Divine Comedy

                                                                 The Divine Comedy

Down the centuries, a work of pure literature which has aroused admiration and has survived the onslaught of passage of time is ‘The Divine Comedy’ written by Italian poet Dante Alighieri.  It is definitely a masterpiece which was given its complete title by the readers who read it, rather than the author who wrote it. An epic poem written in the early part of the fourteenth century, it finds a coveted place in the canon of classical literature.  Its completion secured an honored position for Dante amidst the coterie of classical writers like Virgil and Homer.  A majority of readers outside Italy, though, have derived pleasure from translations. The latter may miss out on the magic of Dante’s verse, but if the translation is done well, the readers have access to his thoughts, feelings and intriguing imagery.  One such eclectic translation in English was undertaken by the publishers of Vintage Books, after due thought and careful appraisal. The works of John Aitken Carlyle, Thomas Okey and P.H. Wicksteed were selected for their truth, lucidity and idiomatic prose. The arguments and the notes at the beginning and end of each Canto in the Vintage Edition, if read in tandem, facilitate the understanding of the reader.

The introduction in the book quotes that the work was originally titled ‘The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth but not in character.’  It is indeed fascinating to learn that the epithet  ‘Divine’ was given to it by the readers over the centuries  who devoured it and recognized it for its worth, beauty, divinity  and wisdom.  Dante is the author and the main character in the comedy, a narrative of a disaster and misery which ends in happiness and bliss. The poem is divided into three parts – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. The bitter modifier ‘not in character’ attached to the epithet ‘Florentine by birth’ is accentuated in his writings in the ‘Inferno’ wherein he attributes beastly qualities to the inhabitants of Florentine and calls them pigs, foxes and wolves. Dante was born to an important family in Florentine.  His fine schooling and exposure to art and music stood him in good stead as he took office in the municipal council and later as a member of the committee of highest administrative authority.  His political experience was bitter and full of strife, which later affected his career and he was exiled.

His acrimony with his fellow-townsmen is carried over in his work. He meets several during his journey through hell undergoing punishment.  The feeling of scorn and hatred does not include his immediate neighbors and personal family, as the references to his family and children are beautiful and sweet.  The book is written in Florentine, the language of his birth place. The language follows a series of crests and troughs, being elevated and exalted in parts, interspersed with plain vernacular.

The Divine Comedy has always been hailed as a poem of sin, reparation, redemption and salvation. It is the journey of Dante, a representative of the human race, through hell, purgatory and finally his ascent to heaven. It begins in a dark wood on the night before Good Friday, 1300. He feels fearful and distorted. The sight of a summit clothed with the light of the rising sun provides him respite and he decides to scale it. His path is blocked by three beasts who bar his way, the third being very ferocious and an adamant wolf.  Just then the ghost of Virgil, the poet of ‘Aenied’ appears and promises to guide Dante.  He explains that to be rid of his sins, he has to undertake the journey through the centre of the earth – the underworld-- traversing it from side to side before he reaches the hill of purgatory on the other side of the earth. Dante is to embark on this fearful journey which shall take him through all the punishments of the sins committed by the human soul. The punishments are distributed over the nine circles of the inverted cone of hell which becomes narrower with each circle culminating in the central pit. Each punishment is appropriate to the sin – the sins of incontinence or lack of self-control, sins of malice and the sins of fraud. The journey through hell is frightening, beset with demons of people and acquaintances who are serving their time according to their sins. He sympathizes with a few who were led by the human vice of love and attachment to commit adultery, and when he cannot withstand the suffering and horror of the punishments, he faints. The path through the centre of the earth on the other side ends in an ocean on the shore of an island where the hill of Purgatory rises. Souls who have seen the folly, hideousness of their sins and acknowledged them for themselves, the repentant souls, undergo disciplines on the seven terraces of the conical surface of the hill. Thereafter Beatrice, whom Dante loved in his lifetime and had dedicated his writings to her, appears and leads him through the revolving skies to the Garden of Eden. She is replaced by St. Bernard who finally shows him the presence of God Himself.

The story is allegorical as well as literal. The narrative begins in sin in the dark wood, escape impossible through mere human effort, compounded by the opposition by the three beasts symbolic of the human compulsions. Virgil, the guide is the human reason which confronts the soul with the hideous face of sins and their beastliness. The climb up the summit of purgatory is the break and move away from sin, and the inculcation of disciplines which incur pain and suffering to purge the soul of evil inclinations. Each suffering is a representative cure of a major human vice. A pure soul then enters the Garden of Eden – a stage of innocence where man is returned to the being of a child free of follies and sins. The various characters that guide and help Dante are characters summoned to perform the needful tasks on meeting him. Each of them is a real person with symbolic functions.  Besides Virgil, Beatrice stands for truth and revelation. St. Bernard who brings him to the vision of God is intuition, higher than human reason (Virgil) and truth (Beatrice).

The literal and the allegorical are intertwined in the narrative beautifully and significantly. If the reader were to read the Commedia as a literal piece, he would be delighted with the emotion, the story, the language and imagery. But if he seeks to imbibe the elevated and exalted in the work, for which it has been appropriately hailed as ‘Divine,’ he has to look for the symbolic in the literal presence of figures in the story. This is in keeping with the middle age conception of life and the world. They believed that everything in the universe, right from elements and rocks, had a literal and a moral meaning imbued in them by creation. Persons we meet in our journey through life are real people with symbolic functions and messages to help us in our journey of life. Dante, himself a distinct human personality, is a representative of the human race in the story, a soul with merits and demerits on the road to salvation.

The structural plan of Dante’s poetic rendition is another fascinating study. I shall serve a comprehensive frame in a few words. The poem is divided into three parts – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each of these parts contains its own three sections. The poem is written in three line stanzas – the poetic form being the Terza rima. The first and the last line rhyme together and the middle line rhymes with the first and last line of the next stanza – aba bcb cdc ded efe.   Purgatorio and Paradiso each have thirty-three cantos; although Inferno has thirty-four, its first canto acts as a general prologue to The Comedy as a whole. Hell, in its entirety, divided into nine circles—three times three.

All the world’s a stage and all the men and women mere players, wrote Shakespeare. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We, as comedians and poor players, maybe, can be something more significant, if we were to partake of the Divine Comedy.  Heavy food for thought!