DANTE ALIGHIERI

Dante Alighieri: translation

(1265–1321)

Dante Alighieri is universally admired as one of the greatest writers in Western culture. HisDIVINE COMEDYstands as perhaps the most significant text in medieval European literature.

Dante was born in Florence at the end of May in 1265, during the internecine strife between the Italian parties known as the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. While there are certainly complex differences between the two parties, in general the Guelfs supported the power of the pope in temporal matters, while the Ghibellines supported the supremacy of the Holy Roman Emperor. The year after Dante’s birth, the Ghibellines suffered a decisive defeat at Benevento, and the Guelfs gained control of Florence. Dante’s was a family of modest means, but he was very proud of his noble heritage: His greatgreat-grandfather Cacciaguida had been knighted by Conrad III and had died in the Second Crusade. In 1274, the nine-year-old Dante met Bici Portinari, a girl his own age who later became the wife of a Florentine banker named Simone de Bardi. Dante claimed to have loved her from that moment, and called her “Beatrice,” that is, “bringer of blessings.”He speaks of meeting her again in 1283. But in that same year, Dante’s father died, and shortly thereafter he married Gemma Donati. The marriage had been arranged by Dante’s father in 1277. The couple eventually had two sons and, probably, two daughters as well.

Around this time, too, Dante met the poet Guido CAVALCANTI, and, with Cavalcanti, became the center of a group of poets who practiced theDOLCE STIL NOVO—that is, the “sweet new style”— a movement in Italian poetry that relied on complex, learned imagery in place of the clichéd love conventions of earlier Italian writers. About 1287 Dante went to Bologna to study at the university. In 1289, he joined the Florentine cavalry. His passion for his own noble ancestry led him to enlist in what was considered the aristocratic branch of the military.While in the cavalry, Dante took part in the battle of Campaldino between Florence and Arezzo, and later the siege of the Pisan fortress of Caprona.

The first great crisis of Dante’s life occurred in 1290, when, on June 8, the woman he called Beatrice died.His grief over her death caused him to compose theVITA NUOVA, or “new life,” his first important literary accomplishment. It consists of 31 lyric poems, interspersed with narrative settings that describe the context in which the poem was composed, and sometimes relate Dante’s intent in writing the poem. Dante’s grief over the loss of Beatrice is clear, but ultimately the text culminates in an interest in the attributes of the now heavenly form of Beatrice. TheVita nuovaends with Dante’s vow to write no more about her until he can “write of her that which has never been written of any woman” (chapter 62)—a vow he keeps when he makes the figure of Beatrice his guide through the heavenly realm in hisDivine Comedy. Dante entered the political life of Florence by enrolling in the Apothecaries’ Guild in 1295. In 1299, he was appointed to fill a minor ambassadorship, and then, in June through August of 1300, served as one of the six priors of Florence. About this time, the Guelf party that had ruled Florence since 1266 split into two rival factions: the Whites, consisting mainly of merchants interested in peaceful trade, and the Blacks, made up of bankers and old money interested in empire and supported by the reigning pope, Boniface VIII. The hostility between Whites and Blacks had reached such ferocity by the summer of 1300 that Dante and the other priors were forced to exile leaders of both parties, including Dante’s brother-in-law Corsa Donati of the Black faction and Dante’s friend and fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti of the Whites.

Pope Boniface, however, took the opportunity to interfere in Florentine politics, and, in 1301, summoned Charles of Valois to “pacify” Florence— that is, essentially, bring it under papal control by force. As Charles’s armies approached, the Florentine government sent Dante to Boniface in October to formally protest the invasion. Charles marched into Florence in November, and set the Blacks—Boniface’s party—in control. Dante himself was triedin absentiaand sentenced to exile for two years on spurious charges of graft and embezzlement. He was ordered to appear before the Florentine court to answer the charges against him or to pay a fine, but, when Dante refused to appear, he was sentenced on March 10, 1302, to permanent exile, and charged never to return to Florence on pain of death.

Dante took refuge at first with Bartolommeo della Scala in Ravenna in 1302.When Bartolommeo died in 1304, Dante began a long life of wandering, moving from one town or one noble patron to another. He probably visited Bologna in 1304, the Malaspina family in Lunigiana in 1306, and then the mountains of Casentino on the upper Arno. It has been suggested that he may have visited Paris in 1307–09. By 1314, he was staying with the Ghibelline captain Can Grande della Scala in Verona. In about 1318, he returned to Ravenna to live with Guido Novella da Polenta.

Now no longer involved directly in political life, Dante was free to write his most significant works. In 1303–04 he wrote a Latin treatise entitledDe VULGARI ELOQUENTIA(On the vulgar tongue), in which he defends the use of the vernacular language, Italian, in serious literature. At the same time he outlines principles of poetic composition in Italian.

Between 1304 and 1308, Dante was working on his next major project, called theCONVIVIO(The Banquet). This text was to be a metaphorical banquet of some 14 courses, structured in alternating passages of poetry and prose in a manner similar to theVita Nuova, with the avowed goal of introducing philosophy to the layman. It seems likely that Dante abandoned theConvivioto devote himself more fully to his masterpiece, what he called hisComedy, to which later admirers have added the epithetDivine. Dante began work on the Inferno about 1307, and had finished that first installment of theComedyby about 1314. He did interrupt his work on theInfernoto write the treatiseDe MONARCHIA(On monarchy) in about 1312–13. The occasion that inspired this work seems to have been the unsuccessful invasion of Lombardy by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg. Henry’s intent was to pacify northern Italy and force the rebellious Italian cities to submit to his authority. Dante saw him as a savior, and asserts in his pro-Ghibelline argument that the emperor received his authority directly from God, and not through any intermediary in the church. Not surprisingly, the pope condemned Dante’s treatise.

After Henry’s untimely death ended his dream of a universal monarchy, Dante devoted the remainder of his life to the completion of his life’s work. Settled relatively permanently in Ravenna, he completed thePurgatorioin 1319 and theParadisoin 1321, shortly before his death. He died in Ravenna on September 13 or 14, and his tomb remains there, rather than in the city of his birth that exiled him.

Dante’s influence on Italian culture and on Western literature has been immense. His choice of his native Tuscan dialect for theComedydemonstrated that the vernacular could be an appropriate vehicle for serious literature and established Tuscan as the standard literary language of Italy. CHAUCER acknowledged his debt to Dante in such works asThe HOUSE OF FAMEandThe MONK’S TALE. During the Renaissance, Dante’s influence was eclipsed by PETRARCH’s, but his preeminence was rediscovered by the English Romantic poets, and the 20th century saw his reputation rise to equal those of Shakespeare and Homer as a pillar ofWestern literature.William Butler Yeats called Dante “the chief imagination of Christendom,” while T. S. Eliot wrote that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no third.”

■ Dante Alighieri.The Divine Comedy. Edited and translated by Charles Singleton. 3 vols. Bollingen Series, 80. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press: 1970–1975.

■ ———.Inferno. Translated by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

■ ———.Purgatorio. Translated by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

■ ———.Dante’s Vita Nuova. Translated by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.

■ Jacoff, Rachel, ed.The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.