We cannot avoid Dante's Inferno

- About the work Dante's Divine Comedy: A Biography [Dante's Divine Comedy: A Biography] of researcher Joseph Luzzi -

By: Tim Smith-Laing / Said Daily Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com
Dante Alighieri had what today would be called a "valuable biography". Besides being a poet, at various times he was a politician and a knight, a political scientist and a theologian, a theorist of language and – at least in the guild documents – a doctor and apothecary. He was also a man of stable views, a trait that, in the deeply divided world of thirteenth-century Florence, could bring him nothing but trouble. Exiled under the threat of capital punishment – ​​in 1301, at the age of 35, in what he later called "the middle of the road of our lives" – he spent the last 20 years cursing those who overthrew him. , while desperately trying to return to his homeland. If his life was, as Joseph Luzzi describes it in his recent study of the poet, a life of "dramatic bets," his political bets never paid off.

While Dante had understandable reason to be angry with his fellow Florentines, later generations have good reason to feel grateful to them for treating him so badly. Already recognized as an innovative lyric poet, being lost in the "dark forest" of exile gave Dante the impetus to begin, around 1308, writing what he called with disorienting modesty, Comedy (only in the 17th century she received the epithet "Divine").

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The result was a work that sought to confront his fate, take revenge on those who caused him this experience, and present a comprehensive vision of the universe that combined his theological and political beliefs into a coherent understanding of life on Earth and in eternity. If that were not enough, he would accomplish all of this by inventing and claiming an entirely new form of poetry: a Christian epic written in the "eminent vernacular," not the learned Latin that was synonymous with literary expression, but in the fluent, intimate and everyday language of Florentine life, refined and used as never before.

No wonder it took Dante the rest of his life to write. After 14 verses, he finished it Comedy in Ravenna in 1321, shortly before he died, without ever setting foot in Florence again. For all his reasonable bitterness, his vision was, as the last line of the poem says, for Love that moves the Sun and other stars. It is difficult not to emphasize either the originality and brilliance of what he achieved, or his influence. Seven centuries after the first manuscripts were copied and circulated, what is now known as Divine Comedy continues to dominate European literature as a work unparalleled in its scope and grandeur.

As Joseph Luzzi points out, the work has influenced generations of writers and artists, prompting an interpretation so wide that it could "fill a large library". Meanwhile, the author's stark portrait, posthumously immortalized by Botticelli, appears on countless products, from olive oil to toilet paper. While academics may struggle to navigate the many articles and studies on it, the general public may opt for a more popular approach, such as the 2010 video game, Dante's Inferno, to traverse Hell fighting as Dante himself to save his beloved Beatrice (an activity that has taken up a large part of my first year of PhD, more than I care to admit publicly).

All this makes the writing of what Luzzi calls his "biography". Divine Comedy a challenging task. And, as Luzzi himself admits, doing this comprehensively is simply impossible. Instead, he opts for a "selective and personal approach" and examines "Dante's afterlife" (a pun that Danteists are very fond of) from the 14th to the 21st century, including poets, censors, translators, artists and the most important directors who reacted to the poet during this period. His aim is not only to give a taste of Dante himself, but to offer something deeper – “to tell the story of those who, pursuing pleasure and sometimes pain, have dared to follow Dante's path from the dark forest to the stars".

No one was more aware of the difficulties of choosing a good guide than Dante himself. He chose Virgil for his journey through the afterlife in Hell, and even then he didn't hesitate to point out the gaps in his knowledge. Luzzi, a scholar who has written extensively on Italy, the Renaissance and film, and translated The life of re Dante's [Vita Nuova], has every qualification to be the perfect guide to this subject, but unfortunately fails in several respects.

This is a book that, at its core, doesn't seem quite sure who it's for or what it's aimed at. His intended audience seems to be at the intersection of a Venn Diagram that unites readers with such a literary interest that they need to be told that Frankenstein "is the creator and not the creature," with specialists seeking reassurance that Luzzi is not "mentioning a practice similar to the provocative model [of statistical literary analysis] developed by Franco Moretti”. I suspect this joint is smaller than the pinhole.

For those who can overcome this challenge, Luzzi offers a condensed summary of what specialists would consider the peak; standard reference of the reaction to Dante (censorship by the church, Botticelli, the Romantics, TS Eliot, Primo Levi, etc.), moving on to the inevitable chapter on the warnings of modern sensibility. But it does not inspire either wonder or self-confidence. In particular, the rich tradition of Dante's illustrations – William Blake, Gustave Doré, Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Phillips – has been reduced to an abbreviated treatise on Botticelli that contains an error so astonishing it's hard to believe it made it to publication. . However clever the idea that Botticelli's illustration for Purgatory 10 shows "two stones spontaneously coming to life and beginning to walk with human feet" as a kind of "joke" allegorizing the "allegedly animating" power of art is also completely incorrect. The hands and feet are those of souls who are being cleansed of pride by laboring under unbearable burdens.

There are endless lives Divine Comedy, but not exactly where or as this "biographical" book makes it seem. The curious looking for a way through the dark forest would do well to return to themselves Comedy. /Telegraph/