Saving Dante from the Classicists

Through this labor-of-love translation, Jason Baxter makes the case for a new take on the Inferno: here is not some dense and heady masterpiece, an unread but highly-regarded doorstopper, or a leather-bound-coffee-table-conversation-piece displayed to impress curious houseguests, but a poem filled with heirloom household medicines fermented with a raw, visceral beauty that warms the blood and sends shivers through the gut. The Commedia is not just encyclopedic compendium containing innumerable, overwhelming allusions to a dizzying range of high culture—stuffed, like an Italian tomato, with spices whose names you may know but whose hard truths you have not digested fully, from Homer and Virgil to Boethius to St. Thomas Aquinas, from the quarrel between poetry and philosophy to political history and mystical theology.

No, these cantos “rough as sandpaper and sharp as broken glass,” contain spine-tickling, heart-rending noir that can “save Dante from the classicists.” Declining literacy and literary capacities and decimated curricula, the deprivations of attention addled by online dopamine addictions—sundry other things seem to be surer obstacles to Dante’s achievement than the snobbery of classicists. But Baxter’s appeal is refreshing: we must restore the Italian’s savage lessons to the vernacular by (to cite his translation) “squeeze[ing] the juice of my perception,” and reaching for “rhymes, sufficiently hoarse and harsh / to be a fitting match for this sick hole.”

Like Ciardi before him, Baxter does not let The Divine Comedy’s status as a Great Book of Western Civilization whitewash the Italian exile’s unflinching devotion to what’s really real, the broken and the blessed, the gory and the gorgeous, not through the familiar catch phrase of “truth goodness and beauty,” but including, says Baxter, the “words for excrement, obscenities, insults, and bitter sarcasm,” that are part and parcel of the poem’s high art. Preserving the elevated elements but eschewing stilted, stuffy meter (not to say that meter is innately stuffy, an argument that has led to much bad poetry!), Baxter risks loose rhythms and lucid prose, preferring rough-hewn lines over a mystifying Commedia. Concocting a cacophony of language and sound, he builds a connection between how hell feels and how it tastes when juiced—still pulpy—into words.

Baxter’s translation and introduction pulse with a teacher’s ardor, inviting the reader to traverse without fear Dante’s fierce-love punishments. The “vile repast” and sundry grotesqueries that “bite[] a conscience hard,” readily explained and “divided up in various platoons,” are not here to satisfy warped delectation or to mystify us into admiration: they’re given as a last hope to save our souls.

Later this year my all-time favorite Dante translator Michael Palma (just a hair ahead of Ciardi) will publish his long-anticipated terza rima translation of the whole, which I cannot wait to tolle lege, for before Palma’s Inferno no English language poet had succeeded in maintaining the meter, meaning, and rhyme scheme of the original. Baxter explains Dante’s form in a footnote: “In terza rima, the first line rhymes with the third; and the second line rhymes with the fourth and sixth (that is, the outer rhymes of the next terzina). In this way, the pattern continues, binding all of the terzine together by a ‘chain’ of rhymes.” This chain, which stretches all the way from the first canto to the final word, is evinced, here, in Canto 17—the province of the fraudulent:

E quella sozza imagine di froda (a)
sen venne, e arrivò la testa e ‘l busto, (b)
ma ‘n su la riva non trasse la coda. (c)

La faccia sua era faccia d’uom giusto, (b)
tanto benigna avea di fuor la pelle, (c)
e d’un serpente tutto l’altro fusto; (b)

Dorothy L. Sayers tried nobly to transpose the terza rima into English, but the achievement of her edition is the footnotes and explanations, rather than the interlocked lines, whose straw braids bristle awkwardly. Here’s how Sayers gives us the monster Geryon, one of the great figures of fraud, whom she helpfully situates as “a shape compounded of three natures, human, bestial, and reptile” replete with “‘the face of a just man’ and an iridescence of beautiful colour,” but possessing, also, a “poisonous sting in his serpent’s tail”:

And on he came, that unclean image of Fraud,
To ground upon the hard with head and chest,
But not his tail, which still he left abroad.

His face was a just man’s, it so expressed
In every line a mild benignity;
And like a wyvern’s trunk was all the rest.

Sayers has Geryon grinding, unsatisfyingly, on an adjective (“the hard”). She suggests that the hidden tail is “abroad,” a confusing, inaccurate metaphor that tries to suggest his stinging trunk is so tucked-away it is as if quite faraway, but ends up implying a greater disconnect between what is concealed and what is revealed. The archaic “mild benignity” hardly rhymes with the forthcoming “shaggy arm-pit high” or “whorled tracery.” Again, her notes reward consultation, as after each canto she includes a concise commentary on the guiding images before explaining any line-by-line obscurities concerning historical personages or mythological creatures. Geryon, for instance is the “perfect” creature to carry Dante through this part of hell, introducing the circle of sexual deviants and usurers who, respectively, “make sterile the natural instincts which result in fertility” and “make fertile that which by its nature is sterile—ie. they ‘make money breed.’”

Baxter, who makes no claims to capture terza tima, departs from the poetic strictures to have, as it were, hypocrisy speak plainly, even as, in the final line, he plays with a colonic pause that delivers a trenchant punchline. Note how the terse sentences “It’s head came up. Then chest” build anticipation and propel the action, even as their rhythm prepares us for that final revelation of fraud’s affiliation with the Tempter of Genesis, that Father of Lies who commenced our exile East of Eden by fostering that hellish disconnect between what seems to be the case and what actually is:

That fetid image of fraud
came in. Its head came up. Then chest.
But didn’t pull his tail up out of the ravine.

Its face was the face of a man of justice.
It looked so kind and warm, but skin-deep.
Its trunk entirely different: a serpent’s.

Palma’s verse is as fit and fluid as it is—recited as a whole—resonant:

Fraud’s filthy image came to us apace,
Beaching head and torso at my master’s sign
But leaving his tail to dangle into space.

His face was the face of a just man, so benign
Was the outward aspect that it chose to wear,
But beneath it his long trunk was serpentine.

He provides potent notes that, sometimes, surpass Sayers’s, describing Dante’s Geryon as drawing upon his classical mythological “tripartite nature, but,” fascinatingly, the Italian “incorporates details from the plague of locusts in Revelation”—not just baptizing the pagan monster but layering its significance as part of the prophesized Biblical plague.

Here is the thing: any honest, hospitably reader wrestling through the Divine Comedy, will acquire an accidental education while trying to make sense of the poem’s several textures, as it constantly contains literal, moral, analogical, and mystical meanings. (Though—as is the case with one’s initial immersions in the sacred Liturgy—the first few times through the poem it is typically advisable to let the language flow over you without pausing and worrying about missed meanings, without digressing down too many delectable or befuddling rabbit holes. Of course, because, last I checked, human beings are not gods outside of time and are therefore bound by the limits of chronology, we cannot—besides tapping our heads and rubbing our bellies simultaneously—readily do two things at once, and so our contact with literature must alternate between the critical consciousness of an astute student and the dreamlike experience of a smitten lover.) Following the allusions, you discover other riches along the way. For instance, the locusts of Revelation contains a strange metamorphoses of natures akin to Ovid’s Metamorphosis—a myth of tremendous significance for Dante—for “The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces”:

And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. ⁴ They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. ⁵ They were not allowed to kill them but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes. ⁶ During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them. (Rev 9:3-8).

By giving Geryon the Scriptural inflection of grotesque, human-headed insects whom God has granted (as Dante grants Geryon) the sting of a Scorpion, Dante brings us to the hellish mood of the Apocalypse, a topsy-turvy time wherein people will “seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.” For our species, ever self-preserving, ever fearful of dying, disinclined to declare with confidence St. Paul’s “Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor 15), Scripture articulates, with unsurpassed poetry, the perpetual punishment of the living dead, forever pulsating in the inferno.

Wonderfully, Palma’s terza rima scheme does not (like Sayers’s) require strain, and the passage from “apace” to “space,” the interlocked “sign” and “benign” more fully rhyme, conserving the Divine Comedy’s deep scaffolding, a skeleton not only sans-arthritic-cracks but replete with a structure that plays guide alongside Virgil, curating the underworld’s treacherous paths.

But we need different takes on the same poem to help us make sense of the necessary density. In fact, the Commedia’s genius becomes even clearer when you read from several contrasting streams that all came from the same torrent. As Dante is perhaps the greatest poet who ever lived, Baxter’s take at first gave me pause, if only because I take very seriously John Henry Newman’s insistence that we exercise “conservative action” upon the past, and lines so “divine” ought not to be tackled without due cause. Those who hold firmly to the permanent things can sometimes refuge in a false conservatism that becomes reactionary and nostalgic, as if all that’s great and good has happened in the past, and anything new, anything happening now, is part of societal decadence or decline. And yet the permanent things and the undying truths need to be interpreted anew in every generation, need to be said in an idiom fit for our times, in a pulsating, living language that can make what’s permanent attractive again, that can pass through what is passing but wrestle from the flux of change what is really worth living and dying for.

Can we live solely off the culture of the past, even if it is rich? When we are talking about changes in sacred art, music, or architecture, the answer should be different—with much more of an emphasis on Newman’s “conservative action upon the past” in order to ward off fleeting and vacuous novelty. However, Newman also insists that, paradoxically, the shapes of enduring truths must sometimes “change . . . in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Philip Rieff’s suggestion in My Life Among the Deathworks is well-worth mulling: every generation needs new spies of the sacred order, “dedicated to the proposition that the truths have been revealed and require constant rereading and application in light of” the particulars of our moment. Taken in a misguided manner, this could lead to a cavalier presentism that would remake solid things in order to sell them as relevant. Undertaken prudently, it is the essence of persuasion—rooted in what’s lasting but appealing via the available means, the language that will reach a real audience.

I do confess to finding the first lines of the first Canto not goodly plain but somewhat blasé:

Midway along the path that makes for us a life
I found myself in the midst of a dark wood.
Yes. The true way was lost.

But as I pressed past this dark wood’s first leaves and returned and reread Baxter’s poetry, and as I descended the inverted cone of Dante’s design and visited more with the damned, I was compelled by the logic of Baxter’s reimagined epic.

Consider Count Ugolino, trapped in the frozen lake of Cocytus created to chastise sins of betrayal. Savagely gnawing on the head of the Archbishop Ruggieri, Ugolino tells how the churchman locked him—and his children—in a tower and kept him there past the point of starvation. This new configuration, while dodging melodrama, makes it hard not to bite your nails:

and then I bit my hands because of sorrow.
They, thinking that I did this from desire
to eat, immediately lifted themselves from off the ground

And said: ‘Dear father, we would suffer less
if you would feed upon us! You dressed us in
this miserable flesh, so you should now despoil it!’

I calmed myself. No need to make them sadder.
That day and next we all stayed mute.
O obdurate earth! Why don’t you open up?

The sharp as sandpaper and hoarse parts are arranged with evident but unassuming care—delivering a clarifying rendering that moves me more and more. Baxter succeeds at his stated aim of summoning “metaphors from daily life for hoary theological realities.” He succeeds in showing just how radical Dante’s decision to write in a common tongue was, given that writing in the homely language of the unlearned meant suffering humiliation, giving up the pretention of using the high language of art.” He lends his pen to Dante’s grotesque capacity to take wrongs as familiar as betrayal and, for the hard of hearing, shout, compelling us to once again see usury and sexual deviancy as sins even though major players across the political spectrum have tried—hard as hell—to normalize both.

The bridge Baxter has built arcs right down into the bolge (infernal ditches) of our age and invites all comers, first time readers or old-time fanatics of Dante’s “sweet-new-style,” to humbly follow—in a humbled but lithe language—the one who first harrowed hell. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis contends that “a good education should build some sentiments while destroying others.” Rather than daring to hope that all are saved, Dante fears for his readers’ damnations, and, bent on delivering a sentimental education, he boldly brings beauty subterranean, measuring big-talking, eternally-embittered sinners against the lowly, lordly Word, so that the species of evil that “all win the hate of heaven” might win our righteous anger too—might make us despise the traces of concupiscence, fraudulence, and greed that we see made hideous around us, whose hideous strength warps our own wills also. Purged by this terrible tour of untoward desires that once held allure, when we step out of the last line into the stars, we might love more that “PRIMAL LOVE” who made the sun and all the other lights.

We might leave convinced that he created, too, the “CITY OF SADNESS” and “ETERNAL SORROW,” and that Dante brings darkness into the spotlight precisely to save us from becoming, forever, miserable tenements with unbreakable leases, paying high rent in perpetual punishment to the parasitic slumlord of the underworld.

The Divine Comedy: Inferno
By Dante Alighieri, new translation by Jason M. Baxter
Angelico Press, 2024
Paperback/Hardcover, 258 pages

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