Dante Alighieri, usually known by his first name, is considered the greatest Italian poet ever. The Renaissance claims him, but he was not a Renaissance figure but a medieval one, born in the mid-thirteenth century (generally dated to 1265), and dying in 1321, well before the traditional date of the beginning of the Renaissance, considered to have begun with the Black Death in 1346. (In practice of course Renaissance Italy is another name for late medieval Italy.)
Dante was a native of Florence, in the region of Tuscany, one of the many city-states that made up medieval Italy. Although the whole peninsula was (and is) called Italy, Italy became a single country only in the nineteenth century. In Dante's time Florence was a republic, not a principality, and they were intensely proud of this status, that they felt set them apart from many of the other Italian city-states. Not surprisingly, however, just as the modern American republic has deep divisions between Democrats and Republicans, the Florentine republic had its own political parties, Guelphs and Ghibbilines, often in open warfare with each other.
But Dante is not known for his politics (though he became embroiled in them) but rather for his literature. He was especially a proponent of writing in the vernacular, rather than in Latin. Epics and romances had been written in the vernacular (Old Italian or Old French, etc.) rather than Latin for at least a century and a half before his lifetime, but he argued that the vernacular was suited for elevated literature as well.
His most famous work is the three-part Comedia (usually known in English as the Divine Comedy, although the "divine" was added later). It was a "comedy" not in the sense of a sit-com, where Uncle Frank comes in, says, "Whatz-upp?" and the laugh track goes Hahaha. Rather, it was a comedy in the ancient Greek sense of a story that ends well, rather than having the stage littered with dead bodies.
The Comedia is a story of a hero's journey (told in the first person), through hell, purgatory, and heaven. The character Dante (the poem's hero) is led part of the way by Virgil, an ancient Roman poet. He meets lost souls in hell, some of whom were the real Dante's enemies, and learns that hell has different circles for sinners, depending on how bad their sin was.
The Inferno, the first third of the long poem, set in hell, is by far the best well known. Above hell's gate is the inscription, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Dante's circles and vivid imagery of the tortures and regrets of the damned have had a major influence over the next seven centuries, although he was not the first to write about visions of hell. (When I sent my heroes to hell in Is This Apocalypse Necessary? I based what they saw on pre-Dante visions, though I couldn't resist using Dante's gate inscription.)
After the Inferno come the Purgatorio and Paradiso, generally considered much less interesting, because good people don't excite interest in the same way as sinners. Because Virgil was a pagan he can't take Dante (the character) all the way through. When Dante gets to heaven, he is greeted by Beatrice, a woman the real Dante had known slightly and always admired from afar as the epitome of womanhood.
The Comedia was immediately recognized for its genius. Even today, "correct" Italian is based on the Florentine dialect Dante used, and the language has changed far less since the fourteenth century than has, say, English. One of Dante's innovations was his rhyme scheme, called terza rima, where the lines rhyme ABA, then BCB, then CDC, and so on. This is relatively easy to do in Italian but almost impossible to do well in English, without distorting the meaning. It is said that it is worth learning Italian just to be able to read Dante in the original.
A solid translation into English (preserving the meaning if not the rhyme scheme), with facing Italian, is by Allen Mandelbaum (University of California Press, 1980-84).
© C. Dale Brittain 2023
