Dante Alighieri
Purgatorio
I flew into Italy last week without a book, the idea being 1) not to carry anything extra and heavy and 2) to force myself to study vocabulary during my reading time. That worked well enough; I reviewed my phrase book during the flight, and while I certainly don’t speak Italian, I was at least able to get around OK, stay fed and sheltered, and have a good time in the process. For the flight home, however, I would need brain fuel. So, in Florence, I set out to find an English language bookstore.
As it happened, there was one near the home of a certain Dante Alighieri, a couple of blocks from the chapel where he first laid eyes on his beloved Beatrice and where Beatrice lies entombed to this day, receiving the prayers of stricken lovers with a pure and reproachless heart. I had my own mystical experience with Beatrice at the chapel (a story for another day), which prompted me to track down La Divina Commedia at the bookstore shortly thereafter.
It’s of course grossly unfair to read Dante in English and make any assessment of the quality of the language. So I won’t. Having read The Inferno years ago, it wasn’t until I read The Purgatory on trains and buses across Tuscany and Umbria that I started to see what Dante was up to. Not just language, although I expect that shines as well, and not just an epic allegory, although it’s that, too. What first struck me was the painstaking attention to structure and symmetry — the structure of the cantos laid out with numerological significance, each of the three books (the trinity) ending with the same word (stars), the mirroring of each of the cardinal sins with a corresponding beatitude, ad infinitum. The Divine Comedy isn’t just an epic, but a clockwork machine, a catalog of antiquity, a political treatise and the shaping of modern Catholic thought. It’s poetry of such a completely different character than that of impressionistic lines dashed in a beat café. Dante is no mere poet — he’s an astronomer, a theologian, an historian, a politician, a bibliophile and perhaps above all else, a lover, loyal beyond marriage, loyal even beyond death. As when I read so many other great writers, I am utterly humbled to understand even a portion of what’s he’s up to. It’s like seeing a watchmaker create a timepiece from ore and sand — it seems impossible, but the product is undeniably real.