Dante died on September 13 or 14, 1321 at the age of fifty-six, having just finished his Commedia, the poem he had been working on for the previous fifteen years or so. He had written, or started to write, other books, all of them groundbreaking, but this was something bigger and more impressively original in every way. The first two parts were already in the public domain. The finished whole was seized on by eager readers of central and Northern Italy and copied and recopied in countless manuscripts (more than 800 survive from the fourteenth century, none unfortunately in Dante’s own hand). Within ten years of Dante’s death the poem was receiving the sort of commentaries normally reserved for the ancient classics and the Bible. Boccaccio dubbed it a divine poem, and divina would become a fixed part of its title from the mid-sixteenth century. Apart from a dip in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Divine Comedy has continued to be seen as one of the greatest literary works ever written, to be compared, in the view of T. S. Eliot, only with the plays of Shakespeare. Modern English has been particularly receptive, with twenty-five complete translations appearing in the past fifty years alone, not to mention many other partial ones.
However impressive the Comedy is, it has always needed interpretation. Medieval commentators and probably Dante himself called the poem an allegory. If that is what it is, it is not easily decoded. The boundaries between the literal and the metaphorical, the historical and the fantastic, the personal and the symbolic are constantly shifting. And then there is the wealth of names, references and ideas, which were often almost as unfamiliar to fourteenth-century admirers as they are to us.
John Took and Enrico Malato are two of the most thoughtful and experienced of Dante’s modern interpreters, the one emerging from the idiosyncratic world of anglophone Dante criticism, the other from an Italian scholarly tradition that emphasizes historical continuity. Yet there are strong points of convergence. For both, Dante is simultaneously immensely enjoyable and has urgent things to say to those who would call his own times ancient (as he himself put it). Both, too, stress the centrality of love in his work, rather than, say, political thought or the issue of allegory, which has absorbed much critical energy in recent years.
In the longer of his two recent books, Took begins with the political context, covering along with much else the struggles in Florence between Guelphs and Ghibellines and then between Black and White Guelphs, that eventually led to Dante’s exile – unjust, he always protested – from 1301 onwards. Though Took is primarily concerned with the Comedy, he then covers in depth the so-called minor works, including disputed ones and uncollected poems, offering often powerful new readings of what Dante is doing in them. So the early Vita nova, for instance, records a progressive spiritual as well as poetic journey that looks forward to the journey of the Comedy, and the unfinished De vulgari eloquentia is also much more than a polemical treatise, rather a book that projects a view of poetry as a form of self-realization, for the reader as much as for the writer. Took finds an underlying existentialist dynamic running through all Dante’s writing, one that finds full expression in his greatest work.
For Took, Dante is a foremost spokesman of Christian existentialism, not only for the Middle Ages but also for us today. His journey through the three realms of the afterlife takes him from inauthenticity to the highest possible form of authentic being. In Hell, appealing sinners such as Francesca da Rimini and Pier della Vigna are the tragic victims of a kind of willed inability to face the reality of themselves and their situation, and attempt to mislead Dante and the reader. In Purgatory comes the much quieter process of reparation, self-recognition and self-education, which has its fruition in Paradise, where there is a transcendence of normal human limits. What Dante calls “trasumanar”, and Took glosses as a “viable form of human being”, culminates in a merging of the self in God. It is the moment when Dante’s prolonged investigation of what Took calls “love-understanding” achieves its end.
Took is most adventurous when, following on from his reading of the De vulgari eloquentia, he attempts to integrate Dante’s poetic imagery with his thinking. The imagery, he says, is a way of getting beyond abstract statements and involving the reader in the creation of meaning, with considerable interpretative freedom. If we participate in this process, we may also participate in authentic language – in a sense, in the divine, since for Dante his poetry in the Comedy is truly divinely inspired. From this vertical point of view, as Took calls it, in contrast to the horizontal progress denoted by the metaphor of a journey, that participation begins from the moment we join Dante in memories of the dark wood at the poem’s start.
There are heady issues here which most criticism barely gestures towards, and Took is a demanding writer, deploying an existentialist vocabulary and syntax which owe a debt to Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich. It is worth persevering, though, and in some ways Took lightens the load. He displaces his encyclopedically useful bibliographical references into notes, and, for readers wanting to savour some of the original text, offers long excerpts (sometimes more than once) with clear English translations. Understandably, Took has also synthesized his ideas in the shorter Why Dante Matters (224pp. Bloomsbury. £20), which focuses more directly on that question, although the subtitle, “An intelligent person’s guide”, is a warning not to expect plain sailing.
Enrico Malato is in the final stages of an ambitious new Italian edition of the Comedy which will be the core work in the Nuova edizione completa delle opere di Dante (or NECOD), due to appear in September for the 7OOth anniversary of Dante’s death. In the meantime, Nuovi studi su Dante, a bulky collection of recent articles and readings put together by his university colleagues, and Malato’s slim introduction to the edition, have arrived to prepare the ground for what promises to be a significant event.
The closely knit terza rima form has always protected Dante’s text against large-scale depredation, as has the fact that it has always existed in written form and been treated with respect by copyists and editors. But the problem of getting back to what Dante actually wrote remains a serious one. Malato cites a zealous copyist, a certain Forese Donati, who was comparing different readings as early as 1330–1. Malato’s own solution is to present a scrupulously revised version of Giorgio Petrocchi’s 1966–7 edition, which more recent editors have tried to go beyond, not all that successfully it would seem. The result, he accepts, cannot be total authorial authenticity (impossible), but should be a viable fourteenth-century Dante. And, like Took, he has the general reader in view. This edition, he writes, will have a detailed but accessible commentary, and will include a modern paraphrase, as is increasingly normal in Italian editions. (Malato stresses the degree to which Dante’s Italian and the modern language are the same, but, as he admits, that does not mean that modern Italians can easily grasp even the literal sense of Dante’s writing.)
Malato goes further. He firmly believes that the editor’s task, particularly when the evidence is as ambiguous as it is in the case of Dante, must involve interpretation. That means resolving specific points of debate. But he is also eager to press in the edition a larger thesis which he explores in several of the articles in Nuovi studi. Guido Cavalcanti, the one-time “first friend” of the Vita nuova (a book dedicated to lyric poetry in Italian must have “nuova” in its title, says Malato, not the currently favoured Latin “nova” derived from the book’s first chapter), is not simply pushed aside by Dante as he moves on to a different kind of poetry. For Malato, the two engage in poetic battle. Cavalcanti’s famous canzone “Donna me prega” is actually a negative counter to Dante’s poems celebrating the positive spiritual power of love for Beatrice and is a major factor in the rupture. Dante’s reply comes years later in the Purgatorio, where in the central canti – at the very heart of the Comedy – without mentioning Cavalcanti by name, he delivers his coup de grâce, laying out clearly and coherently the views on the interplay between love, reason and the divine that underpin his whole poetic enterprise. Cavalcanti is thus consigned to the intellectual sidelines.
Dante on the other hand goes on to play a central role in the evolution of European culture and thought. Malato sees this as partly a question of how his use of the vernacular anticipated and stimulated developments in other languages. But there is much more to it. Dante, he proposes, does not so much sum up the Middle Ages, as he is often said to do, as open the way to Renaissance humanism and modernity – even, he says at one point in the Introduzione, to liberty, equality and fraternity. It is an argument worth pondering by those whose view of Dante is based on the more gruesome parts of the Inferno.
Like many others who write about Dante, Took and Malato see him as inviting any reader, modern or medieval, to engage morally and intellectually with his poetry. In reality their own books are likely to be appreciated largely by specialists, enthusiasts and students. Whether we read them or not, Dante is going to be very much with us this anniversary year in one form or another. In December 2020, La Repubblica put his image on the cover of their Friday supplement and branded him “Man of the Year, 2021”. We can expect more in the same vein. And, who knows?, more people may read Dante and benefit from doing so in the way he wanted.
Peter Hainsworth is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He is the co-author, with David Robey, of Dante: A very short introduction, 2015
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