The Divine Comedy

Here's a big one.

Not only was this close to 900 pages long (but not really - I'll get to that), but it's Dante's Divine Comedy, perhaps the most well-known chunk of literature not penned by William Shakespeare. And it sure was a doozy!

Where to begin? Let's zoom way the hell out.

Dante lived from 1275 to 1321 and wrote The Divine Comedy between 1308 and 1320. It's divided into three parts - Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, (or "Hell," "Purgatory," and "Heaven," of course). It's a deeply religious text that explores Christian theology and philosophy and also serves as an allegory for a soul's journey toward God. It was actually just called The Comedy until sometime in the 1500s when someone first dubbed it "divine" and the adjective stuck.

This is a really important piece of literature. It's also an enormous poem. Major props are due to John Ciardi, the English translator, for transforming the poem line by line into English without ruining its tone or losing the intricate rhyming scheme or cadence. All the same, his translation means that what I read was, out of necessity, not actually a pure version of Dante's Divine Comedy. So be it! I don't want to dwell on this. The last two books I read were also translations from Japanese and French, and I never really considered that anything had been lost in translation. But this - a masterpiece of world literature that took twelve years to complete - felt different. Ciardi acknowledged as much in a lengthy introduction, bemoaning that a perfect translation is an impossible task and sort of humblebragging his way through a few examples of his "most acceptable failures."

I mentioned earlier that although this book was 900 pages long, it wasn't "really." This is because each of the three divisions of The Divine Comedy is divided into thirty-three cantos of about 120 lines each. That's in the ballpark of 12,000 lines or so, and at eight or nine words a line we're only looking at a word count of 100,000. Formatted as prose, then, we'd be looking at something like 300 pages. Maybe 400 at most. So, again, the 900 page count is a bit of a misnomer. But it also isn't! This is a dense text loaded with multiple meanings and various layers, and Ciardi spends a page or two after each canto providing detailed notes that give all kinds of context and explain what isn't necessarily obvious to contemporary readers. And he was right to do so, because none of the intricate details of the text were apparent to me without those lengthy footnotes.

Anyway, let's zoom back in. The Divine Comedy takes place in the year 1300 and begins on Good Friday - a perfect example of a detail that wasn't apparent to me at all, but I guess it's made clear based on Dante's descriptions of the sun, the moon, and certain constellations. (Yeah, that's the level of detail we're dealing with here.) Dante - the narrator and main character - "loses his way" or something, and finds that he needs to traverse through the depths of hell and then the tower of purgatory and then the expanses of heaven itself in order to get his morality back on track. So he does exactly that.

The Inferno

The first part of The Divine Comedy is definitely the most famous and most-often read section, and it features character-Dante wandering through hell recognizing and rejecting all forms of sin. It was author-Dante who came up with the idea of hell as a nine-tiered pit (you know, "circles of hell") that gets nastier and nastier as you head toward its center. In the first circle are all the nonbelievers; their only sin is not believing in Jesus Christ. As such, they aren't really punished - their punishment is just that they'll never make it to heaven. Check out this Wikipedia summary - it's pretty interesting how  many sins and punishments Dante describes in detail. It's also odd to me, from this 21st-century viewpoint, how author-Dante "ranks" some of these sins. Rapists and murderers are in the seventh circle, for example, for "violence." Flatterers, meanwhile, are in the eighth circle, since their sin is a form of "fraud," which is worse than violence. But then, the punishments for each of these sins seem justifiable - the murderers are submerged eternally in boiling blood, while the flatterers are just forced to wallow in shit. (Get it? Their kind words were shit!) At any rate, at the very center (bottom?) of hell, Dante finds that Satan is a three-headed beast and that he perpetually gnashes away on the bodies of Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. (You know, the three worst people - EVER! Kind of funny how a few centuries later, Shakespeare would make Brutus the tragic hero of Julius Caesar.)

The Purgatorio

This was my favorite section of the epic poem. Where the trip through hell in The Inferno was macabre and twisted and harrowing, author-Dante's climb up the tower of purgatory was like one giant story of redemption. Any souls that have made it to purgatory are already saved; they just need to make the difficult climb toward heaven, purging their sinful natures along the way. The tower has seven terraces - one for each of the seven deadly sins. While ascending through purgatory, souls are redeemed. On the envy tier, for example, their eyes are sewn shut so they can't even see the things they're missing out on. On the gluttony tier, they're forced to starve in the presence of wonderful food. Again, here's a Wikipedia summary worth perusing. In contrast to The Inferno, the suffering in The Purgatorio feels relevant and meaningful. By the time character-Dante gets to the top tier of purgatory - the Garden of Eden, where mankind was allowed to live in innocence - his soul has been purified and he's ready to enter heaven.

The Paradiso

I would believe that this is the deepest and most meaningful of the three sections of The Divine Comedy but for me it was also the least enjoyable to read. Just as hell had its circles and purgatory had its layers, heaven is a structured domain consisting of nine spheres. Once again, Wikipedia has you covered. It's interesting conceptually just like the rest of The Divine Comedy but the sole recurring theme here is that God is great and perfect and benevolent and all-powerful. There are parts where Dante begins to question His judgment - why are virtuous pagans forbidden from heaven? - only to be reprimanded and reminded that God's wisdom doesn't have to be something Dante comprehends. That's all fine and good, and it's completely consistent with the Catholic Church's teachings, but it doesn't really make for an interesting culmination to this epic story. When character-Dante finally comes face-to-face with God at the end of the Divine Comedy, author-Dante is at a loss for words worthy of describing His greatness. Which makes perfect sense - God is incomprehensible to a mortal man like Dante, be it the character or the author - but it's still a bit of a soft note to end on. Or so I thought, anyway.

So yeah - The Divine Comedy. I'm glad I looked into it! But Wikipedia has you covered if you're just looking for the summary.