![]() ![]() One of the first maps of Dante’s hell (top) appeared in Sandro Botticelli’s series of ninety illustrations, which the Renaissance great and fellow Florentine made on commission for Lorenzo de’Medici in the 1480s and 90s.īotticelli’s “Chart of Hell,” writes Deborah Parker, “has long been lauded as one of the most compelling visual representations… a panoptic display of the descent made by Dante and Virgil through the ‘abysmal valley of pain.’” Below it, we see one of Antonio Manetti’s 1506 woodcut illustrations, a series of cross-sections and detailed views. ![]() Indeed, readers of Dante have been inspired to map his Inferno for almost as long as they have been inspired to translate it into other languages-and we might consider these maps more-or-less-faithful visual translations of the Inferno’s descriptions. While readers can follow the poem’s vivid action without visual aids, these lend to the text a kind of imaginative materiality: saying yes, of course, this is a real place-see, it’s right here! We can suspend our disbelief, perhaps, in Catholic doctrine and, doubly, in Dante’s weirdly officious, comically bureaucratic, scheme of hell. The sole advantage, perhaps, of the translation I first encountered lies in its use of illustrations, maps, and diagrams. I’m far from an expert by any stretch, but was much relieved to later discover John Ciardi’s more faithful English rendering, which immediately impresses upon the senses and the memory, as in the description above in the first stanzas of Canto II. I labored through the text and did not much enjoy it. Gone is the rhyme scheme, self-contained stanzas, and poetic compression, replaced by wordiness, antiquated diction, and needless density. The first Dante that came my way-the unabridged Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed English translation-renders the poet’s terza rimain leaden prose, which may well be a literary betrayal. Maybe it’s fitting that the proverb about translators as traitors comes from Italian. Reading Dante’s Inferno, and Divine Comedygenerally, can seem a daunting task, what with the book’s wealth of allusion to 14th century Florentine politics and medieval Catholic theology. Shall here set down, nor hesitate, nor err. Of the journey and the pity, which memory The brown air drew downĪll the earth’s creatures, calling them to restįrom their day-roving, as I, one man alone,
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