For those of us not entirely convinced about the architecture (not to mention the existence) of the hereafter, Purgatory is a far more digestible concept than Heaven or Hell. It is most like life. Indeed, in Dante Alighieri’s conception of it, Purgatory is the mirror (i.e., the reverse) image of life. Here one sheds the sins of our time on earth, purifies, purges oneself, arriving finally at the perfect innocence of a newborn baby. (Or, if you’re being technical–at the perfect innocence of a baptized newborn baby, cleansed even of original sin.)
It was Dante, of course, who provided the first fully imagined Purgatory in his 1321 poem, “The Divine Comedy.” Unlike Heaven and Hell, there was no existing iconography for Purgatory when Dante was writing–he had no common schema to follow when he composed his second canticle. The idea of Purgatory itself came latish to Christian theology. Early, embryonic formulations of Purgatory can be found in the writing of the church fathers from the third century, who were trying to explain why one should pray for a soul already departed. If the soul’s eternal fate were already decided, what use would more prayers serve? “If the children of Job were purged by the sacrifice of their father,” wrote John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher, “why does thou doubt that when we too offer for the departed, some consolation arises to them?” Augustine described Purgatory as a place, a “hidden retreat,” between death and final resurrection where a soul “enjoys rest or suffers affliction just in proportion to the merit it has earned by the life which it lead on earth.” One thousand years later, Dante provided the imagery, the landscape of that hidden retreat. Dante created the terraced mountain–an inverse of Hell’s conical shape-that extends up to Eden, the garden of earthly paradise.
Perhaps the most important function that Purgatory served was to satisfy a human (rather than supernatural) notion of justice, whereby sinners who repented weren’t afforded the same express train to Heaven that saints and martyrs enjoyed. Dante dramatized this very conundrum in an oft-cited scene from Canto 5, where he meets up with Buonconte of Montefeltro, a lifelong sinner who died with Mary’s name upon his lips and a single tear of contrition in his eye–enough to save him from damnation. Yet even the devil protests the injustice as the angel of mercy makes away with Buonconte’s soul: “You carry off with you the eternal part,” he complained, “of this one for one little tear that rips him from me.”
Purgation is twofold: a process of atonement similar to that found in the Inferno (the wrathful, for example, shrouded in smoky darkness sing and pray, meekly, for mercy; the envious weep through eyes sewn shut), and the receiving of grace through the prayers that the living offer on the sinner’s behalf. Throughout his travels, Dante meets souls who beg of news from home and who implore him to bring news of their own fate back to loved ones so that they may be prayed for and move more quickly onto Heaven: “O soul who go your journey to be blessed / with the same limbs you had when you were born … Tell if you can bring back any news / of one of us you may have seen before.” And, “O pray, when you return to the world, and are rested from your long journey, remember me.” Again, this rootedness in the here and now, dramatized repeatedly by Dante’s compassionate offers to bring news home, makes “Purgatory” the least ephemeral of the three canticles.
There have been three new translations of “Purgatory” in the last three years–by W. S. Merwin, Jean and Robert Hollander and Anthony Esolen, just out from the Modern Library–on the heels of as many new translations of “Inferno” (the Hollanders and Esolen are translating the whole “Comedy” in installments, publishing one volume at a time). Among Italianists, it is a point of pride that after the Bible, “The Divine Comedy” is the great work of literature that bears seemingly infinite interpretations. It’s a peculiar point of pride, however, given the nature of the original beast–inextricably bound to medieval Italian prosody–which at so many levels defies definitive translation. Each version provides a new series of compromises–sacrificing prosody for clarity, or clarity for literalness and so forth–dramatizing that famous adage (appropriately Italianate) that there is a hairline difference of sonority between translator (traduttore) and traitor (traditore).
The intrinsic failure of translation is something that every translator not only knows but must come to embrace. It is virtually impossible to change the language of a work of literature without sacrificing its most essential component–language. Those who take on Dante, accordingly, prioritize where their compromises will lie. Some, like the Hollanders, are on a scholastic mission and seek to be comprehensive. Others, like Merwin, privilege the poetry of the project–seeking to realize T. S. Eliot’s claim that Dante’s lyrical imagery made him the most “universal” of the great poets. Esolen’s friendly (though slightly ornate) translation seems to be striving for that most appreciable quality, readability–and the Modern Library appendices provide fascinating first documents about the idea of Purgatory. Meanwhile, those of us on the receiving end of all this new Dante wealth are free to admit that we’re fortunate not to have to make such choices.
Eliot suggested that the best way to first read Dante was in the original without any annotations–so as to fall in love with the poetry–and then to learn the background of the poem through its substantial commentary. If you haven’t the patience or the skill to navigate Dante’s medieval Italian, then perhaps the next best way to fall in love with the poem is simply to read as many different translations as are available (my own method), seizing on the scenes or verses that are most resonant in each. Consider, for example, Merwin’s rendering of the scene where a group of souls race to tell their fellows that Dante, a living being, has entered Purgatory: ‘I never saw lit vapors so quickly / just at nightfall split the calm of the sky / nor clouds in August as the sun was setting." The words lift gorgeously from the page, giving a perfect poetic echo of Dante’s original. Whereas Esolen’s more florid translation gives wonderful, lively expression to the characters. This moment, for example, between Dante and his mentor, Virgil: “When he fell silent from his argument / the Teacher of deep matters watched my eyes / to ascertain if I appeared content, / And I said nothing, but a new thirst then / swept like a sickle through me, and I wondered, / ‘Maybe he finds my questions wearisome’.”
It isn’t necessarily sidestepping the question “How to chose which Dante?” if your answer (like mine) is: don’t choose. There’s no need to. Translation, especially in this case, is a form of commentary–each new one endeavoring to reveal something more (or something more nuanced) about the poem. The motivation behind these divergent translations is not simply the hubris of a translator convinced he can do it better than the last guy. Dante was a complex poet, and the “Comedy” is a complex poem. As Robert Hollander himself has written, Dante “is so much richer and deeper than we who write about him are, and allow him to seem.” In that sense, each translation is a success of its own defining–not the dreadful failure that I suggested above.
