from Hell: Canto 1

Good Friday, 1300; Dante, thirty-five years old, finds himself lost in a dark wood, wondering how he strayed from the straight way. He spends a fearful night. Dawn lights on a hill toward which he heads, encouraged by the sun’s light. He finds his way barred by various wild animals: the leopard of lust, the lion of pride, the she-wolf of avarice. Retreating, he is met by the spirit of Vergil who  explains that there is no way past the she-wolf – though one is destined to come to drive her back to Hell. He offers to conduct Dante another way to safety through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Dante agrees to go.

Along the journey of our life half way,
     I found myself again in a dark wood
     Wherein the straight road no longer lay.
How hard it is to tell, make understood
     What a wild place it was, so dense, adverse
     That fear returns in thinking on that wood.
It is so bitter death is hardly worse.
     But, for the good it was my chance to gain,
     The other things I saw there I’ll rehearse.
– Yet still I cannot readily explain
     How I had entered it, so near to sleep
     I was, on losing that true way and plain.
But, when I trod the rising of a steep,
     Toward the ending of that fearful vale
     Whose terror pierced into my heart so deep,
I looked and saw the shoulder I’d to scale
     Arrayed already in that planet’s light
     Which leads men straight on every road they trail.
And then my fear lulled somewhat from its height
     That on my heart’s sea gathered more and more
     Where I so piteously had passed the night.
As one who has escaped from sea to shore
     With panting breath turns round to catch the sight
     Again of all the dangerous waves that roar,
Exactly so, my mind, though still in flight,
     Turned itself round to see that defile where
     None had passed through alive before this night.
 

Dante’s masterpiece is a foundation stone of European poetry. It was a profound influence on T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and in our own day has inspired Seamus Heaney. It is simple in style yet complex in its layers of meaning, episodic in manner yet architectonic in its over-arching vision. It is simultaneously a journey through life and a spiritual biography, a portrait of the internecine Italy of Dante’s time and a pilgrim’s progress through the tripartite afterworld of Catholic mythology. Paradoxically, it is also a devotional work and one of the strangest love poems ever written. It is without doubt one of the supreme works of world literature.

Peter Dale has established a reputation as one of this country’s leading translators for his François Villon: Selected Poems, and more recently for his witty and accurate versions of Jules Laforgue. His great achievement here has been to produce a version of The Divine Comedy in modern English that echoes Dante’s ‘sweet new style’, while keeping to the poet’s demanding terza rima verse pattern. It is a reader’s edition – accurate, clear and compelling. It is also Peter Dale’s crowning achievement as a translator.