Reading Dante by Prue Shaw is a refreshing departure from sluggish sentences that clog knowledge and try one’s patience in much scholarly work by enthusiasts who want their audience in on the pleasures. Her style has the erudition of someone long immersed in the great poet and his milieu, and the elegant accessibility of someone who knows how to turn a fine phrase. She is a lifelong Dante scholar who makes her case from the very beginning.
It is sometimes said that a language is a dialect with an army. You could say that Italian is a dialect with a great poet. There was no ‘Italian’ in Dante’s time. He wrote in the dialect of his native Florence, a language we know as Italian because of him. His creation of the Commedia secured for Florentine the supremacy of all competing dialects. The seventh and final chapter explores this historical reality. In the Paradiso Dante tries to express in human language a reality that is beyond human understanding : the vision of God.
Absorb those lines from Shaw’s introduction, skip the rest of the book and you’ll still get a great deal from a first read of the Commedia. But it would be a shame not to continue because Shaw has so much to offer, much of which is too thinly explored in other editions of Dante, including the one I will soon discuss. Shaw acknowledges the immensity of Dante’s accomplishment and then takes the reader on an orderly journey into the text, becoming the reader’s Virgil. She has also included some bawdy Botticelli drawings and some of the artist’s more tame illustrations of what was going on in those dazzling stanzas.
With a nod to the Internet age—no surprise from the digital editor of the Commedia—Shaw provides web sites—www.danteonline.it, the Dartmouth Dante project, and the Princeton Dante Project, which she calls “the most comprehensive”—that go beyond the limits of a bound paper volume. She also supplies a helpful glossary.
Dante was an exile and a pilgrim, as we all are to varying degrees, and this is part of his appeal. That he needs a Virgil like Shaw to be better appreciated is a testament to his genius and range. Try this :
Whether language is God-made or man-made, whether linguistic change is inherent in the nature of language or is a punishment for human sin—may seem to us merely academic. But the care with which Dante constructs and places his encounter with Adam alerts us to the fact that they were profoundly important. The encounter comes toward the end of the poem, in Canto XXVI of the Paradiso. The pilgrim protagonist is about to leave behind the world of human endeavor and achievement; the poet is close to completing his poem, the triumphant outcome of his own struggle with language to create his masterpiece.
Again Shaw meets the heart of the matter, and by the way and just as seamlessly as she does everything else, she weaves in the struggles of Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare, and others who were influenced by Dante.
In Reading Dante, Prue Shaw has fashioned a well-marked trail that will be useful for readers of Dante no matter what their level of immersion or knowledge.
Clive James’s translation of The Divine Comedy is dedicated to Shaw, who threw him out of their house after many years of marriage and two daughters, because he had a long affair. I debated with myself about whether or not to mention this, especially since, to complicate matters further, James is dying of leukemia. I decided to go ahead for two reasons. First, Dante himself, aware as he was of the complexities of the human heart and soul, would surely have met this situation with compassionate interest. My second reason is that I believe James when he says he could not have done this work without having spent so much time in close proximity to a person so seriously engaged with Dante and his world.
James begins by dashing off zingers without follow-up. He breezily dismisses the Dorothy Sayers translation, which Shaw also ignores. The Sayers version was considered carved in stone by professors of my parents’ generation, including my friend the late Ed Stackpoole, one of Tolkien’s last students at Oxford. They thought she did the best she could, given what had been done before. James, providing no examples, says Shaw “was able to detect that Sayers had simultaneously loaded her text with cliché and pumped it full of wind.” If you are going to be snarky, back it up.
ON THE OTHER HAND I shout with deliberate caps, James has the comprehension and sensitivity to form which make Dante sing with fresh, compelling melodies one hopes Dante himself would appreciate:
Thick-witted mortal cares, how false and vain
Your earthbound reasoning, that keeps your wings
Beating in downward flight! One hoped to gain
Letters in law, one strove to do great things.
Dante invented terza rima, a three-part rhyme scheme suited to the dialect he used. James’ tidy couplets work a perfectly sustainable beauty here and throughout his efforts, encouraging reading aloud of both the original and this English. His ending is flawless.
My mind with that sharp blow by which it got
Its wish. Imagination, there on high –
Too high to breathe free after such a climb-
Had lost its power; but now, just like a wheel
That spins so evenly it measures time
By space, the deepest wish that I could feel
And all my will, were turning with the love
That moves the sun and all the stars above.
You don’t have to believe that God is love, or even to be much of a pilgrim to appreciate the scholarship, craft and ardor in the tremendously welcome achievements of Prue Shaw and Clive James in these important volumes.
