Dante Alighieri - Purgatorio

This translation of the PURGATORIO is inscribed to Irma Brandeis and Helaine Newsteadas laltro Guido had it: CH N TUTTE GUISE VI DEGGIO LAUDARE THE DIVINE COMEDY: PURGATORIO A Bantam BookPUBLISHING HISTORYTHE DIVINE COMEDY OF DANTE ALIGHIERI, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, is published in hardcover by the University of California Press: Volume I, INFERNO (1980); Volume II, PURGATORIO (1981); Volume III, PARADISO (1982). Of the three separate volumes of commentary under the general editorship of Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross, Volume I: THE CALIFORNIA LECTURA DANTIS: INFERNO was published by the University of California Press in 1998. For information, please address University of California Press, 2223 Fulton St., Berkeley, CA 94720. Bantam Classic edition / January 1984Bantam Classic reissue edition / August 2004 Published by Bantam Dell A division of Random House, Inc. New York, New York All rights reserved. Drawings copyright 1982 by Barry Moser. Student Notes copyright 1983 by Laury Magnus, Allen Mandelbaum, and Anthony Oldcorn. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except where permitted by law. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except where permitted by law.

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INTRODUCTION FOR THE Virgil of Dantes Purgatorio, love is the seed in you of every virtue/and of all acts deserving punishment (). This tale forms part of what Thomas Carlyle called Dantes unfathomable heart-song. But in the Purgatorio, the song is sung by a careful cartographer and passionately precise watcher). The space of Dantes island Mountain of Purgatory is in the southern hemisphere of Earth, directly opposite the northern hemispheres Jerusalem.

In that southern hemisphere, the hemisphere of water, it is the only body of land. Souls who will undergo). The lower slopes of the island are a waiting place, the Ante-Purgatory ( to enter Purgatory. Purgatory proper, occupying eighteen cantos of Purgatorio, is entered by a gate at the top of a three-step stairway ( and the hierarchy of sins places the most grievous sins on the lower terraces. In ascending order, the seven terraces punishremediallypride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice (coupled with its counter-sin, prodigality), gluttony, and lust. The Earthly Paradise occupies the summit of the island mountain and the last, and rather autonomous, six cantos of Purgatorio ( may also be called the Mountain of Earthly Paradise, the mountain foreshadowed by the mountain of delight that Dante cannot climb in Canto I of the Infernoand it is probably the same peak Ulysses sees at the end of Canto XXVI of the Inferno, the summit in sight of which Ulysses, unaided by grace, shipwrecks.) Time is charted with equal care: Dante the voyager moves through these three regions of Purgatory in an ascent that most paraphrasts explain as lasting from the morning of Easter Sunday, April 10, 1300, to noon of Wednesday, April 13.

Where the Inferno begins at night in the shadowed forest, with the entry into Hell, or, more precisely, to the Ante-Inferno, on the evening of Good Friday (Inf. II , 13), Purgatorio begins shortly before dawn, the entry to Purgatory proper, two hours after dawn, and to the Earthly Paradise at dawn. But Dante climbs only by day. The first night is spent in that portion of the Ante-Purgatory called the Valley of the Rulers, where men of state who, in life, delayed their repentance through negligence wait (). The movements of heavenly bodies, somewhat clairvoyantly referred to by Virgil but never directly present in Hell, punctuate Purgatorio throughout. References play).

The planets (of which the sun, for Dante, is one), the constellations, the hoursall participate in these recordings. Sometimes Dantes recordings are direct, even when allegorical, as in the vision of the four stars that symbolize the four natural virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance). There his most memorable juxtaposition of Purgatorial skies and our skies concludes his first scanning of Purgatorys skies (): The gentle hue of oriental sapphirein which the skys serenity was steepedits aspect pure as far as the horizonbrought back my joy in seeing just as soonas I had left behind the air of deaththat had afflicted both my sight and breast. The lovely planet that is patronessof love made all the eastern heavens glad, veiling the Pisces in the train she led. Then I turned to the right, setting my mindupon the other pole, and saw four starsnot seen before except by the first people. Heaven appeared to revel in their flames:o northern hemisphere, because you weredenied that sight, you are a widower! Sometimes he is obsessively periphrastic; at a pole far from plain style (and Dante experiments with all styles), he lets us know that it is 3 p.m., the beginning of vespers, there in Purgatory by a likeness that measures the morning span).

And at times Dante records the skies not through the movements of stellar bodies but). The heavens serve not only to measure time there; Dante will also use our skies here as likenesses of what he saw there, most indelibly in reinforcing his first vision of Beatrice in the Comedy (): I have at times seen all the eastern skybecoming rose as day began and seen, adorned in lovely blue, the rest of heaven;and seen the suns face rise so veiled that itwas tempered by the mist and could permitthe eye to look at length upon it; so, within a cloud of flowers that were castby the angelic hands and then rose upand then fell back, outside and in the chariot, a woman showed herself to me; abovea white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs;her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red. Within her presence, I had once been usedto feelingtremblingwonder, dissolution;but that was long ago. Still, though my soul, now she was veiled, could not see her directly, by way of hidden force that she could move, I felt the mighty power of old love. This tight construct of space and time serves as container for a cantica less dispersive and digressive than the Inferno, with its crowded population and its percussiveness. Of course, even in Purgatorio, Dante can, with Infern-al velocity, in thirty lines, examine the nature of attentiveness, refute the Platonic doctrine of the plurality of souls, offer us the vision of a farmer preventing thieves from entering his field, conjure hard ascents).