Instances in Inferno by Dante - Essay Example

Running Head: DANTE'S INFERNO Dante's Inferno of Dante's Inferno This paper will trace the instances in Dante's Inferno in which Virgil becomes impatient or so to say even offended with Dante. This paper will elaborate certain examples from the text and examine errors of judgments committed by Dante. On the other hand, it will also cover and discuss Virgil's responses to these errors. It will justify that those errors were necessary for Dante's education and learning. Unifying the Inferno's babble of syntaxes, its spit-fire diction shifts, are its innumerous quick and extended similes: in Allen Mandelbaum's classic Inferno translation these are strikingly similar, their introductory clauses beginning with a "just as..." subordinator, and ending with main clauses that open with "so..." Rendered by a single translator, these similes tie together disparate styles encountered between analogies; codified by a recurring language of analogy, they give us a dark comfort just as Homer's tropes of analogy--"Wine dark sea," "Rose fingered dawn"--comfort us. If we can safely assume that what we have accomplished sounds better than prose, can we also believe that we have dislodged Dante's sense little enough to justify the effort It all comes down to no more and no less than that. It seems fair to conclude with a test case. Here is the lovely simile, a mixture of Virgilian pastoral and everyday Tuscan agricultural elements that opens Inferno 24, first in John Sinclair's prose, and then in our free verse. The situation is this: Virgil has been irritated by the mocking of his intelligence by the shade of a Jovial Friar from Bologna, since he had been tricked by a devil and almost gotten Dante killed in an ambush: In quella parte del giovanetto anno che 'l sole i crin sotto l'Acquario tempra e gi le notti al mezzo d sen vanno, quando la brina in su la terra assempra l'imagine di sua sorella bianca, ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra, lo villanello a cui la roba manca, si leva, e guarda, e vede la campagna biancheggiar tutta; ond' ei si batte l'anca, ritorna in casa, e qua e l si lagna, come 'l tapin che non sa che si faccia; poi riede, e la speranza ringavagna, veggendo 'l mondo aver cangiata faccia in poco d'ora, e prende suo vincastro e fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia. Cos mi fece sbigottir lo mastro quand' io li vidi s turbar la fronte, e cos tosto al mal giunse lo 'mpiastro; (Inf. 24, 1-18) Dante's style changes with different speakers and settings, and the translator must adjust his style to suit that variety. Francesca's mode in telling of the love that brought her to hell, is very different from the tone Ulysses uses in recalling how he inspired his men to follow him to the ends of the earth. Bertran de Born, holding his head up like a lantern as he tells his sin, has a voice very different from Ugolino's expression of pain and vicious fury. Language and mood shift with the shifting canvas. The simile of the arsenal in Venice as the workmen caulk their unsound ships' with viscous pitch' which introduces the scene devoted to the devils of barratry is different in language and mood from the hoarfrost' image of a country scene evoked to describe the protagonist's feelings of relief at seeing Virgil smile again. Dante succeeds in commemorating not only the paramount movement from visual to verbal levels but the contrary movement from the verbal surface to the picture or vision that lies behind it. The acrostics are something between writing and picture. They have neither the differentiated articulation of a discursive argument nor the representative density of a picture, nor are they as schematic as a diagram, although their numerological distribution has diagrammatic elements. They instantiate rather the locus of a contest among the arts. On the side of vision is the immediacy that places as a picture in "logical space" the Dantean message of man's connection with pride--the fundamental sin. Vision, not discourse, is that toward which the power of the poet strives. Witness, for example, Seamus Heaney's blank-verse opening of Canto I which roughly approximates Dante's terceted stanzas: In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of. How hard it is to say what it was like in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense and gnarled the very thought of it renews my panic. And compare Heaney's style with C.K. Williams's rendition of Canto XIX's opening: Oh, Simon Magus, you and all of your rapacious followers, those wretched robbers, who, for gold and silver whore Likewise, our own spiritual task links with an intellectual one when addressing Inferno. Typical readers have little sense of Medieval poetry, much less an historical sense of the period. If we get anything out of Inferno, it's that Dante's world was very different from our own; we assume that by lacing literary studies with a bit of philosophy and history we better understand our own age. Note how Dante--through Pinsky--abruptly alters his depiction of past carnage in his description of Maometto (Mohammed) splayed wide-open: Who could find words, even in free-running prose, to describe the wounds I saw, in all their horror-- telling it over as many times as you choose, It's certain no human tongue could take the measure of those enormities. Our speech and mind, straining to comprehend them, flail and falter. From time to time, especially in Inferno's first cantos, Dante employs the "Sweet New Style," the signature style of La Vita Nuova to which he also returns in Purgatorio and Paradiso. The characteristics of the style as Dante practiced it are a simplicity of diction, a musical cadence and an attention to fresh concrete language. But Halpern's language in Canto V is anything but fresh: The nightmarish, never-ending hurricane drives the spirits before it with a vengeance: whirling and punishing, tormenting them. When they confront the storm-ripped landscape there are cries, weeping and lamentations, and it's there they curse God himself. I learned this was the cruel punishment of the carnal sinners, those who abandon reason for desire. And as starlings carry through winter air on wings in flocks crowded and wide, that wind bears the wicked spirits: Here, there, up and down, driving them everywhere. There's no hope, nothing to console them, no chance of rest, much less of easing their pain. Dante doesn't give himself much space in Canto XX to pity these contorted creatures. In one of the few moments in Inferno's latter part where he permits himself sympathy, the poet's outpouring is cut off by Virgils' rebuke: Leaning on an outcrop of that rocky site, and my master spoke to me: 'Do you suppose you are above with the other fools even yet Here, pity lives when it is dead to these. Who could be more impious than one who'd dare to sorrow at the judgment God decrees ...' Poetry that attempts to compete with the visual arts is as ancient as Homer, who celebrates the artist in his description of Achilles's shield. The competition becomes a recurring theme in iconic verse: transformation of seemingly resistant material into expressive verbal form celebrates the power of words to encompass any other art. Just as Virgil was drawn to the model of Achilles' shield, so Dante composed his own ecphrases--the most openly iconic theme in the Comedy--on the model presented by his master. His introduction of carved bas-reliefs at the entrance to Purgatory signals the pilgrim's succession to that realm, an arrival that engages both the pilgrim and the poet. By his espousal of ecphrasis at this critical juncture Dante shows the reader how ecphrasis is penetrated by an internalized historical representation of itself. Purgatorio embodies the verbal icon of the classical tradition and thereby recapitulates the history of the contest between visual art and poetry. Dante emulates Virgil in his use of ecphrasis, specifically in the implementation--by representation as through works of art--of the synthesizing power of physical vision. Moreover, the ecphrases in Dante, like those in Virgil, document the progress of the writer as artist and encapsulate the epistemologically ambivalent situation of poetry as a didactic source and a repository of information. Both Virgil and Dante transmit via ecphrasis the adequacy or inadequacy of human response to art. Both poets evaluate this essentially iconic and indexical phase as crucial to the construal of symbols and to symbolic action. References Alighieri, Dante. Translated by John Ciardi. Inferno, The. New York: Mentor, 1982. Read More