The Inferno Read online

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2002

  Copyright © 2000 by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

  Anchor Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:

  Dante Aligheri, 1265–1321

  [Inferno. English]

  The Inferno / Dante Aligheri; translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander; introduction & notes by Robert Hollander.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-385-49697-4

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  I. Hollander, Robert. II. Hollander, Jean. III. Title.

  PQ4315.2 .H65 2000

  851’.1—dc21 00-034531

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80310-8

  Author photograph of Robert Hollander by Pryde Brown

  Cover painting: Hell and Fall of the Damned by Hieronymus Bosch

  © Scala/Art Resource, NY

  Cover design by Mark Melnick

  Book design by Pei Loi Koay

  Map design by Jeffrey L. Ward

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  for

  Francesco,

  Maria Grazia,

  Stefano,

  Simonetta,

  Enrico,

  & Tommaso

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note on Using This eBook

  Note on the Translation

  Table of Abbreviations and List of Commentators

  Map of Dante’s Hell

  Introduction

  The Inferno: English

  INFERNO I

  INFERNO II

  INFERNO III

  INFERNO IV

  INFERNO V

  INFERNO VI

  INFERNO VII

  INFERNO VIII

  INFERNO IX

  INFERNO X

  INFERNO XI

  INFERNO XII

  INFERNO XIII

  INFERNO XIV

  INFERNO XV

  INFERNO XVI

  INFERNO XVII

  INFERNO XVIII

  INFERNO XIX

  INFERNO XX

  INFERNO XXI

  INFERNO XXII

  INFERNO XXIII

  INFERNO XXIV

  INFERNO XXV

  INFERNO XXVI

  INFERNO XXVII

  INFERNO XXVIII

  INFERNO XXIX

  INFERNO XXX

  INFERNO XXXI

  INFERNO XXXII

  INFERNO XXXIII

  INFERNO XXXIV

  The Inferno: Italian

  INFERNO I

  INFERNO II

  INFERNO III

  INFERNO IV

  INFERNO V

  INFERNO VI

  INFERNO VII

  INFERNO VIII

  INFERNO IX

  INFERNO X

  INFERNO XI

  INFERNO XII

  INFERNO XIII

  INFERNO XIV

  INFERNO XV

  INFERNO XVI

  INFERNO XVII

  INFERNO XVIII

  INFERNO XIX

  INFERNO XX

  INFERNO XXI

  INFERNO XXII

  INFERNO XXIII

  INFERNO XXIV

  INFERNO XXV

  INFERNO XXVI

  INFERNO XXVII

  INFERNO XXVIII

  INFERNO XXIX

  INFERNO XXX

  INFERNO XXXI

  INFERNO XXXII

  INFERNO XXXIII

  INFERNO XXXIV

  Notes

  Index of Names and Places

  Index of Subjects Treated in the Notes

  List of Works Cited

  About the Translators

  Other Books by Robert and Jean Hollander

  Acclaim for This Book

  A Note on Using This eBook

  In this eBook edition of The Inferno, you will find two types of hyperlinks.

  The first type is embedded in the line numbers to the left of the text: these links allow you to click back and forth between the English translation and the original Italian text while still holding your place.

  The second type of link, which is indicated by an arrow (→) at the end of a line of poetry, will bring you to an explanatory note.

  You can click on an arrow to navigate to the appropriate note; you can then use the links at the end of each note to return to your location in either the English translation or the original Italian text. You can also click on the note number to return to your location in the English translation.

  NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  * * *

  “Reader, this is an honest book.” Montaigne says this of his Essays. We would like to say the same of this translation. We have tried to bring Dante into our English without being led into the temptation of making the translation sound better than the original allows. The result may be judged by all who know him in his own idiom. This is not Dante, but an approximation of what he might authorize had he been looking over our shoulders, listening to our at times ferocious arguments. We could go on improving this effort as long as we live. We hope that as much as we have accomplished will find an understanding ear and heart among those who know the real thing. Every translation begins and ends in failure. To the degree that we have been able to preserve some of the beauty and power of the original, we have failed the less.

  The accuracy of the translation from the Italian text established by Giorgio Petrocchi (1966–67) has been primarily my responsibility, its sound as English verse primarily that of the poet Jean Hollander, my wife and collaborator. As will be clear from various notes in the text, I am not always in accord with Petrocchi’s readings; however, I thought it imperative to use as the base of this entire project the current standard Italian text of the work, indicating my occasional desire to diverge from it only in its margins. My original intention was to reproduce the John D. Sinclair translation (1939) of Inferno, cleaning up its just barely post-Victorian “thee”s and “thou”s and other such, to a twenty-first-century ear, outdated usages. However, (a) differences between the Italian in the Società Dantesca Italiana (1921) edition, from which Sinclair translated, and Petrocchi’s edition, (b) later “corrections” of Sinclair’s version by a later translator, Charles Singleton, (c) further study of Dante’s lines themselves, (d) a sense of ways in which a prose translation eventually fails to be “sayable”—all of these considerations led us to attempt a new verse translation of the first cantica, despite our original debt to Sinclair.

  Those who come to our text familiar with the Singleton translation (1970) will perhaps think that it is its resonance that they occasionally hear; this is because a tremendous amount of Singleton’s translation conforms word-for-word to Sinclair’s, as anyone may see simply by opening the two volumes side by side. Thus, having decided to begin with Sinclair and to modify him, we found that Singleton had apparently done essentially the same thing. To his credit, his changes are usually for the better; to his blame is his failure to acknowledge the frequency of his exact coincidence with Sinclair. And thus, on his own advice, we have considered it “a mistake … not to let the efforts of one’s predecessors contribute to one’s own” (page 372), and have on occasion included his divergences from Sinclair when we found them just. However, let there be no mistake: the reason our translation seems to reflect Singleton’s, to t
he extent that it does, is that ours, on occasion, and Singleton’s, almost always, are both deeply indebted to Sinclair.

  In February 1997, when my wife and I decided to commit ourselves to this effort, we were able to consult the draft of a verse translation of Inferno composed by Patrick Creagh and me (begun in 1984 and abandoned in 1988, with some 80 percent of the work Englished). Some of its phrases have found their way to our text, and we owe a considerable debt to Patrick Creagh (and to my earlier self), which we are glad to acknowledge. We also owe a debt to the prose paraphrases of difficult Italian passages found in the still helpful English commentary by the Rev. Dr. H. F. Tozer (1901); and to glosses gleaned from various Italian commentaries (most particularly, in the early cantos, those of Francesco Mazzoni [1965–85], but also to the interpretive paraphrases found in the Bosco/Reggio commentary [1979]). We decided early on that we would not consult contemporary verse translations until after we had finished our work, so as to keep other voices out of our ears.

  Several friends and colleagues have helped us in our task. Lauren Scancarelli Seem, administrative coordinator of the Princeton Dante Project, was our first reader, making a number of suggestions for changes. Margherita Frankel, a veteran Dantist as well as a good friend, gave us a close reading and made many valuable criticisms to which we have attended. The poet Frederick Tibbetts lent us his exacting ear and made dozens of helpful suggestions. Lino Pertile, the Dante scholar at Harvard University, also combed through our text and made a number of helpful suggestions. The paperback edition benefitted from the eagle eye of Peter D’Epiro, who caught a number of slips that have been corrected in this printing. Our greatest debt is to Robert Fagles, who went through this translation verse by verse and made many hundreds of comments in our margins. To have had such attentive advice from the most favored translator of Homer of our day has been our extraordinary fortune and pleasure.

  Our goal has been to offer a clear translation, even of unclear passages. We have also tried to be as compact as possible—not an easy task, either. It is our hope that the reader will find this translation a helpful bridge to the untranslatable magnificence of Dante’s poem.

  February 1997 (Florence)–February 1998 (Tortola)

  For this reprinting of the Anchor Books edition, we have made about one hundred and fifty changes in the translation, mainly affecting phrasing and punctuation. There are also some five or six changes in the notes.

  November 2010 (Hopewell)

  TABLE OF ABBREVIATIONS & LIST OF COMMENTATORS

  * * *

  1. Dante’s works:

  Conv. Convivio

  Dve De vulgari eloquentia

  Egl. Egloghe

  Epist. Epistole

  Inf. Inferno

  Mon. Monarchia

  Par. Paradiso

  Purg. Purgatorio

  Quest. Questio de aqua et terra

  Rime Rime

  Rime dub. Rime dubbie

  VN Vita nuova

  Detto Il Detto d’Amore (“attributable to Dante”)

  Fiore Il Fiore (“attributable to Dante”)

  2. Commentators on the Commedia (these texts are all either currently available or, in the case of Landino, Bennassuti, and Provenzal, should one day be available, in the database known as the Dartmouth Dante Project; dates, particularly of the early commentators, are often approximate):

  Jacopo Alighieri (1322) (Inferno only)

  L’anonimo lombardo (1322) (Latin) (Purgatorio only)

  Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli (1324) (Latin) (Inferno only)

  Jacopo della Lana (1324)

  Guido da Pisa (1327) (Latin) (Inferno only)

  L’Ottimo (1333)

  L’anonimo selmiano (1337) (Inferno only)

  Pietro di Dante (1340) (Latin) [also Inferno of 2nd & 3rd redactions]

  Il codice cassinese (1350?) (Latin)

  Giovanni Boccaccio (1373) (Inferno I–XVII only)

  Benvenuto da Imola (1380) (Latin)

  Francesco da Buti (1385)

  L’anonimo fiorentino (1400)

  Giovanni da Serravalle (1416) (Latin)

  Guiniforto Barzizza (1440) (Inferno only)

  *Cristoforo Landino (1481)

  Alessandro Vellutello (1544)

  Bernardino Daniello (1568)

  Lodovico Castelvetro (1570) (Inferno I–XXIX only)

  Pompeo Venturi (1732)

  Baldassare Lombardi (1791)

  Luigi Portirelli (1804)

  Paolo Costa (1819)

  Gabriele Rossetti (1826–40) (Inferno & Purgatorio only)

  Niccolò Tommaseo (1837)

  Raffaello Andreoli (1856)

  *Luigi Bennassuti (1864)

  Henry W. Longfellow (1867) (English)

  Gregorio Di Siena (1867) (Inferno only)

  Brunone Bianchi (1868)

  G. A. Scartazzini (1874; but the 2nd ed. of 1900 is used)

  Giuseppe Campi (1888)

  Gioachino Berthier (1892)

  Giacomo Poletto (1894)

  H. Oelsner (1899) (English)

  H. F. Tozer (1901) (English)

  John Ruskin (1903) (English; not in fact a “commentary”)

  John S. Carroll (1904) (English)

  Francesco Torraca (1905)

  C. H. Grandgent (1909) (English)

  Enrico Mestica (1921)

  Casini-Barbi (1921)

  Carlo Steiner (1921)

  Isidoro Del Lungo (1926)

  Scartazzini-Vandelli (1929)

  Carlo Grabher (1934)

  Ernesto Trucchi (1936)

  *Dino Provenzal (1938)

  Luigi Pietrobono (1946)

  Attilio Momigliano (1946)

  Manfredi Porena (1946)

  Natalino Sapegno (1955)

  Daniele Mattalia (1960)

  Siro A. Chimenz (1962)

  Giovanni Fallani (1965)

  Giorgio Padoan (1967) (Inferno I–VIII only)

  Giuseppe Giacalone (1968)

  Charles Singleton (1970) (English)

  Bosco-Reggio (1979)

  Pasquini-Quaglio (1982)

  *Not yet available

  NB: All references to other works (e.g., Mazz.1967.1) are keyed to the List of Works Cited at the back of this volume, with the exception of references to commentaries contained in the Dartmouth Dante Project database, accessible online (telnet library.dartmouth.edu; at the prompt type: connect dante). Informational notes derived from Paget Toynbee’s Concise Dante Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (Oxford: Clarendon, 1914) are followed by the siglum (T). References to the Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–78) are indicated by the abbreviation ED. Commentaries by Robert Hollander are (at times) shorter versions of materials found in the Princeton Dante Project, a multimedia edition of the Commedia currently including most materials relevant to Inferno (the last two cantiche are under development). Subscription (without charge to the user) is possible at www.princeton.edu/dante.

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  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  What is a “great book”? It is probably impossible to define the concept analytically to anyone’s satisfaction, but it may be described pragmatically: a work that is loved, over time, by millions of more-or-less ordinary readers and by thousands of scholars. Dante, by the time he was writing the fourth canto of Inferno, had already decided he was writing such a book. He sets his name down as one of the six all-time great writers: only Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Lucan have preceded him (he will later add Statius). Unspeakably self-assured as this poet may seem, many today would now shorten that list, perhaps even to two: Homer and Dante. His self-confidence may seem overweening, but he was even more of a prophet than he realized.

  In about 1306, having entered his forties, he set about work on his Comedy. By 1295 he had written a “little book” (the nomenclature is his own), The New Life,
thirty-one of his lyric poems surrounded by a governing prose commentary that almost explains the eventual meaning of his love for a young woman of Florence named Beatrice, who had died in 1290 at the age of twenty-five. We know nothing absolutely certain about her, whether she was an actual woman (if so, probably a member of the Portinari family, and then almost certainly married) or whether she is a fictitious lady of the sort that love-poets invented in order to have a subject to write about. The text, on the other hand, makes it clear that we are to treat her as historical, and also suggests that we are to understand that she means more than she seems, for she is ineluctably joined with the Trinity, and in particular with the life of Christ. Dante seems completely aware of the radical newness of a lady loaded with such lofty theological meaning in the tradition of vernacular poetry of love. That is, he knows that what he is proposing is out of bounds. And this is why he is usually so very diffident in his remarks, forcing us to draw some rather disquieting conclusions about the nature of the very special kind of love that eventually informs his praise of Beatrice.

  Before he began work on his “theological epic,” the Comedy, he had also written major parts of two other works, one a presentation of his ideas about eloquence in the vernacular, De vulgari eloquentia, the second, Convivio, a lengthy study of moral philosophy (in the form of commentary to his own odes), of which he had completed four of the projected fifteen “treatises.” He had been actively involved in the often bitterly contested political life of Florence, at that time one of the most important European cities, swollen with new wealth and consequent political power. At a time when that city had only six of them, he served the customary two-month term as one of its priors, the highest political office in the city. By 1302, having inherited the wrong political identity, he lost practically everything when his party, the White Guelph faction, was outfoxed by the Black Guelphs, supported by the allied forces of Pope Boniface VIII and the French king. He was exiled in 1302 and never returned home again. He then lived a mainly itinerant life in northern Italy, with two longish stays in Verona and a final one in Ravenna, where he died of malarial fever in September 1321 at the age of fifty-six.

  The political situation of northern Italy during his lifetime was distinguished by factionalism and chaos. The emperors who were supposed to govern all of Europe had, for centuries, mainly avoided their Italian responsibilities. The last of them to rule in Italy was Frederick II (we hear of him in Inferno X and XIII), and he, while one of the greatest figures in Europe, was not a leader to Dante’s liking. Dead in 1250, Frederick was the last emperor to govern from Italy. Dante hoped for an imperial restoration of the proper kind, and, to everyone’s amazement, including his own, had his hopes rewarded when the newly crowned Henry VII, a compromise candidate from Luxembourg, allowed to become emperor primarily because of the machinations of Pope Clement V, descended into the peninsula to rule Europe from Italy in 1310. When his military expedition eventually failed because of his death in 1313, Dante’s imperial hopes were dealt a terrible blow, but not finally dashed. To the end of his days (and in the text of Paradiso XXVII and XXX) he insisted on believing that a new “Augustus” would fulfill God’s design for Italy and Europe.