DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY

The making of a masterpiece.

Bard College literature scholar Luzzi posits that Dante was “an intensely experimental writer,” one reason that centuries later James Joyce would take so many cues from him. Dante was experimental, Luzzi continues, first because he did not write his Divine Comedy in Latin—a choice that limited his audience, since all literate Europeans would know Latin but almost certainly not the Tuscan dialect of Italian. Tuscan, in turn, and particularly the Tuscan spoken in Florence, provided Dante with a vigorous language that “could capture the intimate rhythms, cadences, and meanings of everyday speech and, by extension, the resonances and experiences of daily life.” Despite Dante’s enthusiasm for the language and ways of Florence, the city banished him in 1302, which, though infuriating, convinced Dante that he was on a mission from God to write a sacred poem that would explain the workings of heaven, purgatory, and hell. It took time for that word to spread; as Luzzi notes, “by the end of the 1300s, about eight hundred manuscripts of the Commedia were in circulation.” The introduction of movable type and translations into other languages made it a world classic, if long after Dante’s own lifetime. Perhaps ironically, Luzzi notes, one particularly close reader of Dante’s text was a “zealous Spanish cleric” working under the auspices of the Inquisition, who diligently crossed out passages that placed wayward popes and priests in hell and condemned “a Vatican that ‘fornicates’ with kings.” Perhaps it’s a sign of divine approval that the censor’s strikethroughs have faded away and Dante’s original text shines through.

A learned but accessibly written essay on a centerpiece of the European literary tradition and its continuing influence.