Dante’s Divine Comedy A Biography by Joseph Luzzi & The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri translated by Charles S. Singleton – Princeton University Press 2025
Here we have a guide to the circumstances and influence of Dante’s great poem and a prose translation of The Divine Comedy. Although I feel averse to having too many critical notes for a poem, in this case Joseph Luzzi’s short ‘poem biography’ of Dante excellently complements an American English prose version of The Divine Comedy now reading like a novel. I’m a bit reluctant to read Dante as poet turned into ‘novelist’ – the English verse translations of Mark Musa (1973) and Dorothy Sayers (1948) are the ones that I’ve enjoyed, so did Charles Singleton, in 1965, succeed? I’m not quite sure. But let’s first examine Luzzi with his very readable and concise scholarship contained within a book of just over 200 pages.
The title – The Divine Comedy: Luzzi’s introduction reminded me of the fact that Dante originally called his work the Commedia. The adjective “Divina” was only added to the title in 1555 by a Venetian printer. Commedia indicated it was not written in courtly language (the convention of the day) but in a Tuscan regional dialect and has a happy ending. Dante regarded it as a sacred poem fusing the spiritual and the secular. And Luzzi rightly states that Dante’s ubiquity as an iconic figure extends from popular media to high art. His influence and status has permeated so much of world culture. For T.S.Eliot, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third.”
Chapter 1 is called “Inventing ‘Italian Language’ and carefully explains how Dante created a new reading public that went beyond a narrow middle class elite and democratically reached out to all. Its vernacular language also aided in creating a unifying language of a newborn Italian nation. Chapter 2 concerns the critics of Dante’s writing, his criticism of the authority of the Pope, Dante’s exile and how the later Spanish Inquisition redacted parts of The Divine Comedy. Luzzi includes manuscript images of the cancelled passages.
“Renaissance Visions”, Chapter 3, continues with a discussion of Botticelli’s illustrations including his oft re-printed and famous Map of Hell. In the seventieth century Dante’s writing lost their popularity. His book De Monarchia was placed in the index of Forbidden Books. The church objected to Dante’s ecclesial writings and the scholar Bellisario Bulgarini said there was very little that was Christian about the Commedia. In Luzzi’s fourth chapter titled “The Lost Centuries” comparisons are made with Dante and John Milton centring round the concept of free will.
After the enlightenment and in the Romantic age Dante is joyfully rehabilitated and reborn. Mary and Percy Shelley play a big part in this. Luzzi makes an intriguing argument for pairing the epic impassable borders depicted in both The Divine Comedy and the novel Frankenstein. Basically the Romantics took to their hearts the heroic individualism of Dante’s journey, into the underworld, and ignored its religiosity.
Whilst enjoying the brief chapter on “The Modernist Chapter” covering T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, with Dante’s influence on their writings, the other 20th century modernist that I felt deserved to have been included is Samuel Beckett. Joseph Luzzi please read the story “Dante and the Lobster” from Beckett’s collection More Pricks than Kicks. Dante’s influence, on writers, is continued in the next chapter where we read of him strongly affecting the sensibility of the poet Osip Mandelstam, the novelist Primo Levi and the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci.
Curiously this is followed by a piece on Dante represented on screen. Interesting information here on Franco Zeffirelli’s unmade adaptation of Dante’s Inferno (some very striking drawings are included) and other European film directors. For me the various screen versions are fascinating but so are the musical adaptations. I could have done with a mention of say Liszt’s Dante Symphony and the Dante piano sonata.
All is concluded with “Trigger Warnings and Papal Blessings” where we are reminded of the church’s changing attitude towards Dante over the centuries: ranging from hostility and exile to rehabilitation and saintly regard. Today the current Pope Francis writes of Dante as a “prophet of hope” who ended his Commedia with the most joyful conclusion to an epic ever written: a journey to God and a vision of the “Love which moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradiso. 33.145)
Joseph Luzzi’s excellent book preceded my reading of Charles Singleton’s translation of The Divine Comedy. It took me about 50 pages or so to adjust to a prose interpretation. I missed a poetic drive / pulse of the cantos, not in verse form, but appearing to be chapters in a great, spiritual story. Though there is a case for a narrative approach to epic poetry (Homer’s The Odyssey is still well known through E. V. Rieu’s prose translation).
“I am in the third circle of the eternal, accursed, cold and heavy rain: its measure and its quality are never new; huge hail, foul water, and snow pours down through the murky air; the ground that receives it stinks.”
That’s terrifically exact, sinister and sensual. Indeed Singleton is consistently good on the horrors of hell and the distraught characters of Purgatory. Then Paradise lets him down but maybe all translations of Paradise disappoint because for me my interest has often waned here (I feel that such lessening of intensity is comparable to the forbiddingly erudite nature of Goethe’s Faust Part 2. I know T. S. Eliot loved the Paradise section but apart from the work’s closing moments it doesn’t engage me as much as Dante’s beginning and middle)
Sticking with Dantean menace Singleton succeeds well. But often his translation is pitched to a tone of proclamation that feels old fashioned and stilted. Take for instance the opening of Purgatory Canto 2.
“The sun had now reached the horizon whose meridian circle covers Jerusalem with its highest point; and night, circling opposite to him, was issuing forth from Ganges with the Scales, which fall from her hand when she exceeds, so that there where I was the white and rosy cheeks of Fair Aurora were turning orange through too great age.”
Singleton’s achievement is a mixed bag of excitement and tedium.
But what’s in no doubt for me are the book’s impressive new illustrations by Roberto Abbiati; presenting, for the first time, a single volume edition of Singleton’s translation. Both Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy a biography and Singleton’s The Divine Comedy are both beautifully produced hard covers and can be recommended.
Alan Price©2024.
Dante’s Divine Comedy A Biography by Joseph Luzzi & The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri translated by Charles S. Singleton – Princeton University Press 2025
Here we have a guide to the circumstances and influence of Dante’s great poem and a prose translation of The Divine Comedy. Although I feel averse to having too many critical notes for a poem, in this case Joseph Luzzi’s short ‘poem biography’ of Dante excellently complements an American English prose version of The Divine Comedy now reading like a novel. I’m a bit reluctant to read Dante as poet turned into ‘novelist’ – the English verse translations of Mark Musa (1973) and Dorothy Sayers (1948) are the ones that I’ve enjoyed, so did Charles Singleton, in 1965, succeed? I’m not quite sure. But let’s first examine Luzzi with his very readable and concise scholarship contained within a book of just over 200 pages.
The title – The Divine Comedy: Luzzi’s introduction reminded me of the fact that Dante originally called his work the Commedia. The adjective “Divina” was only added to the title in 1555 by a Venetian printer. Commedia indicated it was not written in courtly language (the convention of the day) but in a Tuscan regional dialect and has a happy ending. Dante regarded it as a sacred poem fusing the spiritual and the secular. And Luzzi rightly states that Dante’s ubiquity as an iconic figure extends from popular media to high art. His influence and status has permeated so much of world culture. For T.S.Eliot, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third.”
Chapter 1 is called “Inventing ‘Italian Language’ and carefully explains how Dante created a new reading public that went beyond a narrow middle class elite and democratically reached out to all. Its vernacular language also aided in creating a unifying language of a newborn Italian nation. Chapter 2 concerns the critics of Dante’s writing, his criticism of the authority of the Pope, Dante’s exile and how the later Spanish Inquisition redacted parts of The Divine Comedy. Luzzi includes manuscript images of the cancelled passages.
“Renaissance Visions”, Chapter 3, continues with a discussion of Botticelli’s illustrations including his oft re-printed and famous Map of Hell. In the seventieth century Dante’s writing lost their popularity. His book De Monarchia was placed in the index of Forbidden Books. The church objected to Dante’s ecclesial writings and the scholar Bellisario Bulgarini said there was very little that was Christian about the Commedia. In Luzzi’s fourth chapter titled “The Lost Centuries” comparisons are made with Dante and John Milton centring round the concept of free will.
After the enlightenment and in the Romantic age Dante is joyfully rehabilitated and reborn. Mary and Percy Shelley play a big part in this. Luzzi makes an intriguing argument for pairing the epic impassable borders depicted in both The Divine Comedy and the novel Frankenstein. Basically the Romantics took to their hearts the heroic individualism of Dante’s journey, into the underworld, and ignored its religiosity.
Whilst enjoying the brief chapter on “The Modernist Chapter” covering T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, with Dante’s influence on their writings, the other 20th century modernist that I felt deserved to have been included is Samuel Beckett. Joseph Luzzi please read the story “Dante and the Lobster” from Beckett’s collection More Pricks than Kicks. Dante’s influence, on writers, is continued in the next chapter where we read of him strongly affecting the sensibility of the poet Osip Mandelstam, the novelist Primo Levi and the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci.
Curiously this is followed by a piece on Dante represented on screen. Interesting information here on Franco Zeffirelli’s unmade adaptation of Dante’s Inferno (some very striking drawings are included) and other European film directors. For me the various screen versions are fascinating but so are the musical adaptations. I could have done with a mention of say Liszt’s Dante Symphony and the Dante piano sonata.
All is concluded with “Trigger Warnings and Papal Blessings” where we are reminded of the church’s changing attitude towards Dante over the centuries: ranging from hostility and exile to rehabilitation and saintly regard. Today the current Pope Francis writes of Dante as a “prophet of hope” who ended his Commedia with the most joyful conclusion to an epic ever written: a journey to God and a vision of the “Love which moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradiso. 33.145)
Joseph Luzzi’s excellent book preceded my reading of Charles Singleton’s translation of The Divine Comedy. It took me about 50 pages or so to adjust to a prose interpretation. I missed a poetic drive / pulse of the cantos, not in verse form, but appearing to be chapters in a great, spiritual story. Though there is a case for a narrative approach to epic poetry (Homer’s The Odyssey is still well known through E. V. Rieu’s prose translation).
“I am in the third circle of the eternal, accursed, cold and heavy rain: its measure and its quality are never new; huge hail, foul water, and snow pours down through the murky air; the ground that receives it stinks.”
That’s terrifically exact, sinister and sensual. Indeed Singleton is consistently good on the horrors of hell and the distraught characters of Purgatory. Then Paradise lets him down but maybe all translations of Paradise disappoint because for me my interest has often waned here (I feel that such lessening of intensity is comparable to the forbiddingly erudite nature of Goethe’s Faust Part 2. I know T. S. Eliot loved the Paradise section but apart from the work’s closing moments it doesn’t engage me as much as Dante’s beginning and middle)
Sticking with Dantean menace Singleton succeeds well. But often his translation is pitched to a tone of proclamation that feels old fashioned and stilted. Take for instance the opening of Purgatory Canto 2.
“The sun had now reached the horizon whose meridian circle covers Jerusalem with its highest point; and night, circling opposite to him, was issuing forth from Ganges with the Scales, which fall from her hand when she exceeds, so that there where I was the white and rosy cheeks of Fair Aurora were turning orange through too great age.”
Singleton’s achievement is a mixed bag of excitement and tedium.
But what’s in no doubt for me are the book’s impressive new illustrations by Roberto Abbiati; presenting, for the first time, a single volume edition of Singleton’s translation. Both Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy a biography and Singleton’s The Divine Comedy are both beautifully produced hard covers and can be recommended.
Alan Price©2024.
By Alan Price • books, literature, poetry • Tags: Alan Price, books, literature, poetry