Why is Dante considered a great?

[mal4mac]

Having asked the same question before, Stlukes in the past has recommended the Allen Mandelbaum translation, which is the copy I personally have, as well as the John Ciardi, amongst others... Stlukes has recommended reading the text from more than one translation, I suppose the same could be said for any Major work that you can only read via translation, ...

Yes, but we all have to start somewhere! Which would you recommend as a starter for a "reasonably" well read common reader? I've taken another look at Mandelbaum and I'm swaying away from Musa. The Oxford Guide to English Literature in Translation (OG) quotes the start to canto 27 from these two authors and suggests (and it's obvious!) that Mandelbaum is smoother and more poetic. I might add he's also more compact and understandable, at least for me.

Cary gets honourable mention in this forum, and he's available in Wordsworth Classics with good notes! But here's Canto 27 from Cary:

CANTO XXVII NOW upward rose the flame, and still'd its light
To speak no more, and now pass'd on with leave
From the mild poet gain'd, when following came
Another, from whose top a sound confus'd,
Forth issuing, drew our eyes that way to look.

I would suggest this is not suitable for a beginner, at least not for this beginner! I've read most of Dickens and several other Victorian authors, but that hasn't made Cary transparent to me. The three translators quoted in OG are far easier to read on every level...

Musa Portable Dante seems to be too light in notes. For instance, in the first canto there is talk of a planet from which light beams. This beginner was left wondering, "which planet is that then." Mandelbaum explains it is the sun, and a little about Ptolemy's inclusion of the sun amongst the planets. Musa says nothing, just in his (too long winded) intro. to the Canto kind of hints it.

Finally, Mandelbaum comes in a good, inexpensive hardback Everyman edition, much nicer than the paperback versions. All in all, I'm now favouring Mandelbaum.

[isidro]

Asked the wrong question my dear cuz you is gonna get a mouthful now.

Alighieri's work was written in a certain time frame and period and the fact was that apart from its being exceedingly well written it was written during some major political upheaval in Florence from which Dante was exiled. His work centered around the artwork of Brunaleski's dome in Florence, which not only captured the point of the ethereal ideas behind the masterpiece, but also was very daring in his portrayals of who he deemed worthy of hell.

In short he was willing, and the first person I think, to condemn Popes to hell. Not only that but he creates a conglomeration of other ideas alongside Christianity (Virgil is his guide, he describes the great philosophers and tells where he believes they are, etc). It is a massively impressive work which was not only beautiful but easily applied to the common man and spoke to him. Used as a powerful teaching tool of Catholic rhetoric, and still is to this day.

We could go on for a while, but anyone have commentary on that much?

[Il Dante]

Since I am Dante, I think I can comment on this.

Two points. First, in my opinion even the best English translations are vastly inferior to the original Italian, which flows and rhymes in an interlocking terza rima scheme which is irreproducible in English without compromising the meaning. Thus when reading in English you must assume that the original is roughly ten times as wonderful as that which you are reading.

Second, the reason why La Commedia is great. Almost no poem compares to La Commedia in scope: it is a journey that encompasses all the universe, from hell beneath, to Purgatory on earth, to all the heavenly spheres above, and even beyond paradise into the Empyrean. It is an epic journey upward from the darkest reaches of hell higher and higher into the light, until Dante reaches the Trinity in a blinding blaze of light that smites his senses. And it is a poem about love: love motivates Beatrice to send Virgil to guide Dante onto the straight path upward into light and love. Love motivates God's arrangement of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Love motivates Dante to write of his journey in order to give those on earth a map for the journey of life. And ultimately, it is the divine love, according to the last stanzas, that moves the sun and the other stars; it is love that moves the universe, that sets everything in motion.

Thus, even if one is not catholic, or even Christian for that matter, one can appreciate the all-embracing, cosmological scope of such a work, which serves as an explanation for the sum total of human experience and of all the universe. Even if you do not believe in hell, or perhaps purgatory, or the Christian God, Dante's poem gives you a lot of food for thought. It is a magnificent presentation of a particular explanation of everything. And it is also a presentation of a path to bliss: the farther one is from God the farther he or she is from love, light, and bliss; thus one must journey upwards unto the uttermost ecstasy.

But what makes La Commedia even more brilliant is that despite such grand scope it is intensely human. Dante loves Beatrice to the uttermost, and Beatrice's love for Dante motivates her to save him from his wayward walk. So its a love story both on a microcosmic level (Dante and Beatrice) and on a macrocosmic level (God and humanity).

It is also constructed according to the mathematical principal of three: three sections (Inferno, Purgatario, Paradiso), 33 + 1 cantos per section, stanzas of 3 lines, a terza rima rhyme system, and much more. As I have said elsewhere on this forum, Dante puts the number 3 everywhere to point towards the climax of the poem: his vision of the Trinity. This is the highest peak of the poem, the ultimate mystery—a Being represented as three circles that are three and yet one. Thus unity and trinity form the structure of the entire poem from the smallest to the largest scale.

In addition to all of the above, the poem is extremely rich with allegory, symbols, cultural and historical commentary and reference, and much more.

This is why many consider it to be one of the greatest poems ever written.

[G.Leon Stephens]

You will never understand until you read the poem in Italian. All the translations are rather bad in comparison with the original, and most of them are very bad. But to give you a clue, consider the rhyme scheme, the terza rima. There are 100 cantos, with an average of about 130 lines. When Dante had written lines 1 and 3, which rhyme, then he had to rhyme line 2 with lines 4 and 6, line 5 with 7 and 9, and so on: which means that he had to conceive not only the rhymes but the content of the lines far in advance of writing them, because of the interlinking, which is infinitely more difficult than writing couplets, abba or abab and then beginning another series. It's something like a chess player who has to imagine 130 moves ahead, except that in the chess game there is no verbal meaning involved.

Bear in mind also that the reference is always to life on earth: the characters in Hell and Purgatory always tell the stories of their lives - sometimes in only a few lines, like Pia at the end of Purgatorio V, an extraordinarily beautiful compression. And even in Paradiso, where there is a lot of (admittedly boring) Catholic theology, the focus continues to be the relation of divinity to human life, and of course there is the extraordinary encounter with his ancestor Cacciaguida, which occupies Par. XV, XVI and XVII and contains some of the most beautiful passages in the entire poem. And I might add that the theology is a superficial level of the poem's meaning: there is no need for the reader to adhere to any sort of religious belief to enjoy it.

In short, start studying Italian if you really want to know what the Commedia is really about.

[G.Leon Stephens]

Cary is rubbish. Mandelbaum is a bore.

[William Meegan]

I do agree with you that Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia is extremely boring to read; however, I became extremely enamored by Dante work via his mathematical system codified into the compositional structure of La Divina Commedia.

Dante's work is the foundation of all my researches on esotericism; for the reason that, his work taught me how to cull out esotericism in other literary works, artworks and monuments.

[YesNo]

I think you are right that there is a lot of conscious esotericism in the construction of these early art works. The number of chapters in each of the three books and the three lines per stanza imply the idea of a trinity intentionally being used.

Wikipedia notes this as well:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy

The number three is prominent in the work, represented in part by the number of canticas and their lengths. Additionally, the verse scheme used, terza rima, is hendecasyllabic (lines of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ....

Your research on this goes deeper. The structure of the work does seem to contain something more interesting than I originally thought.

[William Meegan]

After the Alchemists of the seventeenth century it would seem that esotericism died out; however, recently I wrote a paper on the Great Seal of the United States and I illustrate Freemasonry's influence on the America Pathos. Freemasonry set up the United States to be a divisive in order to mirror-image the nature of the psyche, which has everything to do with Esotericism. I mentioned Freemasonry only to point out that there is still a school of thought that is actively and continuously participating in the esoteric tradition. NO, Freemasonry doesn't tell anybody anything; for the reason that, the average person has to basically, serendipitously, stumble on it and then research it on his own.

[Eupalinos]

This (https://soundcloud.com/cndls) online course has given me a deeper appreciation of Dante's symbolism and I strongly recommend it to anyone having a hard time immersing themselves in Dante's world; it is not at all so alien as outwardly it may seem! A couple other places to turn to for inspiring appreciations: Osip Mandelstam's essay, 'Conversations about Dante' and Erich Auerbach's book, 'Dante: Poet of the Secular World'. But only since listening to that course have I begun to see how Dante is a secular poet. Freedom of choice, not externally imposed order, is his central theme. I read what looks to be a now out of print terza rima translation by Geoffrey L. Bickersteth. Laurence Binyon is held in high regard (he got Pound's approval) and that's who I'm turning to when I reread it.

My own main problem with the Comedy was what I couldn't help but perceive as egocentrism. Dante seemed the most egocentric author I'd ever encountered (I almost wondered why Catholics didn't see him as a forerunner to the Reformation), and however great the structure, imagery, and dramatic presentation, I took the poem to be a grand justification of his own perspective, preferences, and prejudices. That was a couple years ago. Since then, through reading and brooding, I'm prepared to take the plunge again. It may seem daunting to those especially unsympathetic to Dante's point of view, but I am sure everyone can find an interesting / useful angle from which to think about the poem, and doing so will not unlikely take more than one reading. After that you may find you actually WANT to keep reading it!

Also, to those above I might recommend 'Medieval Number Symbolism' by Vincent Foster Hopper.

[stlukesguild]

JCamilo may have had the best answer to this question some years back:

"The Comedy is one of the "Most likely best artwork ever"... A single man who invented a country without using weapons, it is almost what we can say about him..."

The idea that you cannot understand or appreciate Dante until you read the original Italian is of course nonsense. Dante is beloved... even revered... by a great many writers and readers who cannot read Italian. Even those fluent in Italian would likely struggle a bit with Dante's 14th century Italian, to say nothing of the historical references, etc... He is frequently cited as the greatest Western writer/poet after Shakespeare and the Comedia is commonly cited as the greatest single work of Western literature, bar none. Personally, after having read a good deal of the "Western Canon" I agree.

Of course any work of art loses something in translation. But to my thinking a good translation is akin to a transcription in music where a work for violin is scored for piano. Something is lost... but the music remains. If the "music" is wholly lost in translation, Dante... as well as Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Proust, Tolstoy, Borges would not resonate with a multilingual audience... many of whom can not read most of these great authors in their original language.

I came to Dante through John Ciardi... whom I still admire. I have his entire Comedia in hard-cover with extensive notes. Some have suggested that his translation stresses the fluid and poetic side of Dante at the expense of the tougher, harder side of him. I liked Pinsky's Inferno but he never translated the other 2 books. My go-to translation now is that of Robert & Jean Hollander. It is written in a poetic prose with unrivaled notes. The last time I read the Comedia I would read one canto by Ciardi then the same by Hollander and Pinsky. Each spotlit certain aspects of Dante.

Dante's use of formal and mathematical structures and his medieval esotericism is fascinating... but these are but a tangential reason for reading the Comedia. If you find the Comedia "extremely boring" I would suggest the problem lies with you, not the book. The Comedia (like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Arabian Nights, Ovid's Metamorphosis, etc...) is one of the great "frame stories" in literature: a collection of tales framed within a larger over-arching narrative. Among the tales in the Comedia are many of the most memorable I have read. Along with the tales Dante presents us with an array of memorable characters, most obviously Beatrice and Virgil... but also most audaciously, Dante himself. The poem itself offers an incredible array of style and moods. There is vulgar humor, serious high-mindedness, tragedy, philosophy, theology, history and politics, and marvelous visionary poetry.

Eupalinos- My own main problem with the Comedy was what I couldn't help but perceive as egocentrism. Dante seemed the most egocentric author I'd ever encountered (I almost wondered why Catholics didn't see him as a forerunner to the Reformation), and however great the structure, imagery, and dramatic presentation, I took the poem to be a grand justification of his own perspective, preferences, and prejudices.

Remember, Dante is writing at the period that we generally recognize as the birth of the Renaissance. What you see as "egocentrism" might also be deemed as nascent Humanism. Like Machiavelli, Dante values his own perceptions, thoughts, and judgments rather than wholly deferring to authority, be it Biblical, Greco-Roman, or than of the aristocracy and clergy. Dante is also an "angry young man". He has witnessed his beloved Florence torn apart by war and political maneuvering and he has seen Italy... which he sees as the rightful heir to the Roman Empire... destroyed by strife between the Church and the Empire (as well as the intervention of the French). The result, to his mind, is that the Church has abdicated its primary role as the spiritual leader, and the Empire/State is not serving its proper role as the secular leader.