The cruelest month: Lasciate ogne speranza

Like so many of the poems I’m sharing for NationalPoetry Month, I was first introduced to Inferno in high school. It happened because I was taking both a lit class and honors English, And both courses (taught by Mr. Sheinkopf) were reading Macbeth (at different times). So Mr. Sheinkopf had Griff Owens and me read Dante instead of Shakespeare twice over.

Maybe he was planning on giving the same tests & didn’t want us coasting.

At any rate, it was the translation by John Ciardi, which I carried around with me for years and years, finally replacing it a while ago with one recommended to me by a colleague (a software developer, as it happens) when he heard me mooching around muttering about needing to refresh my vision of Hell. This one is by two Princetonians, Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander.

I really like this edition because it has the Italian and English on facing pages, just inviting you to make the connection, and luring you into speaking the Italian out loud. Jeez, it’s luscious.

I’m giving you the opening tercets to Cantos I and III, in Italian and the Hollanders’ translation: I is where Dante wakes up to find himself on the cusp of Hell; III is the sign telling us that we’ve officially arrived at Hell.

I

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;

ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,

dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.

***

Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood,

For the straight way was lost

Ah, how hard it is to tell

The nature of that wood, savage, dense & harsh—

The very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.

But to set forth the good I found

I will recount the other things I saw.

III

"Per me si va ne la città dolente,

per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

per me si va tra la perduta gente.

"Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;

fecemi la divina podestate,

la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore.

"Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

se non etterne, e io etterno duro.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate."

***

“Through me the way to the city of woe,

Through me the way to eternal pain,

Through me the way among the Lost.

“Justice moved my maker on high.

Divine power made me,

Wisdom supreme, & primal love.

“Before me nothing was but things eternal,

& I endure eternally.

Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”

You may recall that Dante’s guide through both Inferno and Purgatorio is our friend Vergil—considered by the Church to be essentially a righteous pagan—the kind of guy who would have been a Christian except that he predated Christ (70 BCE – 19 BCE). Once they make it through Purgatory, Vergil hands off to Beatrice, Dante’s love, who becomes his guide through Paradiso.

I’d have given you someone reading this in Italian, but I can’t find anything. Damn.

There was an episode of the TV show Northern Exposure that I caught once (not being a regular viewer) that captured my fancy: Ruth-Anne, the aging store-keeper, wants to learn Italian so she can read Dante. Only it seems that she just doesn’t have the gift for languages. But Shelly, the ditzy blonde waitress, turns out to be fluent in it, and the episode closes with Shelly reading it to a rapt Ruth-Anne.

I absolutely know how she felt. It’s enchanting.