(I couldn’t resist. I’m reading Borges. I miss reading the Divine Comedy.)
The Art of Poetry, No. 9: Dante Aligheri
Interviewed by Katarina Holmes, John Ciardi, and Kevin LaTorre
The exiled poet and statesman Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, whom we call Dante, lives in Ravenna, Italy. The stone house where he is kept overlooks the Adriatic Sea. It is not his home, though he certainly lives there with his wife, Gemma di Manetto Donati, and his children, Jacobo, Pietro, and Antonia. Dante hosted us in the house’s great banquet room, and he fetched and served us his own wine bottles from his own hand. His seat in the falling, dusty light of the eastern window laid a light, sacral glow on his clothes, over his rare smiles. His two sons passed periodically through the room, most often to ask things of Gemma as she sat embroidering beside her lit hearth and monitored us, her voluminously troublesome husband and his foreign guests. The two men take their nine spinone hounds hunting in the western hills, and though their father doesn’t allow them to sail into the Adriatic, they keep their private vessel anchored to a dock in the bay below the house’s hillside. When glimpsed down the hallways of the house, Antonia bent her head to us so as not to speak or be spoken to.
Dante himself spoke slowly, allowing for John (a poet, my compatriot) to translate his orations from the Italian but, despite his courtly gentleness with us and with John, he sometimes grew irritated that the English impeded all he was discussing. With only our feeble interests to prompt him, Dante lectured fluently on the vile bulls of Boniface before the sweet roses of St. Bernard, the illustrious mountain-mounting ancestor of the honorable Guido Novella de Polenta, the difference between the crustaceans found in Ravenna’s tidal pools and the invading crabs in the shallows of the Lago di Garda, the atmospheric costs of the marble blocks used for new construction around the Vatican, his sons’ spinone hounds, the seven Indo-European monarchs of history most equipped to quell and unite Italy (maybe too obviously, Dante prefers Julius Caesar), and the sorry state of Italian cartography for the use of messengers. His eyes didn’t move or rove as he spoke, though he was evidently seeing (or had seen) much. Aside from the above, he explicated a dozen other subjects during the nine hours we sat with him in the large banquet room of the Ravenna house, but I will not recount them here from my impoverished shorthand. We here bind ourselves and the poet to the poem. The interview’s transcription cobbles together only our comments on that subject.
Katarina—Kati pronounced kaht-yeh, if you are her podcast co-hosts or her refugee mother—claimed that Ravenna didn’t impress her, joking that the Commedia had disappointed her in almost the same way. I don’t pretend to understand her addled humor. Walking through the city centre toward the stone house growing ever larger on the eastern hill, Katarina laughed with the boys darting through both cars and motorcycles to play their soccer match, and she pretended not to enjoy arguing with the uncompromising fruit-sellers under their canvas awnings. At no point before or after speaking with Dante did she discuss the Commedia with me. This is the sort of detail she doesn’t mind that I include, as she prefers keen, unflattering exposure as a narrative vantage point in her own work and (apparently) in mine as well. In all her fictions, Katarina depicts herself as an inscrutable, unwelcoming, and dogged young woman. These adjectives are true enough to life that I’m forced to add to her oeuvre myself.
John and I had corresponded for nearly a year before he joined us in Ravenna, after he replied to my fan mail with a few exquisitely passive-aggressive complaints about the Sayers and Longfellow translations of the Commedia. Aside from the poem, we mostly have discussed the University of Michigan football team or the mad Robert Lowell. (John politely, consistently ignores the questions I’ve asked about his Boston Catholic upbringing.) Translating between Dante, Katarina, and me, John became as invisible as a cleaned pane of glass. Below, I have not marked his words except where he spoke apart from Dante. I trust John won’t mind.
Kevin: Thank you for allowing us to join you here, sir. Is sir too much, sir? Sorry, it’s—I’d rather not just address you by your first name, if that’s alright.
Dante: My given name was enough for my mother and will be enough for my God. And you are all most welcome here, though I will not pretend I am a proper host or master of this house. You have heard of my situation?
Katarina: No, of course not. Why, did something happen?
Dante: So you have heard, my young friend, if you would still like to be too intelligent to discuss the situation. Very well. It is worth discussing, however, because the thorns of this land, its vilest leaders, and its cursed cities are not separate from the poem.
Katarina: We’re here for the verses, trust me. But most people reading the poem won’t know the people or the arcane motives of your situation.
Dante: What readers know or do not know cannot change the composition of the poem. I have written every one of its cantos in the shadow of my exile and thus never in Florence. My ancestral city’s present absence is a significant feature of the form. And at any point, a reader may dare to infer the circumstances which the verses allude to, as simply as spreading two branches apart to see how their great lengths join their trunk. Whatever I have suffered, I have preserved in my pilgrim’s way through the cantos as his glory and mine, for all I have suffered came from our Holy Father, as have all my blessings.
Kevin: As has the love of Beatriz Portinari?
Dante: Of course, of course.
Katarina: Do you each mind not bringing her up, right now?
Kevin: Not bring up Beatriz?
Katarina: Yes. I mean, Gemma’s sitting right over there. [She waves to Gemma, who does not wave in kind.] I’m no medieval genius, but it’s probably better not to talk up a long-dead girlfriend while the very-much-still-living wife is with us, or at least I think so. If you both can manage it. All respect to the side-piece, of course, for whomst among us, right? But I’m working on being a marriage-respecter now that I’m newly and bitterly single.
Kevin: We’re not going to talk about Beatriz while discussing the Commedia, with the literal Dante? This is some multilayered irony, right?
Katarina: I’m so earnest about this that it hurts my back. And my cervix.
Kevin: …
Dante: …
John: I don’t need to translate that, I hope.
Katarina: Well thank you, boys. We’ll all survive the strain. Now, we were discussing all you have suffered, Dante, and I was hoping you’d start really naming some names.
Dante: I have already named names, to my persecutors’ infamy. They are a pack of underfed, ravening, slobbering curs even now, after so many years to reform or satisfy their unending greed. But let me speak unmistakably: God the Creator plunged me down into these years of torment so as to raise me still higher than I could have reached while only a pampered prior of Florence, for that is His way and one of His great arts.
Kevin: Is that the allegorical meaning of the poem’s descent into Hell, which is ultimately an ascent into Heaven?
Dante: It is one meaning, of one vantage of the allegory, yes. How can I describe it, now? A succinct description without a day’s digression or falling upon the groves of vanity is the work of a scholar like John, not a poet. Still, I will attempt one: while the Lord God is truly indescribable, the men, lands, trials, and miracles He takes up for tools are not. I say again, it is His great artistry to compose the world so that from all vantages, and at all times, we may perceive Him in it. And, perceiving His mastery, we cannot keep from testifying to Him, even singing it aloud at the end of our comforts. That is why I wrote all the shades as ones who witness to their lives, grace, or punishment. Notice, too, that my own pilgrim is himself a witness. Damned, penitent, beatified, and living souls perceive God the Father, not only in the scriptures or the Church but in the circumstances he uses as revelation in our days. His revelation to me came in my exile, persecution, and dishonor. It all felt vile to me, and still it is grace from his His hands, like the persecutions of the prophet Jeremiah as he spoke his Master’s message.
Kevin: But what if you die?
Katarina: I’m pretty sure that guy Jeremiah has died by now. And we’re not doing that right now, Kevin. Dante, you use the word pilgrim to describe yourself in the poem. Or, John translated it that way. How differently do you view the Dante of your poem, versus yourself in your own life?
Dante: The first is a pilgrim, and the second is a poet.
Katarina: But they’re both you, aren’t they? Or, you are each of them. The Dante in the poem is just you in 1300, a year before the Italy-hopping, Pope-hating, verse-celling shitstorm that’s coming for you. [Katarina did not let me edit out that phrase.]
Dante: I am a man in the world, not an I on those pages. My poem reflects my life, but to see the sun’s rays reflected from a brook is not precisely to behold the sun itself.
Katarina: But you are the poet. As the poet you transcribed your entire history in your poem. Your friends, your politics, your aesthetics, your religion (your religious extremism, to be honest, but don’t worry, we love a boy who’s too crazily earnest)—it’s everything, and it’s all you. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here speaking with you.
Dante: What is your question?
Katarina: How do you treat reality in the poem? How do you pose it against your own personality, your own perception?
Dante: It is a poem.
Kevin: And as a poem, it has a set narrative where you placed the pilgrim on his inescapable path to redemption. Between “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray” and “by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he has a fixed path—
Dante: Wooing too strenuously is unbecoming, dear boy. Must you quote my verses to me?
Kevin: …[I should’ve told him to tell that to Virgil, but the moment passed dumbly.] What I mean is narrative fate, how the pilgrim is fated to receive his lot from God, just as the sinners, penitents, and beatified have. But throughout the Commedia, you argue again and again for the free will of man as an honorable thing from above, even as the pilgrim ascends into that realm where God’s will is itself reality, regardless of man’s will or deeds.
Dante: What is your question?
Kevin: Does the poem enact the pilgrim’s free will, or is it constrained by your own sub-providence as the poet?
Katarina: I specifically asked you not to ask this question. Dante, it’s an obsession, but not the fun kind. The entire trip over here, he kept asking whether we could choose anything, given that God exists (which is not a given but that’s for another time). Then he asks if the existence of free will actually matters, if we perceive reality as something we choose, and then he asks why it bothers him so much that he wouldn’t have free will, if he has Christ. I specifically asked him not to bring this up, and you don’t have to answer him.
Kevin: Well—he might have to, if God has already willed it. And He might have willed it, since Purgatorio Canto 16 delves into the question indirectly through Marco Lombardo and his free will, which “can conquer all if it is well sustained.”
Katarina: Can you stop?
Kevin: Do I have a choice?
Dante: The passage you quote from discusses only a portion of my concern with free will, as it is only Purgatorio but not yet Purgatorio or Paradiso. God has granted us intellects to be His free subjects, so that the light of our reason still sifts good from evil in moral discipline and wise virtue. Here, I am following where Aquinas leads (as well a free Christian should), though I made sure that Virgil voice these truths, to honor that king of poets and acknowledge in him the best of man’s reason. For Virgil, instructed by the divine revelation of nature, saw too that all loves, both righteous and evil, spring from human urges but that the will of the disciplined, virtuous, and moral man empowers him to check it.
Kevin: But how can man check sin by the strength of his own will? He’s suffused in sin after the fall, truly “bare of every trace of good and by evil overshadowed everywhere.”
Katarina: We’re here to discuss the poem.
Kevin and Dante: This is the poem.
Dante: Man doesn’t overcome sin in his own strength, because of course he cannot. A free will presupposes God’s grace given through the Incarnation, as Christ lived, died, and was raised that we may be freed unto Himself in His father. And, I should stress, freed unto Himself is the key directional phrase for discussing our free wills in God. Anything called “freedom” apart from the chain-breaking Creator is a foul lie couched in glittering, stolen robes.
Kevin: … [Here I gave myself over, as in many times before on the question of will, to submitting and not understanding. Partly, I wished not to discuss my own Protestant teachers on the question of providence, because Dante would surely have placed Wycliffe, Hus, Luther, Calvin, and even Erasmus in the eighth bolgia of Hell’s eighth circle, for sowing discord.]
Dante: Silence is welcome, young man, if only at the end of your silence you say something intelligent. I am only a teacher on these questions. I myself have been taught only by teachers, however wise. The truest, fullest answer to these questions lies in our faith’s mystery, which in my third and final voyage, I revealed as my Beatriz. But, as befits heavenly mystery, she teaches as much in her celestial beauty its, so like that of the Lord’s sun, as she does in her explicit teachings on the cosmology of Paradiso. Reason must be mastered by revelation in our approach to God. If we are not to discuss Beatriz openly, we will be disappointed by ending her discourse here.
Katarina: That was such a nice thing you said of her that I’m sure it’s fine with Gemma, and fine with me. Paradiso was my second-favorite of the canticles for how much light you lay over it. But, of course, Inferno is too hard-core brimstone-y to not be my favorite.
Kevin: It’s the recognition of sin by the awful fullness of God’s wrath, compared to the reception of glory by the infinite radiance of His love.
Katarina: I don’t even know who you said that to, at this point. But—you mentioned reason just now, Dante, and I wanted to come back to that. It’s clear from the poem how much you’ve learned, though it’s also clear that not even you can keep juggling all your sources throughout the poem. My question is, I guess, why depict yourself as so learned throughout the Commedia to then disavow it all by the end?
Dante: The poem never disavows learning. Nor have I, in my other writings. How could I, if learning itself brought me here as surely as my travails, and from the same hands of God?
Katarina: But don’t you compare an over-reliance on philosophy to the leopardess in the dark wood, at some point?
Kevin: She-wolf.
Dante: I allegorized each of those beasts as a vice foretelling certain doom, and my pilgrim’s chief vice was the pride of a man well-read in the documents of human reason, not learnedness itself.
Kevin: Your pilgrim bends nearly to the ground of the cornice among the proud in Purgatory, nearly bearing their penitence as his own. I loved that image, it burned me. I feared it and loved it. It’s the same doubled searing I got when your pilgrim relinquishes his reason in Paradise, just at the gates of the Empyrean when he’s tested by St. Peter, St. James, and St. John. His answers demonstrate the height of human reason, just at the moment he relinquishes them to enter into the presence of God. I burned reading it. I wish I had a less off-putting description to tell you, I’m sorry. It was a Purgatory flame, not an infernal one.
Katarina: Very nice, thank you for your completely directionless input. But, Dante, why did you repeat my pilgrim just now, when in that literal sentence you had been referring to yourself?
Dante: I again meant my pilgrim, the character of the poem who goes bodily through Hell, Purgatory, and the three heavens. All three of which I have not done.
Katarina: But why do you separate him from yourself? It’s not a clear distinction in the poem, which was exactly what I liked most about it. If you are yourself in the poem, then placing your enemies in Hell—the liars, the killers, the Greek heroes, the gays, the cheats, the literal popes—becomes actual transgression and not just poetic exercises in nice language. Ditto for the denunciations of the Church from the saints from Paradise: their criticism, treated as documentation, would be more cutting, more transgressive. Don’t shy away from actual transgression! You’ve already been living on the run, it’s not like you could write something to get yourself still more canceled.
Dante: … [Looks to John, who shrugs.] Perhaps, my dear one, you have never visited Italy before. Beheadings await too many of us. What is your question?
Katarina: Why do you separate him from yourself, when the self-documentation would sharpen your insight?
Dante: I separate him from myself because I have written a poem, not a history or a revelatory dream from God.
Katarina: But don’t you see the potential for reordering reality, if you do away with the pretense of authorship?
Dante: You assume I am as heretical as you are. Reality is both ordered and immutable. All things have their places, their forms, and their essences because they have received them from God above, who spoke first and speaks still. I may delight in the learning of the men He has made, still knowing that for all my grasping, my reason falls at His feet. I may form the verses which He has enabled us to speak and write, still knowing that for all my skill, I can reorder nothing He makes and sustains. How could I, within the shelter of the reality whose Maker also made us and our minds?
Katarina: You really, really enjoy this unified world you believe exists. But the only unity is in what you perceive. That’s what the poem demonstrates! Not even in what we perceive, but in what you perceive, which is a totally separate unity compared to what I perceive. A unified world, but only in the one and not the many. For all your reading, you’ve never picked up on that?
Dante: I have picked up the futility of determining all things according to myself. For many years, I even bore it upon my shoulders as true. It is an oppressive weight. Only humiliation, prayer, and revelation lighten it, so that it weighs less than a dawn’s beam. Now, I bear the weightless one in the many.
Katarina: Is this the part where you tell me that I’m young, and that my humiliation will come someday? It definitely feels like you’re winding up for it. First of all: so hot, bring on the cuffs, can’t wait for my denigration. Second: you’re telling me that subjectivity is a dead-end? I know you’re reading older books and taking a deity for granted, and I know how fun a good anomie can be, but you can’t actually think that objective, triumphalist Christianity isn’t also a dead end.
Dante: I am telling you to repent, my dear one. Lest you become alone in yourself, menaced by the consequences of your pride.
Katarina: But what if one of the consequences of my pride is that I get to write something as notable, as fame-orgasming, as your Commedia?
Dante: [He looks to John, and to me. He looks again to Katarina but does not respond.]
Kevin: What if you were about to die, Dante?
Dante: That is no hypothetical. I will die, and maybe soon.
Kevin: What will you do then?
Dante: I will see the foot of Mount Purgatory, and I will approach my Lord. I only regret that my deepest imagination will have disappointed me when I finally behold Him without a veil.
Kevin: I doubt you’ll need the words, then. I doubt any of us would want words then. Won’t that be a relief?
Dante: I’ll need only “Te Deum laudamus,” but there, it will be our very breath.
Kevin: I’d written down a question about what you’re writing now. But it’s a moot, absurd question, isn’t it?
Dante: It is. We still have so much to discuss in the Commedia! Forgive me my passion, but you have each only begun. Surely, you must ask me about the construction and revelation of poem’s terza rima form, or the sixty-fourth line of its sixty-fourth canto, or the wedding of Christian virtue and pagan cosmology, or all three in succession. Didn’t you also want to discuss La Vita Nuova, or Monarchia?
Katarina: Are those prologues I didn’t know about?
Kevin: … how do you translate terza rima?
John: Oh my God.
Dante Alighieri did soon die. He trembled with malarial fevers, dying the night of September 13, 1321. I wrote to John to inquire about the poet’s final days, but in his mourning, John didn’t respond. Like the rest of us, I had to read about Dante’s funeral from an outdated essay, and it only saddened me more to have missed the procession which brought the poet’s bones into the Minor Friars of Ravenna, and only made me wish I had asked proper questions of him and his poem. (As if there are proper questions for a poet who believes in God, Katarina would say. When I told her on the phone that Dante had died, she hesitated, and then she hung up. Later that day, she emailed me the following:
“Time and again at daybreak I have seen the eastern sky glow with a wash of rose while all the rest hung limpid and serene, and the Sun’s face rise tempered from its rest so veiled by vapors that the naked eye could look at it for minutes undistressed.
She added that I would look more poetic, and more Calvinist, in the mourning black I’d surely be wearing for the rest of my days. I’ve missed her, I’ll admit it.)
I cannot think happily on Dante’s death, despite his clear, stated anticipation of entering into Paradise. For one thing, I struggle with endings, which for me always read too repetitively. For another, malaria is too undignified. The foul wetland mosquito which delivered the disease is too small, too devious, compared to the golden eagles or powerful gryphons which should have borne Dante without death into the Empyrean. But his death is not merely my own feelings about it—as an event, it was ordered. It was given. I’m always having to remember that, in the deaths of others. And when I remember the altered, lucid visions I suffered in the feverish nights of my own life, a fevered death given to the greatest poet to render the cosmos makes good sense of his suffering. It may also be an ironic sense, but then God seems to make ironic sense as readily as He makes sanctified souls. (He is the first Poet, after all.) The bones of Dante Alighieri, interred in their plain stone sarcophagus, make sense only by the sanctifying touch like flame from the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.
Man this was great. Extremely funny. Also the way you channeled Dante in his dialogue was very evocative. The brief descriptive bits had pitch-perfect atmosphere I thought.
Tour de force piece of writing. And you say more than a little that is important! Bravo.