Dante Alighieri - The divine comedy - The Paradiso (ciardi)

Table of Contents

DANTE ALIGHTERI was born in 1265. Considered Italys greatest poet, this scion of a Florentine family mastered the art of lyric poetry at an early age. His first major work, La Vita Nuova (1292), was a tribute to Beatrice Portinari, the great love of his life. Dantes political activism resulted in his being exiled from Florence, and he eventually settled in Ravenna. It is believed that The Divine Comedy comprising three canticles, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso was written between 1308 and 1320. Dante Alighieri died in 1321.

JOHN CIARDI was a distinguished poet and professor, having taught at Harvard and Rutgers universities, and a poetry editor of The Saturday Review. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1955, he won the Harriet Monroe Memorial Award, and in 1956, the Prix de Rome. He died in 1986.

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Published by Signet Classic, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Mentor edition.

Canto I was first published in The Italian Quarterly, 1965.

Canto VIII was first published in Arbor, 1961.

Canto XXI was first published in Hartwick Review, 1967.

Canto XXXIII was first published in The Rarer Action Essays in Honor of Francis Fergusson, ed. Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler, 1970.

First Signet Classic Printing, August

Copyright John Ciardi, 1961, 1965, 1970

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For Connie
as all things draw to what they most are.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I must thank Professor Mark Musa and especially Professor John Freccero for reading and commenting on this version of The Paradiso. I am not a Dante scholar; I have undertaken what I hope is poets work. The learning of these good men has saved me from some of the gaps in my own. At times I have not followed their suggestions, feeling that the points raised, though important to scholars, might interfere with the pleasure of a beginning student reading in translation. If I have been wrong in so deciding, the responsibility is mine. Their suggestions have been invaluable, and I owe them a most grateful thanks, gladly offered.

Introduction

Dantes claim for the Paradiso, the last cantica of his poem, is as daring as it is clear: My course is set for an uncharted sea. History has in fact granted him the unique place that he claimed with that navigational metaphor, both as pilgrim and as poet. Just as, within the fiction of the poem, the pilgrims course is privileged beyond the aspiration of ordinary men, so in its final course the poem accomplishes what no other poet had ever dared. Throughout the Divine Comedy, the metaphor of the ship serves to describe both the pilgrims journey and the progress of the poem: on both counts, Dante can refer to himself as a new Jason, who returns with the Golden Fleece that is at once the vision of God and the poem that we read.

For the twentieth-century reader, the fiction of the story requires a great effort of the imagination-few of us still believe in a paradise in any form, much less in the possibility of reaching it in this life. The claim of the pilgrim to have reached the absolute seems to us even more fantastic than the fiction of the Inferno, where at least the characters, if not the landscape, are quite familiar. For this reason, the Paradiso is often thought of as the most medieval part of the poem. This reputation should not, however, obscure for us the sense in which, as poetry, it remains daring and even contemporary. By attempting to represent poetically that which is by definition beyond representation, this cantica achieves what had scarcely seemed possible before (even for the poet of the Inferno and the Purgatorio) and has remained the ultimate aspiration of poets ever since. The quest of Romantic poets and their successors for pure poetry has for its prototype the Paradiso.

The poetry of the Paradiso represents a radical departure from that of the Purgatorio, as the latter represented a departure from the poetry of the Inferno. The changes may be thought of as a gradual attenuation of the bond between poetry and representation, from the immediacy of the Inferno to the dreamlike mediation of the Purgatorio to the attempt to create a non-representational poetic world in the last cantica. This refinement of poetic representation perfectly matches the evolution of the piIgrims understanding within the story: he learns first of all from his senses, from the sights and sounds of a hell that seems actually to exist, now and forever, thanks to the celebrated mimetic power of Dantes verses in the Inferno. As the pilgrim depends upon his senses in his travels, so the reader seems to be with him in a world which exists autonomously, almost as if it had not been created by an act of the imagination.

In the Purgatorio, on the other hand, the major revelations come to the pilgrim subjectively, as interior events in what Francis Fergusson has called a drama of the mind. The dream-vision is the primary vehicle for this illumination; Dante refers to the power which receives it as the imaginativa (Purgatorio XV). According to medieval physchology, this is the same power that enables poets to create a totally new world from the fragments of sense experience and memory, so that in Dantes view, the poetic power that created the poem is the same power that is illuminated within the pilgrim during his ascent of the mountain. The poets imagination, hidden by its own concreteness in the first part of his poem, becomes the focus of his attention and of ours in the Purgatorio. Thus, the landscape is suffused with mist, the tone is nostalgic, and the reader is called upon to respond with his imagination to both the sensory and the emotional suggestiveness, to imagine visible speech in the bas-reliefs, to hear the music of familiar hymns, to recall the lessons from the Sermon of the Mount. The substantiality of this part of the poem resides in the subjectivity of the pilgrim and in our reaction to it more than in an explicit architectonic creation of the poet.