The Online Library of Liberty

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• The Trinity of Love
• Preface
• Paradiso I
• Paradiso Ii
• Paradiso Iii
• Paradiso Iv
• Paradiso V
• Paradiso Vi
• Paradiso Vii
• Paradiso Viii
• Paradiso Ix
• Paradiso X
• Paradiso Xi
• Paradiso Xii
• Paradiso Xiii
• Paradiso Xiv
• Paradiso Xv
• Paradiso Xvi
• Paradiso Xvii
• Paradiso Xviii
• Paradiso Xix
• Paradiso Xx
• Paradiso Xxi
• Paradiso Xxii
• Paradiso Xxiii
• Paradiso Xxiv
• Paradiso Xxv
• Paradiso Xxvi
• Paradiso Xxvii
• Paradiso Xxviii
• Paradiso Xxix
• Paradiso Xxx
• Paradiso Xxxi
• Paradiso Xxxii
• Paradiso Xxxiii

PREFACE

A SEPARATELY published translation or interpretation of the Divine Comedy’s last part is obliged to face one of the strangest facts in the history of great literature. The Paradiso is the least known and the least understood, and consequently the least likely to be read of the three Canticles of the “Sacred Poem.” And yet for all genuine Dante lovers it is what, from the point of view of art, it ought to be, the crown of the whole prophetic work, the last glorious part “for which the first was made.” In fact, it was because of this that its author, following in mediaeval fashion the usage of antiquity, called his poem a Comedy, and not a Tragedy. Though beginning unhappily in Hell, it ends happily in the joy of Heaven.

This relative, if not positive, unpopularity of the Paradiso has been variously accounted for. Professor Grandgent’s statement that “of the three parts of the Commedia, the Purgatorio seems to a twentieth-century reader most modern, the Paradiso most mediaeval,” might find a brief explanation in the predominance of so-called practical interests and beliefs in our brilliant but essentially superficial age. Loving his struggling life on the earth’s surface as never before, and absorbed by his intellectual conquest of matter, the modern man, as such, merely patronizes a visionary spiritual Heaven. Believing in material evolution and progress on earth, he unconsciously sees something of himself and of his age in the illustrations afforded by the lifelike topography of the Purgatorio, but very little in the suggestions of the crude mediaeval geology and astrology of the Inferno and Paradiso, with whose apparently static and everlasting damnation and perfection he has, and very rightly, but little sympathy.

But even to those, who love the Paradiso as it deserves to be loved, in spite of its antiquated cosmogony and intellectualistic and dogmatic theology, each separate part of the Divine Comedy makes almost as different an appeal, as if the exclusive and unrelated subjects of each were Satan, Man, and God.

The appeal of the Inferno is the grim strength of its fearless portrayal of that inexorable moral Law in whose God even “devils believe and tremble.” The horrid fascination of its dark etchings of the nature and results of sin may possibly account for the relatively greater popularity which for so many has associated its author’s name exclusively with Hell. Its thrills are the sensational surface thrills of terror, morbidity and pain.

The appeal of the Purgatorio’s more familiar world, whose days are diversified by lights and shades and colors drawn from sea and land and sky, whose dawns and evening twilights are infinitely charming, and whose nights are “quieted by hope” and happy dreams, is its winning struggle for freedom, its ever increasing beauty, and the veiled apotheosis of man’s soul in its last canto.

Quite other than either of these is the dazzling, but discriminating, appeal of Dante’s matchless Paradiso, of whose conclusion a Lowell could say that “nothing in all poetry approaches” its “imaginative grandeur.” The distinct appeal of the Paradiso is its pervading and ever intenser sublimity, which renders invisible its ether-like strength, and veils the ultra-violet hues of its spiritual beauty from all who have not attuned their inner hearing and vision to the ever developing overtones of its love, and to the splendor of its ever dawning light. Its thrills are those that stir subconscious depths. Here, however, the reader, who has left behind him the outer, as well as the under world of life, is warned by the poet himself not to go on, unless very differently prepared than before, to follow closely in the spiritual wake of his fearless leader’s aëroplane. Materialists and the merely intellectual are not bidden to this spirit feast.

What, then, is the task of the translator of the words of Dante’s wonderful third canticle, if he would also be its interpreter, or the translator of the buds, as well as of the full blown flowers, of its creative original thought? If, under the very jealous eyes of the original Italian text, which frowns at a translation made poetical at its expense, he has tried to better his previous efforts to achieve a metrical version at once accurate and readable; and if, in the trust that poetical results will follow, he has fused the simplest English words he can find, in verse for whose rhythm he has patiently listened, he must next prepare to reap the prophetic harvest of intuitions far deeper and subtler than any he had met before.

Furthermore, he must take to himself a much more serious warning than that which Dante gives to those who would merely be his readers. For, to try to interpret the Paradiso otherwise than by laboriously illucidating the well nigh worn out historical, philosophical and theological media of its pregnant intuitions, will call rather for the daring imagination of a child, than for the timid, though entrenched, learning of a scholar. The latter, as such, can do little more than correct, or find new references to “sources,” and quote “authorities,” in the uninspiring hope of doing in a possibly better way what had been often done well, though futilely, before. The child in him, on the other hand, subconsciously knowing why it was that he was set in his elders’ midst, and being spiritually hard to please, will insist upon creating out of the dust of dogmas what his soul desires, if what is offered to his credulity by the static scholarship of the past be not enough to sate his craving for dynamic belief.

Many an interpreter has doubtlessly been praised or blamed, by being told that his interpretations were due to his reading “between the lines” what Dante’s or some other poet’s words may have possibly suggested to him, but what the poet himself certainly neither thought, nor meant to teach. Yes, should have been his answer, you have stated it correctly, “between the lines.” For, if by the “meaning” of Dante’s words one refer, beyond their literal equivalent in English, to their living or creative, and not to their dead, or atrophied, significance, where else shall one look for it, than apart from, though still in close proximity to, the words to which was left the hard task of expressing and of transmitting that meaning’s spirit? Or are we never to learn that the spiritual meaning of poetry lies in the greatest thought it can consistently be helped to create, rather than in the mere words of the less developed thought, however great, which dropped it as the living seed of its dying self?

Our age being predominantly, if not despotically, scientific and historical, men are more apt to inquire as to the provenience of an idea and its authoritatively accepted position in intellectual society, than as to its intrinsic merit and spiritual legitimacy. An independent interpreter will, therefore, have to share with others in being asked that very old Gospel question which is susceptible of being adapted to endless secondary occasions: “By what authority” sayest “thou these things?”

Not caring to add myself unnecessarily to the already sufficient number of competent theological and philological scribes who limit their function as interpreters to quoting accurately from well “documented” sources, and from orthodoxly authoritative expositions of Dante’s teaching, I think that a brief discussion of authority in the field of great poetical literature is fairly in order here. Indeed, what could be a better place for it than the preface to the Canticle of the Divine Comedy which, far more than the other two, has tempted its interpreter to present views which might very plausibly be accused of forgetting a proper regard for the too prevalent dogmatic lack of personal opinion on the part of Dante scholars?

What, then, is authority? I would answer this question, which is the main subject of this preface, by saying that it is a power to win approval for a truth, which does not reside in the person of him who utters it, but in the dynamic persuasiveness of the truth it was given him to utter. An authoritative interpretation, therefore, is one which will be seen to be the natural flowering of the seed of truth latent in the thought interpreted, by readers or hearers who have kept their freedom to listen to their own minds and hearts.

As to the function of scholarship, if being “scholarly” in the field of creative literature consist in applying to the interpretation of works of intuitive imagination and art the methods properly and successfully used in the field of physical science and history, then some other term must be found for the openly avowed ambition of one who, if not exclusively, is far more interested in what is unique, vitally new and creative in a poet’s thought, than he is in what the latter shared with others, or in what he “owed” to his predecessors, or to the times in which he lived. “Sources,” then, and “authorities” could usefully be left, as their interesting specialty, to genealogically minded scholars who think it is more important to know where an idea came from, and by whom it had been accepted, than what its intrinsic value is, and to what further truth it can lead.

Science, in dealing with anything purely material or intellectual, very properly ignores what seems unique in it, or attempts to reduce it to intellectual terms by analyzing it into elements common to it and to other things or events in the past or present. In the spiritual field, however, by which I mean the field of intuition and imagination, which it is the function of poetry to express and enlarge, what is true in the field of scientific and historical facts ceases to apply. What is unique, new and germinal is here the main thing, everything else being properly viewed as its accessory outer case, and as interesting and valuable only as all well fitting and appropriate clothing is.

Now what is unique, new and creative cannot be explained at all by analysis or by an investigation of its sources in the past, but only by a sympathetic appreciation of its creative vitality in the present, the essential question being not what it originally meant, or was early thought to mean, but what it has grown to mean in the fuller light that can now be thrown upon it by the richer experience of man. What sayest thou that I mean? is the question which a real poet asks of his reader.

Of this truth I had an interesting illustration many years ago at Cornell University. Professor Corson, having elicited some doubt as to whether he had given a correct interpretation of one of Browning’s poems upon which he had been lecturing, settled the question by referring it to the poet whom he knew intimately. In due time the latter’s answer came from England, and was to the effect that, to tell the truth, he did not mean what Professor Corson thought he meant, when he wrote the poem, but that he was very glad to recognize the latter’s interpretation of his thought as its fuller meaning now. Similarly, if I may refer to a poem which I owe to Dante, what of the meaning of the verses I have set before this preface? I wrote them as an imaginative means of suggesting what I feel is the Paradiso’s supreme teaching, namely, the ultimate oneness of all spirit, and the infinitely close relation between the consciousness of man and the supra-consciousness of God. Now I myself know that these verses mean a great deal more to me now, than they did when I first sketched out their essential thought many years ago; and I also hope, whether or not their meaning will have grown for me, that they will come to mean whatever more they may be capable of meaning to any who hereafter shall apply their suggestions to their own richer spiritual circumstances or needs. As to whether they exactly express Dante’s thought, I cannot tell, as I cannot ask him yet; if, therefore, they have any value, it will be that of throwing a little light on what Dante’s poem can mean, not to ultra historical Dantists who insist that “Dante was wholly of his time,” but to those who will contribute their own loving imagination and spiritual experience to the illucidation of truth germs which make him “not of an age, but for all time.” So with my interpretation as a whole. I do not claim that it shows only what the Divine Comedy’s teaching meant for Dante, nor for Boccaccio, but for me, too, as a vicarious representative of many readers now, who are, of course, free to endorse, modify or reject any or all of my interpretations, but whom I cannot uphold in attributing a stationary significance to living and dynamic words, still winged for far higher flights of meaning than even this age’s eyes can see.

Of a jest Shakespeare said that its prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it. So is it, likewise, with all vital truth. Its worth lies in the creative imagination of him who can put it to use, and breed therewith other, if not fairer, truths. In the field of history of the purely scientific kind, “sources” must, of course, be consulted to make sure that statements about events are based upon actual facts, though even there it should not be forgotten that, as Rostand said, there is often more truth in a legend than in a document. But here the source, paradoxical as it may at first seem, is in the reader’s potential intuitive imagination, and is more apt to be found in unborn ears than in dead mouths. Hence, as in the case of art, it is the supreme duty of those who constitute themselves the guardians of the winged truth that lives and moves in great poetry, to see to it that it be not “made tongue-tied by authority” of the devitalizing static kind.

Having, therefore, done his duty to the avowedly necessary and useful philological parts of his interpretative work, what, then, is left for one who holds such views as those expressed above, but to recall Sir Philip Sydney’s words, and “look into his heart and write,” even though the result risk the danger of proving a comfort and an inspiration to himself alone?

Something like this, the present annotator has tried to accomplish in the sporadic and compressed notes to the Paradiso, which, with those of the Inferno and Purgatorio, are intended to illuminate the historical, and expand the spiritual, significance of individual words, lines and passages. Incidentally he hopes that these notes will also serve to interest the reader or student in the attitude to be assumed toward the Divine Comedy in the forthcoming Commentary, whose aim is to be a popularly readable, though serious, essay on the poem as a whole, and on Dante’s prophetic moral and spiritual message, if read not so much in the light thrown upon it by his age, as in that which can be thrown upon it by ours without making Dante’s insight other than it was.

And here this preface might well close for the satisfied, all others being referred to the two previous prefaces and to notes in the fourth volume, which will try to meet criticisms of individual translations or interpretations.

To any, however, who may have been led to misunderstand my general position, I avail myself reluctantly of this opportunity of saying accumulatively that the only criticism I deprecate is that of not having done well, or exclusively, what I never proposed to do at all, or at least not exclusively, because it had been so well done before, namely, show what the Divine Comedy meant to Dante or his age; that I avow no disdain for the historical fact, even if I do feel that there are other kinds of facts about a great world poem which may be more important for us than what was its exact meaning six hundred years ago in the opinion of predominantly historical scholars now; that I have made no claim of reproducing in English Dante’s ‘curious felicities,’ since I do not believe that any translation has, or could have, done that, though I do think that my version might have been somewhat more poetical, had it been less accurate, and a little more accurate, had it been less rhythmical; that I never said that, if living now, Dante would judge many things differently, though I did say that he would be able to express his wonderful intuitions more fully, and in a way more easily apprehended by us; that I agree that the problem of literary interpretation concerns itself with what an author did teach when he lived, though I hasten to add that what he taught when living includes the more that his seed-bearing words and insight can consistently seem to teach, now that they have fallen into better soil than his age could afford them; and, finally, that to claim for my work in a first preface that it was “only a personal interpretation” of the poem’s “latent spiritual significance” coupled with the express warning that it should be separated from “scholarly” information based upon the authoritative work of others, would seem to be a sufficiently sincere avowal of its nature and purpose. Claiming, in short, that the Divine Comedy belongs exclusively neither to the Church nor to historical science, this interpretation, to quote in part from Bishop W. Boyd Carpenter, is simply an attempt to steer between “the misconceptions into which a rationalistic theology had plunged the Church,” and those into which dogmatic scientism is prone to plunge the study of literature, with the object of showing “the full significance of the Love in which Dante so profoundly believed.”

To those, however, who in studying Dante want to be on more “orthodox” ground than I can claim to stand on, if they have read Lowell’s Essay on Dante, in my opinion the greatest of all, I sincerely recommend Professor J. B. Fletcher’s excellent little book on the same poet, with only the “reservations” due to the difference in our points of view. It links the thought of Dante’s masterpiece to that of his previous more or less mystifying works so lucidly and consistently, brings the meaning of the dogmatic theology and complex symbolic system of the Divine Comedy down to 1321, so convincingly, and describes Dante’s art so brilliantly, and sympathetically that, for the purposes of my own Commentary, I could gratefully wish it had been much expanded.

And now, to follow the example set by the two previous prefaces, this one will also end with a final word about Dante’s Italy. A new era is undoubtedly opening up for her wonderful people who, having seen so many of the ages of civilization, may have begun this one by harking back to the wisdom of their dawn as a political entity. If Italy prove to be the first of modern nations to solve the vexed problem of the relation of labor and capital to each other, it will be because she will have applied to it the twenty-five century old fable of Menenius Agrippa, who persuaded the Roman plebeians to compromise for the state’s sake, by telling them the fable of the belly and the members. The despotism of a class is not to be feared in the mother-land of law and order. Nor has the utter defeat of Austria superannuated the old Italian cry “Fuori i Barbari!” for, in spite of hopes rendered futile by weakness, Europe’s Rome-born civilization is still menaced from the Teutonic and Scythian North-East. It may prove fortunate, therefore, that Italy has so largely achieved the strategic as well as the other aims referred to in the sonnet at the head of the Inferno, for nearly hers at last is the barrier-wall of those Alps, which Nature long ago assigned to her people, when she made Latin or Italian all the material, human and spiritual flora and fauna of the sunny valleys sloping eastward, southward and westward from their highest peaks. As to Italy’s Adriatic claims, as to Fiume, henceforth a “local habitation and a name” forever Italian in spirit, and as to d’Annunzio, what shall I say but vedremo, and pazienza? Shakespeare said of the strange performance witnessed by his cool-headed statesman, Theseus of Athens, that lunatics, lovers and poets, “of imagination all compact,” apprehended “more than cool reason ever comprehends.” And it was he, too, who went on to say in Hippolyta’s words: “But all the story of the night told over, and all their minds transfigured so together, more witnesseth than fancy’s images, and grows to something of great constancy.” So will it prove, I think, with Italy’s secular racial and national aspirations. The story of the Fiume trouble, inexplicable to us, is essentially a frontier story, which finds its explanation in “ancestral voices prophesying war.” We shall see it, and be glad to see it “grow,” for the good of all the West, “to something of great constancy.”

Meanwhile 1921 is Dante’s year in Italy; and from now on until after mid-September, who says one will largely say the other. May he more than ever be hers, and she his, and both the world’s, is the wish of every American lover of Dante, and mine, as I close this version of his joyously creative poem, by gratefully addressing to his spirit the words he addressed to Virgil’s at his poem’s inception:

• O light and glory of the other poets,
• let the long study, and the ardent love
• which made me con thy book, avail me now!

Courtney Langdon.

Brown University, December 22, 1920.