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The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno]

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The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno]

by Dante Aligheri

Translated by Charles Eliot Norton




HELL




To

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

E come sare' io sense lui corso?

It is a happiness for me to connect this volume with the memory
of my friend and master from youth. I was but a beginner in the
study of the Divine Comedy when I first had his incomparable aid
in the understanding of it. During the last year of his life he
read the proofs of this volume, to what great advantage to my
work may readily be conceived.

When, in the early summer of this year, the printing of the
Purgatory began, though illness made it an exertion to him, he
continued this act of friendship, and did not cease till, at the
fifth canto, he laid down the pencil forever from his dear and
honored hand.

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.


CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,

1 October, 1891

The text followed in this translation is, in general, that of
Witte. In a few cases I have preferred the readings which the
more recent researches of the Rev. Dr. Edward Moore, of Oxford,
seem to have established as correct.



CONTENTS

CANTO I. Dante, astray in a wood, reaches the foot of a hill
which he begins to ascend; he is hindered by three beasts; he
turns back and is met by Virgil, who proposes to guide him into
the eternal world.

CANTO II. Dante, doubtful of his own powers, is discouraged at
the outset.--Virgil cheers him by telling him that he has been
sent to his aid by a blessed Spirit from Heaven.--Dante casts off
fear, and the poets proceed.

CANTO III. The gate of Hell. Virgil leads Dante in.--The
punishment of the neither good nor bad.--Acheron, and the sinners
on its bank.--Charon.--Earthquake.--Dante swoons.

CANTO IV. The further side of Acheron.--Virgil leads Dante into
Limbo, the First Circle of Hell, containing the spirits of those
who lived virtuously but without Christianity.--Greeting of
Virgil by his fellow poets.--They enter a castle, where are the
shades of ancient worthies.--Virgil and Dante depart.

CANTO V. The Second Circle: Carnal sinners.--Minos.--Shades
renowned of old.--Francesca da Rimini.

CANTO VI. The Third Circle: the Gluttonous.--Cerberus.--Ciacco.

CANTO VII. The Fourth Circle: the Avaricious and the Prodigal.--
Pluto.--Fortune.--The Styx.--The Fifth Circle: the Wrathful and
the Sullen.

CANTO VIII. The Fifth Circle.--Phlegyas and his boat.--Passage of
the Styx.--Filippo Argenti.--The City of Dis.--The demons refuse
entrance to the poets.

CANTO IX. The City of Dis.--Eriehtho.--The Three Furies.--The
Heavenly Messenger.--The Sixth Circle: Heresiarchs.

CANTO X. The Sixth Circle: Heresiarchs.--Farinata degli Uberti.--
Cavalcante Cavalcanti.--Frederick II.

CANTO XI. The Sixth Circle: Heretics.--Tomb of Pope Anastasius.--
Discourse of Virgil on the divisions of the lower Hell.

CANTO XII. First round of the Seventh Circle: those who do
violence to others.--Tyrants and Homicides.--The Minotaur.--The
Centaurs.--Chiron.--Nessus.--The River of Boiling Blood, and the
Sinners in it.

CANTO XIII. Second round of the Seventh Circle: those who have
done violence to themselves and to their goods.--The Wood of
Self-murderers.--The Harpies.--Pier della Vigne.--Lano of Siena
and others.

CANTO XIV. Third round of the Seventh Circle those who have done
violence to God.--The Burning Sand.--Capaneus.--Figure of the Old
Man in Crete.--The Rivers of Hell.

CANTO XV. Third round of the Seventh Circle: those who have done
violence to Nature.--Brunetto Latini.--Prophecies of misfortune
to Dante.

CANTO XVI. Third round of the Seventh Circle: those who have done
violence to Nature.--Guido Guerra, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi and
Jacopo Rusticucci.--The roar of Phlegethon as it pours downward.--
The cord thrown into the abyss.

CANTO XVII. Third round of the Seventh Circle: those who have
done violence to Art.--Geryon.--The Usurers.--Descent to the
Eighth Circle.

CANTO XVIII. Eighth Circle: the first pit: Panders and Seducers.--
Venedico Caccianimico.--Jason.--Second pit: false flatterers.--
Alessio Interminei.--Thais.

CANTO XIX. Eighth Circle: third pit: Simonists.--Pope Nicholas
III

CANTO XX. Eighth Circle: fourth pit: Diviners, Soothsayers, and
Magicians.--Amphiaraus.--Tiresias.--Aruns.--Manto.--Eurypylus.--
Michael Scott.--Asolente.

CANTO XXI. Eighth Circle: fifth pit: Barrators.--A magistrate of
Lucca.--The Malebranche.--Parley with them.

CANTO XXII. Eighth Circle: fifth pit: Barrators.--Ciampolo of
Navarre.--Brother Gomita.--Michael Zanche.--Fray of the
Malebranche.

CANTO XXIII. Eighth Circle. Escape from the fifth pit.--The sixth
pit: Hypocrites.--The Jovial Friars.--Caiaphas.--Annas.--Frate
Catalano.

CANTO XXIV. Eighth Circle. The poets climb from the sixth pit.--
Seventh pit: Fraudulent Thieves.--Vanni Fucci.--Prophecy of
calamity to Dante.

CANTO XXV. Eighth Circle: seventh pit: Fraudulent Thieves.--
Cacus.--Agnello Brunellesehi and others.

CANTO XXVI. Eighth Circle: eighth pit: Fraudulent Counsellors.--
Ulysses and Diomed.

CANTO XXVII. Eighth Circle: eighth pit: Fraudulent Counsellors.--
Guido da Montefeltro.

CANTO XXVIII. Eighth Circle: ninth pit: Sowers of discord and
schism.--Mahomet and Ali.--Fra Dolcino.--Pier da Medicina.--
Curio.--Mosca.--Bertran de Born.

CANTO XXIX. Eighth Circle: ninth pit.--Geri del Bello.--Tenth
pit: Falsifiers of all sorts.--Griffolino of Mezzo.--Capocchio.

CANTO XXX. Eighth Circle: tenth pit: Falsifiers of all sorts.--
Myrrha.--Gianni Schiechi.--Master Adam.--Sinon of Troy.

CANTO XXXI. The Giants around the Eighth Circle.--Nimrod.--
Ephialtes.--Antiens sets the Poets down in the Ninth Circle.

CANTO XXXII. Ninth Circle: Traitors. First ring: Caina.--Counts
of Mangona.--Camicion de' Pazzi.--Second ring: Antenora.--Bocca
degli Abati.--Buoso da Duera.--Count Ugolino.

CANTO XXXIII. Ninth Circle: Traitors. Second ring: Antenora.--
Count Ugolino.--Third ring: Ptolomaea.--Brother Alberigo.--Branca
d' Oria.

CANTO XXXIV. Ninth Circle: Traitors. Fourth ring: Judecca.--
Lucifer.--Judas, Brutus and Cassius.--Centre of the universe.--
Passage from Hell.--Ascent to the surface of the Southern
hemisphere.


INTRODUCTION.

So many versions of the Divine Comedy exist in English that a new
one might well seem needless. But most of these translations are
in verse, and the intellectual temper of our time is impatient of
a transmutation in which substance is sacrificed for form's sake,
and the new form is itself different from the original. The
conditions of verse in different languages vary so widely as to
make any versified translation of a poem but an imperfect
reproduction of the archetype. It is like an imperfect mirror
that renders but a partial likeness, in which essential features
are blurred or distorted. Dante himself, the first modern critic,
declared that "nothing harmonized by a musical bond can be
transmuted from its own speech without losing all its sweetness
and harmony," and every fresh attempt at translation affords a
new proof of the truth of his assertion. Each language exhibits
its own special genius in its poetic forms. Even when they are
closely similar in rhythmical method their poetic effect is
essentially different, their individuality is distinct. The
hexameter of the Iliad is not the hexameter of the Aeneid. And if
this be the case in respect to related forms, it is even more
obvious in respect to forms peculiar to one language, like the
terza rima of the Italian, for which it is impossible to find a
satisfactory equivalent in another tongue.

If, then, the attempt be vain to reproduce the form or to
represent its effect in a translation, yet the substance of a
poem may have such worth that it deserves to be known by readers
who must read it in their own tongue or not at all. In this case
the aim of the translator should he to render the substance
fully, exactly, and with as close a correspondence to the tone
and style of the original as is possible between prose and
poetry. Of the charm, of the power of the poem such a translation
can give but an inadequate suggestion; the musical bond was of
its essence, and the loss of the musical bond is the loss of the
beauty to which form and substance mutually contributed, and in
which they were both alike harmonized and sublimated. The
rhythmic life of the original is its vital spirit, and the
translation losing this vital spirit is at best as the dull
plaster cast to the living marble or the breathing bronze. The
intellectual substance is there; and if the work be good,
something of the emotional quality may be conveyed; the
imagination may mould the prose as it moulded the verse,--but,
after all, "translations are but as turn-coated things at best,"
as Howell said in one of his Familiar Letters.

No poem in any tongue is more informed with rhythmic life than
the Divine Comedy. And yet, such is its extraordinary
distinction, no poem has an intellectual and emotional substance
more independent of its metrical form. Its complex structure, its
elaborate measure and rhyme, highly artificial as they are, are
so mastered by the genius of the poet as to become the most
natural expression of the spirit by which the poem is inspired;
while at the same time the thought and sentiment embodied in the
verse is of such import, and the narrative of such interest, that
they do not lose their worth when expressed in the prose of
another tongue; they still haye power to quicken imagination, and
to evoke sympathy.

In English there is an excellent prose translation of the
Inferno, by Dr. John Carlyle, a man well known to the reader of
his brother's Correspondence. It was published forty years ago,
but it is still contemporaneous enough in style to answer every
need, and had Dr. Carlyle made a version of the whole poem I
should hardly have cared to attempt a new one. In my translation
of the Inferno I am often Dr. Carlyle's debtor. His conception of
what a translation should be is very much the same as my own. Of
the Purgatorio there is a prose version which has excellent
qualities, by Mr. W. S. Dugdale. Another version of great merit,
of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A. J. Butler.
It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I owe
much to Mr. Butler's work. But through what seems to me
occasional excess of literal fidelity his English is now and then
somewhat crabbed. "He overacts the office of an interpreter," I
cite again from Howell, "who doth enslave himself too strictly to
words or phrases. One may be so over-punctual in words that he
may mar the matter."

I have tried to be as literal in my translation as was consistent
with good English, and to render Dante's own words in words as
nearly correspondent to them as the difference in the languages
would permit. But it is to be remembered that the familiar uses
and subtle associations which give to words their full meaning
are never absolutely the same in two languages. Love in English
not only SOUNDS but IS different from amor in Latin, or amore in
Italian. Even the most felicitous prose translation must fail
therefore at times to afford the entire and precise meaning of
the original.

Moreover, there are difficulties in Dante's poem for Italians,
and there are difficulties in the translation for English
readers. These, where it seemed needful, I have endeavored to
explain in brief footnotes. But I have desired to avoid
distracting the attention of the reader from the narrative, and
have mainly left the understanding of it to his good sense and
perspicacity. The clearness of Dante's imaginative vision is so
complete, and the character of his narration of it so direct and
simple, that the difficulties in understanding his intention are
comparatively few.

It is a noticeable fact that in by far the greater number of
passages where a doubt in regard to the interpretation exists,
the obscurity lies in the rhyme-word. For with all the abundant
resources of the Italian tongue in rhyme, and with all Dante's
mastery of them, the truth still is that his triple rhyme often
compelled him to exact from words such service as they did not
naturally render and as no other poet had required of them. The
compiler of the Ottimo Commento records, in an often-cited
passage, that "I, the writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme
had led him to say other than he would, but that many a time and
oft he had made words say for him what they were not wont to
express for other poets." The sentence has a double truth, for it
indicates not only Dante's incomparable power to compel words to
give out their full meaning, but also his invention of new uses
for them, his employment of them in unusual significations or in
forms hardly elsewhere to be found. These devices occasionally
interfere with the limpid flow of his diction, but the
difficulties of interpretation to which they give rise serve
rather to mark the prevailing clearness and simplicity of his
expression than seriously to impede its easy and unperplexed
current. There are few sentences in the Divina Commedia in which
a difficulty is occasioned by lack of definiteness of thought or
distinctness of image.

A far deeper-lying and more pervading source of imperfect
comprehension of the poem than any verbal difficulty exists in
the double or triple meaning that runs through it. The narrative
of the poet's spiritual journey is so vivid and consistent that
it has all the reality of an account of an actual experience; but
within and beneath runs a stream of allegory not less consistent
and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself. To the
illustration and carrying out of this interior meaning even the
minutest details of external incident are made to contribute,
with an appropriateness of significance, and with a freedom from
forced interpretation or artificiality of construction such as no
other writer of allegory has succeeded in attaining. The poem may
be read with interest as a record of experience without attention
to its inner meaning, but its full interest is only felt when
this inner meaning is traced, and the moral significance of the
incidents of the story apprehended by the alert intelligence. The
allegory is the soul of the poem, but like the soul within the
body it does not show itself in independent existence. It is, in
scholastic phrase, the form of the body, giving to it its special
individuality. Thus in order truly to understand and rightly
appreciate the poem the reader must follow its course with a
double intelligence. "Taken literally," as Dante declares in his
Letter to Can Grande, "the subject is the state of the soul after
death, simply considered. But, allegorically taken, its subject
is man, according as by his good or ill deserts he renders
himself liable to the reward or punishment of Justice." It is the
allegory of human life; and not of human life as an abstraction,
but of the individual life; and herein, as Mr. Lowell, whose
phrase I borrow, has said, "lie its profound meaning and its
permanent force." [1] And herein too lie its perennial freshness
of interest, and the actuality which makes it contemporaneous
with every successive generation. The increase of knowledge, the
loss of belief in doctrines that were fundamental in Dante's
creed, the changes in the order of society, the new thoughts of
the world, have not lessened the moral import of the poem, any
more than they have lessened its excellence as a work of art. Its
real substance is as independent as its artistic beauty, of
science, of creed, and of institutions. Human nature has not
changed; the motives of action are the same, though their
relative force and the desires and ideals by which they are
inspired vary from generation to generation. And thus it is that
the moral judgments of life framed by a great poet whose
imagination penetrates to the core of things, and who, from his
very nature as poet, conceives and sets forth the issues of life
not in a treatise of abstract morality, but by means of sensible
types and images, never lose interest, and have a perpetual
contemporaneousness. They deal with the permanent and unalterable
elements of the soul of man.

[1] Mr. Lowell's essay on Dante makes other writing about the
poet or the poem seem ineffectual and superfluous. I must assume
that it will be familiar to the readers of my version, at least
to those among them who desire truly to understand the Divine
Comedy.


The scene of the poem is the spiritual world, of which we are
members even while still denizens mu the world of time. In the
spiritual world the results of sin or perverted love, and of
virtue or right love, in this life of probation, are manifest.
The life to come is but the fulfilment of the life that now is.
This is the truth that Dante sought to enforce. The allegory in
which he cloaked it is of a character that separates the Divine
Comedy from all other works of similar intent, In The Pilgrim's
Progress, for example, the personages introduced are mere
simulacra of men and women, the types of moral qualities or
religious dispositions. They are abstractions which the genius of
Bunyan fails to inform with vitality sufficient to kindle the
imagination of the reader with a sense of their actual, living
and breathing existence. But in the Divine Comedy the personages
are all from real life, they are men and women with their natural
passions and emotions, and they are undergoing an actual
experience. The allegory consists in making their characters and
their fates, what all human characters and fates really are, the
types and images of spiritual law. Virgil and Beatrice, whose
nature as depicted in the poem makes nearest approach to purely
abstract and typical existence, are always consistently presented
as living individuals, exalted indeed in wisdom and power, but
with hardly less definite and concrete humanity than that of
Dante himself.

The scheme of the created Universe held by the Christians of the
Middle Ages was comparatively simple, and so definite that Dante,
in accepting it in its main features without modification, was
provided with the limited stage that was requisite for his
design, and of which the general disposition was familiar to all
his readers. The three spiritual realms had their local bounds
marked out as clearly as those of time earth itself. Their
cosmography was but an extension of the largely hypothetical
geography of the tune.

The Earth was the centre of the Universe, and its northern
hemisphere was the abode of man. At the middle point of this
hemisphere stood Jerusalem, equidistant from the Pillars of
Hercules on the West, and the Ganges on the East.

Within the body of this hemisphere was hell, shared as a vast
cone, of which the apex was the centre of the globe; and here,
according to Dante, was the seat of Lucifer. The concave of Hell
had been formed by his fall, when a portion of the solid earth,
through fear of him, ran back to the southern uninhabited
hemisphere, and formed there, directly antipodal to Jerusalem,
the mountain of Purgatory which rose from the waste of waters
that covered this half of the globe. Purgatory was shaped as a
cone, of similar dimensions to that of Hell, amid at its summit
was the Terrestrial Paradise.

Immediately surrounding the atmosphere of the Earth was the
sphere of elemental fire. Around this was the Heaven of the Moon,
and encircling this, in order, were the Heavens of Mercury,
Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jove, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, and the
Crystalline or first moving Heaven. These nine concentric Heavens
revolved continually around the Earth, and in proportion to their
distance from it was time greater swiftness of each. Encircling
all was the Empyrean, increate, incorporeal, motionless,
unbounded in time or space, the proper seat of God, the home of
the Angels, the abode of the Elect.

The Angelic Hierarchy consisted of nine orders, corresponding to
the nine moving heavens. Their blessedness and the swiftness of
time motion with which in unending delight they circled around
God were in proportion to their nearness to Him, --first the
Seraphs, then the Cherubs, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers,
Princes, Archangels, and Angels. Through them, under the general
name of Intelligences, the Divine influence was transmitted to
the Heavens, giving to them their circular motion, which was the
expression of their longing to be united with the source of their
creation. The Heavens in their turn streamed down upon the Earth
the Divine influence thus distributed among them, in varying
proportion and power, producing divers effects in the generation
and corruption of material things, and in the dispositions and
the lives of men.

Such was the general scheme of the Universe. The intention of God
in its creation was to communicate of his own perfection to the
creatures endowed with souls, that is, to men and to angels, and
the proper end of every such creature was to seek its own
perfection in likeness to time Divine. This end was attained
through that knowledge of God of which the soul was capable, and
through love which was in proportion to knowledge. Virtue
depended on the free will of man; it was the good use of that
will directed to a right object of love. Two lights were given to
the soul for guidance of the will: the light of reason for
natural things and for the direction of the will to moral virtue
the light of grace for things supernatural, and for the direction
of the will to spiritual virtue. Sin was the opposite of virtue,
the choice by the will of false objects of love; it involved the
misuse of reason, and the absence of grace. As the end of virtue
was blessedness, so the end of sin was misery.

The cornerstone of Dante's moral system was the Freedom of the
Will; in other words, the right of private judgment with the
condition of accountability. This is the liberty which Dante,
that is man, goes seeking in his journey through the spiritual
world. This liberty is to be attained through the right use of
reason, illuminated by Divine Grace; it consists in the perfect
accord of the will of man with the will of God.

With this view of the nature and end of man Dante's conception of
the history of the race could not be other than that its course
was providentially ordered. The fall of man had made him a just
object of the vengeance of God; but the elect were to be
redeemed, and for their redemption the history of the world from
the beginning was directed. Not only in his dealings with the
Jews, but in his dealings with the heathen was God preparing for
the reconciliation of man, to be finally accomplished in his
sacrifice of Himself for them. The Roman Empire was foreordained
and established for this end. It was to prepare the way for the
establishment of the Roman Church. It was the appointed
instrument for the political governument of men. Empire and
Church were alike divine institutions for the guidance of man on
earth.

The aim of Dante in the Divine Comedy was to set forth these
truths in such wise as to affect the imaginations and touch the
hearts of men, so that they should turn to righteousness. His
conviction of these truths was no mere matter of belief; it had
the ardor and certainty of faith. They had appeared to him in all
their fulness as a revelation of the Divine wisdom. It was his
work as poet, as poet with a divine commission, to make this
revelation known. His work was a work of faith; it was sacred; to
it both Heaven and Earth had set their hands.

To this work, as I have said, the definiteness and the limits of
the generally accepted theory of the Universe gave the required
frame. The very narrowness of this scheme made Dante's design
practicable. He had had the experience of a man on earth. He had
been lured by false objects of desire from the pursuit of the
true good. But Divine Grace, in the form of Beatrice, who had of
old on earth led him aright, now intervened and sent to his aid
Virgil, who, as the type of Human Reason, should bring him safe
through Hell, showing to him the eternal consequences of sin, and
then should conduct him, penitent, up the height of Purgatory,
till on its summit, in the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice should
appear once more to him. Thence she, as the type of that
knowledge through which comes the love of God, should lead him,
through the Heavens up to the Empyrean, to the consummation of
his course in the actual vision of God.


AIDS TO THE STUDY OF THE DIVINE COMEDY.

The Essay by Mr. Lowell, to which I have already referred (Dante,
Lowell's Prose Works, vol. iv.) is the best introduction to the
study of the poem. It should be read and re-read.

Dante, an essay by the late Dean Church, is the work of a learned
and sympathetic scholar, and is an excellent treatise on the
life, times, and work of the poet.

The Notes and Illustrations that accompany Mr. Longfellow's
translation of the Divine Comedy form an admirable body of
comment on the poem.

The Rev. Dr. Edward Moore's little volume, on The Time-References
in the Divina Cominedia (London, 1887), is of great value in
making the progress of Dante's journey clear, and in showing
Dante's scrupulous consistency of statement. Dr. Moore's more
recent work, Contributions to the Textual Criticism of the Divina
Commedia (Cambridge, 1889), is to be warmly commended to the
advanced student.

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