Books in Brief.

Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri, translated by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander (Doubleday, 56 pp., $35)

With this Purgatorio, the Hollanders take a large step forward with one of the most exciting literary and scholarly projects of our time. The Hollander Divine Comedy is the definitive translation; its copious notes are both invaluable and civilized. With regard to Dante scholarship, I do not hesitate to apply to the Hollanders what Dante said of Aristotle in the Inferno: They are "the master[s] of those who know." Readers who do not know the Purgatorio should do themselves a great favor by tackling this book. They may find that they prefer it to the Inferno: The Inferno is sublime, but the Purgatorio is beautiful. The Purgatorio is Mozart to the Inferno's Beethoven.

The souls in Hell are there because in life they refused to incline toward the greater good; but the souls in Purgatory have chosen the greater good, and will be saved. In Dante's Purgatory, souls eagerly want their spiritual dross to be cleansed away; appropriately, the poetry expresses a sweet longing, and whereas the colors of Hell are primarily red and black, those of Purgatory are mostly pastel blues and greens.

Beautifully, the Purgatorio is full of poets: Virgil, of course, whose relation to Dante is one of the great things in literature; Statius; and Dante's models and colleagues, Sordello, Guido Guinizzelli, Casella, and Arnaut Daniel, whom Dante called "the better craftsman" (il miglior fabbro). Their love and admiration is striking. And here we are invited to consider the religion of Amor, a new human emotion born in 11th-century Provence that changed the Western world. Its new attitude toward women -- viewing them as the refiners of male manners - - still distinguishes the West from all other civilizations ancient and modern.

Dante knew that sexual love could be dangerous to the soul, because so powerful. Yet he was strikingly kind to it, certainly compared with later moralists. His great adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca are kindly treated in the Inferno; and in the Purgatorio Lust is near the top of the mountain, preferable to, lower down, the remaining six deadly sins. I think this corresponds to our own intuitive valuations. Perhaps Dante's own temptation in "the sweet world," as he calls it, was not so bad after all. We hope to have the Hollanders' Paradiso soon, culminating their own great project, and ours.

-- jeffrey hart