Signet (lassies. 'jw THE IN Translated by John Ciardi Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/inferno00dant_2 "Fresh and sharp. ... I think [Ciardi'sl version of Dante will be in many respects the best we have seen." —John Crowe Ransom Considered Italy's greatest poet, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was the scion of a Florentine family who mastered the art of lyric poetry at an early age. His first major work, La Vita Nuova ( 1 292), was a tribute to Beatrice Portinari, the great love of his life. Dante's political activism resulted in his being exiled from Florence, and he eventually settled in Ravenna. It is be- lieved that The Divine Comedy—comprising three canticles, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso—was writ- ten between 1 308 and 1320. John Ciardi (1916-86), a distinguished poet and professor, taught at Harvard and Rutgers universities and served as po- etry editor of the Saturday Review. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1955, he won the Harriet Monroe Memorial Award and the Prix de Rome in 1956. Archibald T. MacAHister (1905-66) taught at Yale and at Brown University before joining the Princeton faculty in 1940, where he taught the advanced course in the Divine Comedy. He was chair of the Italian section of the Department of Ro- mance Languages at Princeton, and contributed many arti- cles on Dante to scholarly publications, including the entry on Dante in A Dictionary ofMoral Philosophy. Prof. Edward M. Cifelli has taught at colleges and universi- ties for nearly forty years. He has written biographies of poets David Humphreys and John Ciardi, and a memoir, Routine Miracles. He has also edited or compiled books of letters, poetry, and bibliography. He contributes regularly to magazines and journals publishing articles about poetry and literary history, and has also contributed to the American Na- tional Biography, American Writers Before 1800, and The Encyclopedia ofNew Jersey. THE INFERNO Dante Alighieri Translated byJohn Ciardi With an Introduction by Archibald T. MacAllister and a New Afterword by Edward M. Cifeli, PhD SIGNET CLASSICS SIGNET CLASSICS Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3 124, Aus- tralia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) - Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 1 1 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannes- burg 2 1 96, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Mentor edition. First Signet Classics Printing, June 2001 First Signet Classics Printing (Cifelli Afterword), October 2009 10987654321 Copyright © John Ciardi, 1954, 1982 Afterword copyright © Edward M. Cifelli, 2009 All rights reserved \Tj REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA Printed in the United States of America Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other- wise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the au- thor nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appre- ciated. To Judith Cosi n 'andammo infino alia lumiera, parlando cose, che il tacere e bello, * si com era il parlar cola dov ' era. Contents translator sNote iX Introduction xii THEINFERNO 1 Selected Works by John Ciardi 287 The Ciardi Translations: Inferno 288 Illustrations Hell—First Seven Circles 26 Hell—Eight Circle (Malebolge) 142 The Descent of Malebolge 150 Hell—Ninth Circle (Cocytus) 260 Translator's Note When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music," the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano. Language too is an instrument, and each language has its own logic. I believe that the process of rendering from lan- guage to language is better conceived as a "transposition" than as a "translation," for "translation" implies a series of word-for-word equivalents that do not exist across language boundaries any more than piano sounds exist in the violin. The notion of word-for-word equivalents also strikes me as false to the nature of poetry. Poetry is not made of words but of word-complexes, elaborate structures involving, among other things, denotations, connotations, rhythms, puns, jux- tapositions, and echoes of the tradition in which the poet is writing. It is difficult in prose and impossible in poetry to jug- gle such a complex intact across the barrier of language. What must be saved, even at the expense of making four strings do for eighty-eight keys, is the total feeling of the complex, its gestalt. The only way I could see of trying to preserve that gestalt was to try for a language as close as possible to Dante's, which is in essence a sparse, direct, and idiomatic language, distinguishable from prose only in that it transcends every known notion of prose. I do not imply that Dante's is the language of common speech. It is a much better thing than IX x Translator's Note that: it is what common speech would be if it were made perfect. One of the main sources of the tone of Dante's speech is his revolt from the Sicilian School of Elegance. Nothing would be more misleading than to say that Dante's language is simple. Overwhelmingly, however, it seeks to avoid ele- gance simply for the sake of elegance. And overwhelmingly it is a spoken tongue. I have labored therefore for something like idiomatic En- glish in the present rendering. And I have foregone the use of Dante's triple rhyme because it seemed clear that one render- ing into English might save the rhyme or save the tone of the language, but not both. It requires approximately 1,500 triple rhymes to render the Inferno and even granted that many of these combinations can be used and re-used, English has no such resources of rhyme. Inevitably the language must be in- verted, distorted, padded, and made unspeakable in order to force the line to come out on that third all-consuming rhyme. In Italian, where it is only a slight exaggeration to say that everything rhymes with everything else or a variant form of it, the rhyme is no problem: in English it is disaster. At the same time some rhyme is necessary, I think, to ap- proximate Dante's way of going, and the three-line stanzas seem absolutely indispensable because the fact that Dante's thought tends to conclude at the end of each tercet (granted a very large number of run-on tercets) clearly determines the "pace" of the writing, i.e., the rate at which it reveals itself to the reader. These were my reasons for deciding on the present form. Moreover, I have not hesitated to use a deficient rhyme when the choice seemed to lie between forcing an exact rhyme and keeping the language more natural. For my interpretation of many difficult passages I have leaned heavily on the Biagi commentaries, and even more heavily on the Vandelli-Scartazzini. A number of these inter- pretations are at odds with those set forth in some of the more familiar English versions of the Inferno, but, subject to my own error, this rendering is consistent at all points with Van- delli's range of arguments. I have also leaned heavily on the good will and knowledge of a number of scholars. Dudley Fitts read patiently through Translator 's Note xi the whole manuscript and made detailed, and usually legible, notes on it. Professor A. T. MacAllister not only gave me the benefit of another complete set of detailed notes, but agreed to undertake the historical introduction so important to a good understanding of Dante, and so brilliantly presented here. Professor Giorgio di Santillana gave me sound and subtle advice on many points. My major regret is that he left for Italy before I could take further advantage of his patience and of his profound understanding of Dante. I wish to thank also Professor C. S. Singleton for some useful disapproval at a few points, Professor Irwin Swerdlow and Professor Richard W.