Divine Comedy

"The Divine Comedy" redirects here. For other uses, see The Divine Comedy (disambiguation).

"La Divina Commedia" redirects here. For other uses, see Commedia (disambiguation).

The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia; Italian pronunciation: [diˈviːna komˈmɛːdja]) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature^[1] and one of the greatest works of world literature.^[2] The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language.^[3] It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Dante shown holding a copy of the Divine Comedy, next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, with the spheres of Heaven above, in Domenico di Michelino's 1465 fresco

The poem discusses "the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward",^[4] and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.^[5] Allegorically, the poem represents the soul's journey towards God,^[6] beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin (Inferno), followed by the penitent Christian life (Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent to God (Paradiso). Dante draws on medieval Catholic theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy derived from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.^[7] Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called "the Summa in verse".^[8]

In the poem, the pilgrim Dante is accompanied by three guides:^[9][4] Virgil, who represents human reason, and who guides him for all of Inferno and most of Purgatorio;^[10] Beatrice, who represents divine revelation^[10] in addition to theology, grace, and faith;^[11] and guides him from the end of Purgatorio on); and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who represents contemplative mysticism and devotion to Mary the Mother, guiding him in the final cantos of Paradiso.^[12]

The work was originally simply titled Comedìa (pronounced [komeˈdiːa], Tuscan for "Comedy") – so also in the first printed edition, published in 1472 – later adjusted to the modern Italian Commedia. The adjective Divina was added by Giovanni Boccaccio,^[13] owing to its subject matter and lofty style,^[14] and the first edition to name the poem Divina Comedia in the title was that of the Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce,^[15] published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari.

Erich Auerbach said Dante was the first writer to depict human beings as the products of a specific time, place and circumstance, as opposed to mythic archetypes or a collection of vices and virtues, concluding that this, along with the fully imagined world of the Divine Comedy, suggests that the Divine Comedy inaugurated realism and self-portraiture in modern fiction.^[16]

Structure and story

The Divine Comedy is composed of 14,233 lines that are divided into three cantiche (singular cantica) – Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) – each consisting of 33 cantos (Italian plural canti). An initial canto, serving as an introduction to the poem and generally considered to be part of the first cantica, brings the total number of cantos to 100. It is generally accepted, however, that the first two cantos serve as a unitary prologue to the entire epic, and that the opening two cantos of each cantica serve as prologues to each of the three cantiche.^[17][18][19]

The number three is prominent in the work, represented in part by the number of cantiche 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, ....^[20] The total number of syllables in each tercet is thus 33, the same as the number of cantos in each cantica.

Written in the first person, the poem tells of Dante's journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Heaven. Beatrice was a Florentine woman he had met in childhood and admired from afar in the mode of the then-fashionable courtly love tradition, which is highlighted in Dante's earlier work La Vita Nuova.^[21]

The structure of the three realms follows a common numerical pattern of 9 plus 1, for a total of 10: 9 circles of the Inferno, followed by Lucifer contained at its bottom; 9 rings of Mount Purgatory, followed by the Garden of Eden crowning its summit; and the 9 celestial bodies of Paradiso, followed by the Empyrean containing the very essence of God. Within each group of 9, 7 elements correspond to a specific moral scheme, subdivided into three subcategories, while 2 others of greater particularity are added to total nine. For example, the seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church that are cleansed in Purgatory are joined by special realms for the late repentant and the excommunicated by the church. The core seven sins within Purgatory correspond to a moral scheme of love perverted, subdivided into three groups corresponding to excessive love (Lust, Gluttony, Greed), deficient love (Sloth), and malicious love (Wrath, Envy, Pride).^[22]

In central Italy's political struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante was part of the Guelphs, who in general favored the Papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. Florence's Guelphs split into factions around 1300 – the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs. Dante was among the White Guelphs who were exiled in 1302 by the Lord-Mayor Cante de' Gabrielli di Gubbio, after troops under Charles of Valois entered the city, at the request of Pope Boniface VIII, who supported the Black Guelphs. This exile, which lasted the rest of Dante's life, shows its influence in many parts of the Comedy, from prophecies of Dante's exile to Dante's views of politics, to the eternal damnation of some of his opponents.^[23]

The last word in each of the three cantiche is stelle ("stars").

Inferno

 

Gustave Doré's engravings illustrated the Divine Comedy (1861–1868); here Charon comes to ferry souls across the river Acheron to Hell.

Main article: Inferno (Dante)

The poem begins on the night before Good Friday in the year 1300, "halfway along our life's path" (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita). Dante is thirty-five years old, half of the biblical lifespan of 70 (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate), lost in a dark wood (understood as sin),^[24][25][26] assailed by beasts (a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf) he cannot evade and unable to find the "straight way" (diritta via) – also translatable as "right way" – to salvation (symbolized by the sun behind the mountain). Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a "low place" (basso loco) where the sun is silent ('l sol tace), Dante is at last rescued by Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin's punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, in Canto XX, fortune-tellers and soothsayers must walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because that was what they had tried to do in life:

they had their faces twisted toward their haunches
and found it necessary to walk backward,
because they could not see ahead of them.
... and since he wanted so to see ahead,
he looks behind and walks a backward path.^[27]

Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious.^[28] These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante's Hell: Upper Hell, outside the city of Dis, for the four sins of indulgence (lust, gluttony, avarice, anger); Circle 7 for the sins of violence against one's neighbor, against oneself, and against God, art, and nature; and Circles 8 and 9 for the sins of fraud and treachery. Added to these are two unlike categories that are specifically spiritual: Limbo, in Circle 1, contains the virtuous pagans who were not sinful but were ignorant of Christ, and Circle 6 contains the heretics who contradicted the doctrine and confused the spirit of Christ.^[29]

Purgatorio

Main article: Purgatorio

 

Dante gazes at Mount Purgatory in an allegorical portrait by Agnolo Bronzino, painted c. 1530

Having survived the depths of Hell, Dante and Virgil ascend out of the undergloom to the Mountain of Purgatory on the far side of the world. The Mountain is on an island, the only land in the Southern Hemisphere, created by the displacement of rock which resulted when Satan's fall created Hell^[30] (which Dante portrays as existing underneath Jerusalem^[31]). The mountain has seven terraces, corresponding to the seven deadly sins or "seven roots of sinfulness."^[32] The classification of sin here is more psychological than that of the Inferno, being based on motives, rather than actions. It is also drawn primarily from Christian theology, rather than from classical sources.^[33] However, Dante's illustrative examples of sin and virtue draw on classical sources as well as on the Bible and on contemporary events.

Love, a theme throughout the Divine Comedy, is particularly important for the framing of sin on the Mountain of Purgatory. While the love that flows from God is pure, it can become sinful as it flows through humanity. Humans can sin by using love towards improper or malicious ends (Wrath, Envy, Pride), or using it to proper ends but with love that is either not strong enough (Sloth) or love that is too strong (Lust, Gluttony, Greed). Below the seven purges of the soul is the Ante-Purgatory, containing the Excommunicated from the church and the Late repentant who died, often violently, before receiving rites. Thus the total comes to nine, with the addition of the Garden of Eden at the summit, equaling ten.^[34]

Allegorically, the Purgatorio represents the Christian life. Christian souls arrive escorted by an angel, singing In exitu Israel de Aegypto. In his Letter to Cangrande, Dante explains that this reference to Israel leaving Egypt refers both to the redemption of Christ and to "the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace."^[35] Appropriately, therefore, it is Easter Sunday when Dante and Virgil arrive.

The Purgatorio is notable for demonstrating the medieval knowledge of a spherical Earth. During the poem, Dante discusses the different stars visible in the southern hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various time zones of the Earth. At this stage it is, Dante says, sunset at Jerusalem, midnight on the River Ganges, and sunrise in Purgatory.

Paradiso

Main article: Paradiso (Dante)

 

Paradiso, Canto III: Dante and Beatrice speak to Piccarda and Constance of Sicily, in a fresco by Philipp Veit.

After an initial ascension, Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, as in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. While the structures of the Inferno and Purgatorio were based on different classifications of sin, the structure of the Paradiso is based on the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.

The seven lowest spheres of Heaven deal solely with the cardinal virtues of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice and Temperance. The first three spheres involve a deficiency of one of the cardinal virtues – the Moon, containing the inconstant, whose vows to God waned as the moon and thus lack fortitude; Mercury, containing the ambitious, who were virtuous for glory and thus lacked justice; and Venus, containing the lovers, whose love was directed towards another than God and thus lacked Temperance. The final four incidentally are positive examples of the cardinal virtues, all led on by the Sun, containing the prudent, whose wisdom lighted the way for the other virtues, to which the others are bound (constituting a category on its own). Mars contains the men of fortitude who died in the cause of Christianity; Jupiter contains the kings of Justice; and Saturn contains the temperate, the monks who abided by the contemplative lifestyle. The seven subdivided into three are raised further by two more categories: the eighth sphere of the fixed stars that contain those who achieved the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and represent the Church Triumphant – the total perfection of humanity, cleansed of all the sins and carrying all the virtues of heaven; and the ninth circle, or Primum Mobile (corresponding to the Geocentricism of Medieval astronomy), which contains the angels, creatures never poisoned by original sin. Topping them all is the Empyrean, which contains the essence of God, completing the 9-fold division to 10.

Dante meets and converses with several great saints of the Church, including Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Saint Peter, and St. John. The Paradiso is consequently more theological in nature than the Inferno and the Purgatorio. However, Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is merely the one his human eyes permit him to see, and thus the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's personal vision.

The Divine Comedy finishes with Dante seeing the Triune God. In a flash of understanding that he cannot express, Dante finally understands the mystery of Christ's divinity and humanity, and his soul becomes aligned with God's love:^[36]

But already my desire and my will
were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.^[37]

History

Manuscripts

According to the Italian Dante Society, no original manuscript written by Dante has survived, although there are many manuscript copies from the 14th and 15th centuries – some 800 are listed on their site.^[38]

Early translations

Coluccio Salutati translated some quotations from the Comedy into Latin for his De fato et fortuna in 1396–1397. The first complete translation of the Comedy was made into Latin prose by Giovanni da Serravalle in 1416 for two English bishops, Robert Hallam and Nicholas Bubwith, and an Italian cardinal, Amedeo di Saluzzo. It was made during the Council of Constance. The first verse translation, into Latin hexameters, was made in 1427–1431 by Matteo Ronto [fr].^[39]

The first translation of the Comedy into another vernacular was the prose translation into Castilian completed by Enrique de Villena in 1428. The first vernacular verse translation was that of Andreu Febrer into Catalan in 1429.^[4]

Early printed editions

 

Title page of the first printed edition (Foligno, 11 April 1472)

 

First edition to name the poem Divina Comedia, 1555

 

Illustration of Lucifer in the first fully illustrated print edition. Woodcut for Inferno, canto 34. Pietro di Piasi, Venice, 1491.

The first printed edition was published in Foligno, Italy, by Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini da Trevi on 11 April 1472.^[40] Of the 300 copies printed, fourteen still survive. The original printing press is on display in the Oratorio della Nunziatella in Foligno.

Early printed editions

Date	Title	Place	Publisher	Notes
1472	La Comedia di Dante Alleghieri	Foligno	Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini da Trevi	First printed edition (or editio princeps)
1477	La Commedia	Venice	Wendelin of Speyer
1481	Comento di Christophoro Landino fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Dante Alighieri	Florence	Nicolaus Laurentii	With Cristoforo Landino's commentary in Italian, and some engraved illustrations by Baccio Baldini after designs by Sandro Botticelli
1491	Comento di Christophoro Landino fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Dante Alighieri	Venice	Pietro di Piasi	First fully illustrated edition
1502	Le terze rime di Dante	Venice	Aldus Manutius
1506	Commedia di Dante insieme con uno diagolo circa el sito forma et misure dello inferno	Florence	Philippo di Giunta
1555	La Divina Comedia di Dante	Venice	Gabriel Giolito	First use of "Divine" in title

Thematic concerns

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternative meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem (see the Letter to Cangrande)^[41] he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory: the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical.

The structure of the poem is also quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns distributed throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of the Inferno, allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."^[42]

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" was added later, in the 16th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy").^[43] Low poems had happy endings and were written in everyday language, whereas High poems treated more serious matters and were written in an elevated style. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of humanity, in the low and "vulgar" Italian language and not the Latin one might expect for such a serious topic. Boccaccio's account that an early version of the poem was begun by Dante in Latin is still controversial.^[44][45]

Scientific themes

Although the Divine Comedy is primarily a religious poem, discussing sin, virtue, and theology, Dante also discusses several elements of the science of his day (this mixture of science with poetry has received both praise and criticism over the centuries^[46]). The Purgatorio repeatedly refers to the implications of a spherical Earth, such as the different stars visible in the southern hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various time zones of the Earth. For example, at sunset in Purgatory it is midnight at the Ebro, dawn in Jerusalem, and noon on the River Ganges:^[47]

Just as, there where its Maker shed His blood,
the sun shed its first rays, and Ebro lay
beneath high Libra, and the ninth hour's rays

were scorching Ganges' waves; so here, the sun
stood at the point of day's departure when
God's angel – happy – showed himself to us.^[48]

Dante travels through the centre of the Earth in the Inferno, and comments on the resulting change in the direction of gravity in Canto XXXIV (lines 76–120). A little earlier (XXXIII, 102–105), he queries the existence of wind in the frozen inner circle of hell, since it has no temperature differentials.^[49]

Inevitably, given its setting, the Paradiso discusses astronomy extensively, but in the Ptolemaic sense. The Paradiso also discusses the importance of the experimental method in science, with a detailed example in lines 94–105 of Canto II:

Yet an experiment, were you to try it,
could free you from your cavil and the source
of your arts' course springs from experiment.

Taking three mirrors, place a pair of them
at equal distance from you; set the third
midway between those two, but farther back.

Then, turning toward them, at your back have placed
a light that kindles those three mirrors and
returns to you, reflected by them all.

Although the image in the farthest glass
will be of lesser size, there you will see
that it must match the brightness of the rest.^[50]

A briefer example occurs in Canto XV of the Purgatorio (lines 16–21), where Dante points out that both theory and experiment confirm that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. Other references to science in the Paradiso include descriptions of clockwork in Canto XXIV (lines 13–18), and Thales' theorem about triangles in Canto XIII (lines 101–102).

Galileo Galilei is known to have lectured on the Inferno, and it has been suggested that the poem may have influenced some of Galileo's own ideas regarding mechanics.^[51]

Influences

Classical

Without access to the works of Homer, Dante used Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, and Statius as the models for the style, history, and mythology of the Comedy.^[52] This is most obvious in the case of Virgil, who appears as a mentor character throughout the first two canticles and who has his epic The Aeneid praised with language Dante reserves elsewhere for Scripture.^[53] Ovid is given less explicit praise in the poem, but besides Virgil, Dante uses Ovid as a source more than any other poet, mostly through metaphors and fantastical episodes based on those in The Metamorphoses.^[54] Less influential than either of the two are Statius and Lucan, the latter of whom has only been given proper recognition as a source in the Divine Comedy in the twentieth century.^[55]

Besides Dante's fellow poets, the classical figure that most influenced the Comedy is Aristotle. Dante built up the philosophy of the Comedy with the works of Aristotle as a foundation, just as the scholastics used Aristotle as the basis for their thinking. Dante knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations of his works and indirectly quotations in the works of Albertus Magnus.^[56] Dante even acknowledges Aristotle's influence explicitly in the poem, specifically when Virgil justifies the Inferno's structure by citing the Nicomachean Ethics.^[57] In the same canto, Virgil draws on Cicero's De Officiis to explain why sins of the intellect are worse than sins of violence, a key point that would be explored from canto XVIII to the end of the Inferno.^[58]

Christian

The Divine Comedy's language is often derived from the phraseology of the Vulgate. This was the only translation of the Bible Dante had access to, as it was one the vast majority of scribes were willing to copy during the Middle Ages. This includes five hundred or so direct quotes and references Dante derives from the Bible (or his memory of it). Dante also treats the Bible as a final authority on any matter, including on subjects scripture only approaches allegorically.^[59]

The Divine Comedy is also a product of Scholasticism, especially as expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas.^[60][61] This influence is most pronounced in the Paradiso, where the text's portrayals of God, the beatific vision, and substantial forms all align with scholastic doctrine.^[62] It is also in the Paradiso that Aquinas and fellow scholastic St. Bonaventure appear as characters, introducing Dante to all of Heaven's wisest souls. Despite all this, there are issues on which Dante diverges from the scholastic doctrine, such as in his unbridled praise for poetry.^[63]

Islamic

Dante lived in a Europe of substantial literary and philosophical contact with the Muslim world, encouraged by such factors as Averroism ("Averrois, che'l gran comento feo" Commedia, Inferno, IV, 144, meaning "Averrois, who wrote the great comment") and the patronage of Alfonso X of Castile. Of the twelve wise men Dante meets in Canto X of the Paradiso, Thomas Aquinas and, even more so, Siger of Brabant were strongly influenced by Arabic commentators on Aristotle.^[64] Medieval Christian mysticism also shared the Neoplatonic influence of Sufis such as Ibn Arabi. Philosopher Frederick Copleston argued in 1950 that Dante's respectful treatment of Averroes, Avicenna, and Siger of Brabant indicates his acknowledgement of a "considerable debt" to Islamic philosophy.^[64]

In 1919, Miguel Asín Palacios, a Spanish scholar and a Catholic priest, published La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia (Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy), an account of parallels between early Islamic philosophy and the Divine Comedy. Palacios argued that Dante derived many features of and episodes about the hereafter from the spiritual writings of Ibn Arabi and from the Isra and Mi'raj or night journey of Muhammad to heaven. The latter is described in the ahadith and the Kitab al Miraj (translated into Latin in 1264 or shortly before^[65] as Liber scalae Machometi, "The Book of Muhammad's Ladder"), and has significant similarities to the Paradiso, such as a sevenfold division of Paradise, although this is not unique to the Kitab al Miraj or Islamic cosmology.^[66]

Many scholars have not been satisfied that Dante was influenced by the Kitab al Miraj. The 20th century Orientalist Francesco Gabrieli expressed skepticism regarding the claimed similarities, and the lack of evidence of a vehicle through which it could have been transmitted to Dante.^[67] The Italian philologist Maria Corti pointed out that, during his stay at the court of Alfonso X, Dante's mentor Brunetto Latini met Bonaventura de Siena, a Tuscan who had translated the Kitab al Miraj from Arabic into Latin. Corti speculates that Brunetto may have provided a copy of that work to Dante.^[68] René Guénon, a Sufi convert and scholar of Ibn Arabi, rejected in The Esoterism of Dante the theory of his influence (direct or indirect) on Dante.^[69] Palacios' theory that Dante was influenced by Ibn Arabi was satirized by the Turkish academic Orhan Pamuk in his novel The Black Book.^[70]

In addition to that, it has been claimed that Risālat al-Ghufrān ("The Epistle of Forgiveness"), a satirical work mixing Arabic poetry and prose written by Abu al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri around 1033 CE, had an influence on, or even inspired, Dante's Divine Comedy.^{[71][72][page needed]}

Literary influence in the English-speaking world and beyond

 

A detail from one of Sandro Botticelli's illustrations for Inferno, Canto XVIII, 1480s. Silverpoint on parchment, completed in pen and ink.

The Divine Comedy was not always as well-regarded as it is today. Although recognized as a masterpiece in the centuries immediately following its publication,^[73] the work was largely ignored during the Enlightenment, with some notable exceptions such as Vittorio Alfieri; Antoine de Rivarol, who translated the Inferno into French; and Giambattista Vico, who in the Scienza nuova and in the Giudizio su Dante inaugurated what would later become the romantic reappraisal of Dante, juxtaposing him to Homer.^[74] The Comedy was "rediscovered" in the English-speaking world by William Blake – who illustrated several passages of the epic – and the Romantic writers of the 19th century. Later authors such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, C. S. Lewis and James Joyce have drawn on it for inspiration. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was its first American translator,^[75] and modern poets, including Seamus Heaney,^[76] Robert Pinsky, John Ciardi, W. S. Merwin, and Stanley Lombardo, have also produced translations of all or parts of the book. In Russia, beyond Pushkin's translation of a few tercets,^[77] Osip Mandelstam's late poetry has been said to bear the mark of a "tormented meditation" on the Comedy.^[78] In 1934, Mandelstam gave a modern reading of the poem in his labyrinthine "Conversation on Dante".^[79] In T. S. Eliot's estimation, "Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third."^[80] For Jorge Luis Borges the Divine Comedy was "the best book literature has achieved".^[81]

English translations

Main article: List of English translations of the Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy has been translated into English more times than any other language, and new English translations of the Divine Comedy continue to be published regularly. Notable English translations of the complete poem include the following.^[82]

Year	Translator	Notes
1805–1814	Henry Francis Cary	An older translation, widely available .
1867	Henry Wadsworth Longfellow	Unrhymed terzines. The first U.S. translation, raising American interest in the poem. It is still widely available, including online.
1891–1892	Charles Eliot Norton	Prose translation used by Great Books of the Western World. Available online in three parts (Hell, Purgatory, Paradise) at Project Gutenberg.
1933–1943	Laurence Binyon	Terza rima. Translated with assistance from Ezra Pound. Used in The Portable Dante (Viking, 1947).
1949–1962	Dorothy L. Sayers	Translated for Penguin Classics, intended for a wider audience, and completed by Barbara Reynolds.
1969	Thomas G. Bergin	Cast in blank verse with illustrations by Leonard Baskin.^[83]
1954–1970	John Ciardi	His Inferno was recorded and released by Folkways Records in 1954.
1970–1991	Charles S. Singleton	Literal prose version with extensive commentary; 6 vols.
1981	C. H. Sisson	Available in Oxford World's Classics.
1980–1984	Allen Mandelbaum	Available online at World of Dante and alongside Teodolinda Barolini's commentary at Digital Dante.
1967–2002	Mark Musa	An alternative Penguin Classics version.
2000–2007	Robert and Jean Hollander	Online as part of the Princeton Dante Project. Contains extensive scholarly footnotes.
2002–2004	Anthony M. Esolen	Modern Library Classics edition.
2006–2007	Robin Kirkpatrick	A third Penguin Classics version, replacing Musa's.
2010	Burton Raffel	A Northwestern World Classics version.
2013	Clive James	A poetic version in quatrains.

A number of other translators, such as Robert Pinsky, have translated the Inferno only.

In the arts

Main article: The Divine Comedy in popular culture

 

Dante and Virgil, a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1850), which depicts Dante and Virgil in the eighth circle of Hell, observing two damned souls in eternal combat in Hell.^[84]

The Divine Comedy has been a source of inspiration for countless artists for almost seven centuries. There are many references to Dante's work in literature. In music, Franz Liszt was one of many composers to write works based on the Divine Comedy. In sculpture, the work of Auguste Rodin includes themes from Dante. Sculptor Timothy Schmalz created a series of 100 sculptures, one for each canto, on the 700th anniversary of the date of Dante’s death,^[85] and many visual artists have illustrated Dante's work, as shown by the examples above. There have also been many references to the Divine Comedy in cinema, television, comics and video games.

See also

• Allegory in the Middle Ages
• Book of Arda Viraf
• List of cultural references in Divine Comedy
• Paradise Lost
• Seven Heavens
• Theological fiction

Citations

1. For example, Encyclopedia Americana, 2006, Vol. 30. p. 605: "the greatest single work of Italian literature;" John Julius Norwich, The Italians: History, Art, and the Genius of a People, Abrams, 1983, p. 27: "his tremendous poem, still after six and a half centuries the supreme work of Italian literature, remains – after the legacy of ancient Rome – the grandest single element in the Italian heritage;" and Robert Reinhold Ergang, The Renaissance, Van Nostrand, 1967, p. 103: "Many literary historians regard the Divine Comedy as the greatest work of Italian literature. In world literature it is ranked as an epic poem of the highest order."
2. Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon. ISBN 9780151957477. See also Western canon for other "canons" that include the Divine Comedy.
3. See Lepschy, Laura; Lepschy, Giulio (1977). The Italian Language Today. or any other history of Italian language.
4. Vallone, Aldo. "Commedia" (trans. Robin Treasure). In: Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia, 181-84.
5. Peter E. Bondanella, The Inferno, Introduction, p. xliii, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003, ISBN 1-59308-051-4: "the key fiction of the Divine Comedy is that the poem is true."
6. Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on page 19.
7. Charles Allen Dinsmore, The Teachings of Dante (Ayer, 1970), p. 38, ISBN 0-8369-5521-8.
8. The Fordham Monthly Fordham University, Vol. XL, Dec. 1921, p. 76
9. Slade, Carole; Cecchetti, Giovanni, eds. (1982). Approaches to teaching Dante's Divine comedy. New York, N.Y.: Modern Language Association of America. ISBN 978-0873524780. OCLC 7671339.
10. Emmerson, Richard K., and Ronald B. Herzman. "Revelation." In: Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia, 742-44.
11. Ferrante, Joan M. "Beatrice." In: Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia, 87-94.
12. Picone, Michelangelo. "Bernard, St." (trans. Robin Treasure). In: Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia, 99-100.
13. "Divina Commedia". Enciclopedia Italiana (in Italian). Enciclopedia Italiana. Archived from the original on 18 February 2021. Retrieved 19 February 2021.
14. Hutton, Edward (1910).Giovanni Boccaccio, a Biographical Study 4 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine. p. 273.
15. Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 166.
16. Michael Dirda, Introduction to Auerbach's Dante: Poet of the Secular World 29 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), pp. viii–ix. ISBN 978-1-59017-219-3
17. Dante The Inferno A Verse Translation by Professor Robert and Jean Hollander p. 43
18. Epist. XIII 43 to 48
19. Wilkins E.H The Prologue to the Divine Comedy Annual Report of the Dante Society, pp. 1–7.
20. Kaske, Robert Earl, et al. Medieval Christian Literary Imagery: A Guide to Interpretation. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1988. p. 164
21. Shaw 2014, pp. xx, 100–101, 108.
22. Eiss 2017, p. 8.
23. Trone 2000, pp. 362–364.
24. "Inferno, la Divina Commedia annotata e commentata da Tommaso Di Salvo, Zanichelli, Bologna, 1985". Abebooks.it. Retrieved 16 January 2010.
25. Lectura Dantis, Società dantesca italiana
26. Online sources include [1] 11 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine, [2] 23 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine, [4] 23 February 2004 at the Wayback Machine, . Archived from the original on 2 December 2009. Retrieved 1 December 2009., . Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 20 February 2010.
27. Inferno, Canto XX, lines 13–15 and 38–39, Mandelbaum translation.
28. Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory, notes on p. 75.
29. Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed, Divine Comedy, "Notes to Dante's Inferno"
30. Inferno, Canto 34, lines 121–126.
31. Barolini, Teodolinda. "Hell." In: Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia, 472-77.
32. Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory, Introduction, pp. 65–67 (Penguin, 1955).
33. Robin Kirkpatrick, Purgatorio, Introduction, p. xiv (Penguin, 2007).
34. Carlyle-Oakey-Wickstead, Divine Comedy, "Notes on Dante's Purgatory.
35. "The Letter to Can Grande," in Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, translated and edited by Robert S. Haller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), p. 99
36. Dorothy L. Sayers, Paradise, notes on Canto XXXIII.
37. Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, lines 142–145, C. H. Sisson translation.
38. "Elenco Codici". Dante Online. Retrieved 5 August 2009.
39. Michele Zanobini, "Per Un Dante Latino": The Latin Translations of the Divine Comedy in Nineteenth-Century Italy 20 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine, PhD diss. (Johns Hopkins University, 2016), pp. 16–17, 21–22.
40. Christopher Kleinhenz, Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1, Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0-415-93930-5, p. 360.
41. "Epistle to Can Grande". faculty.georgetown.edu. Retrieved 20 October 2014.
42. Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, Introduction, p. 16 (Penguin, 1955).
43. "World History Encyclopedia".
44. Boccaccio also quotes the initial triplet:"Ultima regna canam fluvido contermina mundo, / spiritibus quae lata patent, quae premia solvunt / pro meritis cuicumque suis". For translation and more, see Guyda Armstrong, of Giovanni Boccaccio. Life of Dante. J. G. Nichols, trans. London: Hesperus Press, 2002.
45. Peri, Hiram (1955). "The Original Plan of the Divine Comedy". Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 18 (3/4): 189–210. doi:10.2307/750179. JSTOR 750179. S2CID 244492114.
46. Michael Caesar, Dante: The Critical Heritage, Routledge, 1995, pp. 288, 383, 412, 631.
47. Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory, notes on p. 286
48. Purgatorio, Canto XXVII, lines 1–6, Mandelbaum translation.
49. Dorothy L. Sayers, Inferno, notes on p. 284.
50. Paradiso, Canto II, lines 94–105, Mandelbaum translation.
51. Peterson, Mark A. (2002). "Galileo's discovery of scaling laws" (PDF). American Journal of Physics. American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). 70 (6): 575–580. arXiv:physics/0110031. Bibcode:2002AmJPh..70..575P. doi:10.1119/1.1475329. ISSN 0002-9505. S2CID 16106719.
52. Moore, Edward. Studies in Dante, First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante, Oxford: Clarendon, 1969 {1896}, pg. 4.
53. Jacoff, Rachel and Schnapp, Jeffrey T. The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante's Commedia 29 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine. pg. 1–3
54. Van Peteghem, Julie. Digital Readers of Allusive Texts: Ovidian Intertextuality in the Commedia and the Digital Concordance on Intertextual Dante 23 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine, pg. 40–42
55. Commentary to Paradiso, IV.90 by Robert and Jean Hollander, The Inferno: A Verse Translation (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), as found on Dante Lab, http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu 14 June 2021 at the Wayback Machine
56. Lafferty, Roger. "The Philosophy of Dante 29 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine", pg. 4
57. Inferno, Canto XI, lines 70–115, Mandelbaum translation.
58. Cornell University, Visions of Dante: Glossary 29 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine
59. Moore, Edward. Studies in Dante, First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante 29 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine, Oxford: Clarendon, 1969 {1896}, pg. 4, 8, and 47–48
60. Toynbee, Paget. Dictionary of Dante A Dictionary of the works of Dante 25 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine, pg. 532
61. Alighieri, Dante (1904). Philip Henry Wicksteed, Herman Oelsner (ed.). The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri (fifth ed.). J.M. Dent and Company. p. 126.
62. Commentary to Paradiso, I.1–12 and I.96–112 by John S. Carroll, Paradiso: A Verse Translation (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), as found on Dante Lab, http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu 14 June 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
63. Commentary to Paradiso, XXXII.31–32 by Robert and Jean Hollander, Paradiso: A Verse Translation (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), as found on Dante Lab, http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu 14 June 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
64. Copleston, Frederick (1950). A History of Philosophy, Volume 2. London: Continuum. p. 200.
65. I. Heullant-Donat and M.-A. Polo de Beaulieu, "Histoire d'une traduction," in Le Livre de l'échelle de Mahomet, Latin edition and French translation by Gisèle Besson and Michèle Brossard-Dandré, Collection Lettres Gothiques, Le Livre de Poche, 1991, p. 22 with note 37.
66. Uždavinys, Algis (2011). Ascent to Heaven in Islamic and Jewish Mysticism. Matheson Trust. pp. 23, 92–93, 117. ISBN 978-1908092021.
67. Gabrieli, Francesco (1954). "New Light on Dante and Islam". Diogenes. 2 (6): 61–73. doi:10.1177/039219215400200604.
68. . Archived from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 7 September 2007.
69. Guenon, René (1925). The Esoterism of Dante.
70. Almond, Ian (2002). "The Honesty of the Perplexed: Derrida and Ibn 'Arabi on "Bewilderment"". Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 70 (3): 515–537. doi:10.1093/jaar/70.3.515. JSTOR 1466522.
71. Glassé, Cyril (2008). The New Encyclopedia of Islam, 3rd Volume (3rd ed.). Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 278. ISBN 9780742562967.
72. Watt, Montgomery W.; Cachia, Pierre (2017). A History of Islamic Spain. p. 125-126. doi:10.4324/9781315083490. ISBN 9781315083490.
73. Chaucer wrote in the Monk's Tale 7 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine, "Redeth the grete poete of Ytaille / That highte Dant, for he kan al devyse / Fro point to point; nat o word wol he faille".
74. Auerbach, Erich (1961). Dante, poet of the secular world (in Italian). Ralph Manheim. [Chicago]: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-03205-1. OCLC 2016697.
75. Irmscher, Christoph. Longfellow Redux. University of Illinois, 2008: 11. ISBN 978-0-252-03063-5.
76. Seamus Heaney, "Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet." The Poet's Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses. Ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff. New York: Farrar, 2001. 239–258.
77. Isenberg, Charles. "Dante in Russia." In: Lansing (ed.), The Dante Encyclopedia, 276-78.
78. Glazova, Marina (November 1984). "Mandel'štam and Dante: The Divine Comedy in Mandel'štam's Poetry of the 1930s 29 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine". Studies in Soviet Thought. 28 (4).
79. James Fenton, Hell set to music 29 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine, The Guardian, 16 July 2005
80. T. S. Eliot (1950) "Dante." Selected Essays, pp. 199–237. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
81. Jorge Luis Borges, "Selected Non-Fictions". Ed. Eliot Weinberger. Trans. Esther Allen et al. New York: Viking, 1999. 303.
82. A comprehensive listing and criticism, covering the period 1782–1966, of English translations of at least one of the three cantiche is given by Gilbert F. Cunningham, The Divine Comedy in English: A Critical Bibliography, 2 vols. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965–67), esp. vol. 2, pp. 5–9.
83. Dante Alighieri. Bergin, Thomas G. trans. Divine Comedy. Grossman Publishers; 1st edition (1969) .
84. "Dante et Virgile – William Bouguereau". Musée d'Orsay. Retrieved 1 December 2022.
85. Farrell, Jane (8 September 2021). "The Divine Comedy in sculpture: Timothy Schmalz". The Florentine.

Bibliography

• Eiss, Harry (2017). Seeking God in the Works of T.S. Eliot and Michelangelo. New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. ISBN 978-1-44384-390-4.
• Shaw, Prue (2014). Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. New York: Liveright Publishing. ISBN 978-1-63149-006-4.
• Trone, George Andrew (2000). "Exile". In Lansing, Richard (ed.). The Dante Encyclopedia. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-41587-611-7.

Further reading

• Ziolkowski, Jan M. (2015). Dante and Islam. Fordham University Press, New York. ISBN 0823263878.

External links

 

Wikiquote has quotations related to Divine Comedy.

 

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Divine Comedy.

 

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Divine Comedy

• Divine Comedy at Standard Ebooks
• Princeton Dante Project Website that offers the complete text of the Divine Comedy (and Dante's other works) in Italian and English along with audio accompaniment in both languages. Includes historical and interpretive annotation.
• (in Italian) Full text of the Commedia
• Dante Dartmouth Project: Full text of more than 70 Italian, Latin, and English commentaries on the Commedia, ranging in date from 1322 (Iacopo Alighieri) to the 2000s (Robert Hollander)
• A Dictionary of the Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante by Paget Toynbee, London, The Clarendon Press (1898).
• Columbia University's Digital Dante features the full text in Italian alongside English translations from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Allen Mandelbaum. Includes English commentary from Teodolinda Barolini as well as multimedia resources relating to the Divine Comedy.
•   Divine Comedy public domain audiobook at LibriVox (in English and Italian)
• Going through Hell: The Divine Dante Exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, April 9 – July 16, 2023.