deeper-lying and more pervading source of imperfect comprehension of the
poem than any verbal difficulty exists in the double or triple meaning that
runs through it. The narrative of the poet’s spiritual journey is so
vivid and consistent that it has all the reality of an account of an actual
experience; but within and beneath runs a stream of allegory not less
consistent and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself. To the
illustration and carrying out of this interior meaning even the minutest
details of external incident are made to contribute, with an appropriateness of
significance, and with a freedom from forced interpretation or artificiality of
construction such as no other writer of allegory has succeeded in attaining.
The poem may be read with interest as a record of experience without attention
to its inner meaning, but its full interest is only felt when this inner
meaning is traced, and the moral significance of the incidents of the story
apprehended by the alert intelligence. The allegory is the soul of the poem,
but like the soul within the body it does not show itself in independent
existence. It is, in scholastic phrase, the form of the body, giving to it its
special individuality. Thus in order truly to understand and rightly appreciate
the poem the reader must follow its course with a double intelligence.
“Taken literally,” as Dante declares in his Letter to Can Grande,
“the subject is the state of the soul after death, simply considered.
But, allegorically taken, its subject is man, according as by his good or ill
deserts he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of
Justice.” It is the allegory of human life; and not of human life as an
abstraction, but of the individual life; and herein, as Mr. Lowell, whose
phrase I borrow, has said, “lie its profound meaning and its permanent
force.”[1] And herein too lie its perennial freshness of interest, and
the actuality which makes it contemporaneous with every successive generation.
The increase of knowledge, the loss of belief in doctrines that were
fundamental in Dante’s creed, the changes in the order of society, the
new thoughts of the world, have not lessened the moral import of the poem, any
more than they have lessened its excellence as a work of art. Its real
substance is as independent as its artistic beauty, of science, of creed, and
of institutions. Human nature has not changed; the motives of action are the
same, though their relative force and the desires and ideals by which they are
inspired vary from generation to generation. And thus it is that the moral
judgments of life framed by a great poet whose imagination penetrates to the
core of things, and who, from his very nature as poet, conceives and sets forth
the issues of life not in a treatise of abstract morality, but by means of
sensible types and images, never lose interest, and have a perpetual
contemporaneousness. They deal with the permanent and unalterable elements of
the soul of man.
The scene of the poem is the spiritual world, of which we are members even
while still denizens of the world of time. In the spiritual world the results
of sin or perverted love, and of virtue or right love, in this life of
probation, are manifest. The life to come is but the fulfilment of the life
that now is. This is the truth that Dante sought to enforce. The allegory in
which he cloaked it is of a character that separates the Divine Comedy from all
other works of similar intent. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example,
the personages introduced are mere simulacra of men and women, the types of
moral qualities or religious dispositions. They are abstractions which the
genius of Bunyan fails to inform with vitality sufficient to kindle the
imagination of the reader with a sense of their actual, living and breathing
existence. But in the Divine Comedy the personages are all from real life, they
are men and women with their natural passions and emotions, and they are
undergoing an actual experience. The allegory consists in making their
characters and their fates, what all human characters and fates really are, the
types and images of spiritual law. Virgil and Beatrice, whose nature as
depicted in the poem makes nearest approach to purely abstract and typical
existence, are always consistently presented as living individuals, exalted
indeed in wisdom and power, but with hardly less definite and concrete humanity
than that of Dante himself.
The scheme of the created Universe held by the Christians of the Middle Ages
was comparatively simple, and so definite that Dante, in accepting it in its
main features without modification, was provided with the limited stage that
was requisite for his design, and of which the general disposition was familiar
to all his readers. The three spiritual realms had their local bounds marked
out as clearly as those of time earth itself. Their cosmography was but an
extension of the largely hypothetical geography of the tune.
The Earth was the centre of the Universe, and its northern hemisphere was the
abode of man. At the middle point of this hemisphere stood Jerusalem,
equidistant from the Pillars of Hercules on the West, and the Ganges on the
East.
Within the body of this hemisphere was hell, shared as a vast cone, of which
the apex was the centre of the globe; and here, according to Dante, was the
seat of Lucifer. The concave of Hell had been formed by his fall, when a
portion of the solid earth, through fear of him, ran back to the southern
uninhabited hemisphere, and formed there, directly antipodal to Jerusalem, the
mountain of Purgatory which rose from the waste of waters that covered this
half of the globe. Purgatory was shaped as a cone, of similar dimensions to
that of Hell, amid at its summit was the Terrestrial Paradise.
Immediately surrounding the atmosphere of the Earth was the sphere of elemental
fire. Around this was the Heaven of the Moon, and encircling this, in order,
were the Heavens of Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jove, Saturn, the Fixed
Stars, and the Crystalline or first moving Heaven. These nine concentric
Heavens revolved continually around the Earth, and in proportion to their
distance from it was time greater swiftness of each. Encircling all was the
Empyrean, increate, incorporeal, motionless, unbounded in time or space, the
proper seat of God, the home of the Angels, the abode of the Elect.
The Angelic Hierarchy consisted of nine orders, corresponding to the nine
moving heavens. Their blessedness and the swiftness of time motion with which
in unending delight they circled around God were in proportion to their
nearness to Him, —first the Seraphs, then the Cherubs, Thrones,
Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Princes, Archangels, and Angels. Through them,
under the general name of Intelligences, the Divine influence was transmitted
to the Heavens, giving to them their circular motion, which was the expression
of their longing to be united with the source of their creation. The Heavens in
their turn streamed down upon the Earth the Divine influence thus distributed
among them, in varying proportion and power, producing divers effects in the
generation and corruption of material things, and in the dispositions and the
lives of men.
Such was the general scheme of the Universe. The intention of God in its
creation was to communicate of his own perfection to the creatures endowed with
souls, that is, to men and to angels, and the proper end of every such creature
was to seek its own perfection in likeness to the Divine. This end was attained
through that knowledge of God of which the soul was capable, and through love
which was in proportion to knowledge. Virtue depended on the free will of man;
it was the good use of that will directed to a right object of love. Two lights
were given to the soul for guidance of the will: the light of reason for
natural things and for the direction of the will to moral virtue the light of
grace for things supernatural, and for the direction of the will to spiritual
virtue. Sin was the opposite of virtue, the choice by the will of false objects
of love; it involved the misuse of reason, and the absence of grace. As the end
of virtue was blessedness, so the end of sin was misery.
The cornerstone of Dante’s moral system was the Freedom of the Will; in
other words, the right of private judgment with the condition of
accountability. This is the liberty which Dante, that is man, goes seeking in
his journey through the spiritual world. This liberty is to be attained through
the right use of reason, illuminated by Divine Grace; it consists in the
perfect accord of the will of man with the will of God.
With this view of the nature and end of man Dante’s conception of the
history of the race could not be other than that its course was providentially
ordered. The fall of man had made him a just object of the vengeance of God;
but the elect were to be redeemed, and for their redemption the history of the
world from the beginning was directed. Not only in his dealings with the Jews,
but in his dealings with the heathen was God preparing for the reconciliation
of man, to be finally accomplished in his sacrifice of Himself for them. The
Roman Empire was foreordained and established for this end. It was to prepare
the way for the establishment of the Roman Church. It was the appointed
instrument for the political government of men. Empire and Church were alike
divine institutions for the guidance of man on earth.
The aim of Dante in the Divine Comedy was to set forth these truths in such
wise as to affect the imaginations and touch the hearts of men, so that they
should turn to righteousness. His conviction of these truths was no mere matter
of belief; it had the ardor and certainty of faith. They had appeared to him in
all their fulness as a revelation of the Divine wisdom. It was his work as
poet, as poet with a divine commission, to make this revelation known. His work
was a work of faith; it was sacred; to it both Heaven and Earth had set their
hands.
To this work, as I have said, the definiteness and the limits of the generally
accepted theory of the Universe gave the required frame. The very narrowness of
this scheme made Dante’s design practicable. He had had the experience of
a man on earth. He had been lured by false objects of desire from the pursuit
of the true good. But Divine Grace, in the form of Beatrice, who had of old on
earth led him aright, now intervened and sent to his aid Virgil, who, as the
type of Human Reason, should bring him safe through Hell, showing to him the
eternal consequences of sin, and then should conduct him, penitent, up the
height of Purgatory, till on its summit, in the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice
should appear once more to him. Thence she, as the type of that knowledge
through which comes the love of God, should lead him, through the Heavens up to
the Empyrean, to the consummation of his course in the actual vision of God.