Dante's divine comedy in America.

The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl, New York: Random House, 2003. 400 pp.

Inferno, by Dante Alighieri; edited by Matthew Pearl; translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, New York: Modern Library, 2003. 432 pp.

Dante's Gallery of Rogues: 36 Color Reproductions of Original Paintings Illustrating Dante's Inferno, by Vincenzo R. Latella; edited by Anne Paolucci, Middle Village, N.Y.: Council on National Literatures, 2001. 119 pp.

ALTHOUGH DANTE HIMSELF never used the term "divine comedy," it may be the most far-reaching to have worked its way into popular culture. Dante's first biographer, Giovanni Boccaccio, coined the words to explain how Dante's son was mystically led after the death of his father to discover the last missing cantos of the Paradiso walled up in Dante's study. Despite the complaints of Voltaire and Machiavelli about Dante's "dreadful voice," the impact of Dante's Commedia has grown over the centuries down to our schismatic and frightful times.

Advertising for a popular movie, Sister Act, starring Whoopi Goldberg, billed it as a "divine comedy," while another writer has even come up with a do-it-yourself Dante work-book to "help you explore the way your human fallibility--your sinfulness--works to prevent you from understanding how to love." (1) The impact of the Divine Comedy in music is likewise significant--everything from Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini symphonic tone poem to a United Kingdom rock group called "Divine Comedy." The Florentine also exerts significant influence not only ecumenically, but also in interfaith ways. The Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, for example, in his novella about the death of Anwar Sadat, The Day the Leader Was Killed, presents a character who sees the inscription from Dante's hell "ENTER HERE WITHOUT HOPE" on a sign over a food company in Cairo, Egypt. (2)

While Dante's influence persists in many ways, Matthew Pearl shows in The Dante Club that the Florentine met resistance at a crucial period in the development of American literature. A Harvard graduate and recipient of the 1998 Dante prize from the Dante Society of America, Pearl in his novel has masterfully rescued a vital and yet almost forgotten phase of Dante's impact on American culture. He adroitly interweaves a significant but neglected part of literary history with a subplot of serial murders and intrigue worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dante himself. Pearl mixes the literary politics of translation presided over by the "Dante Club," an aloof, patrician group of Harvard "grey-beard, triple-named" men of letters, with sensational murders modeled on the punishments of Dante's Inferno. In Boston in the mid-1860s who would commit such horrendous crimes imitating in real life what Dante presents in the afterlife of the Inferno?

The insular, Brahmin professors--James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--gather as the "Dante Club" to discuss canto by canto Longfellow's translation, yet reluctantly to help the Boston police solve the Dantesque murders. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous Harvard professor of anatomy and physiology, observes that "he was part of the Fireside Poets ... the New England saints. Whatever their name, they were the top literary contingent of the country." Holmes describes Lowell as the "poet, professor and editor, idly twisting the long tusks of his mustache." When Longfellow walks through the streets of Cambridge, "people whispered, children threw themselves into his arms, hats were lifted in such great numbers that it seemed all of Middlesex Country had simultaneously entered a chapel."

Longfellow and friends participate in a sustained effort to make the Florentine as accessible to an American audience as Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible; yet, they also wonder who in their midst knows Dante so well that the Inferno's punishments are reenacted in chilling detail--for example, a Boston judge who upholds the Fugitive Slave Act consumed by maggots; a noted clergyman buried head downward with his feet afire; and another victim gruesomely butchered as a schismatic.

It turns out that the crimes are violent reactions to Harvard's institutional conspiracy against Longfellow's translation. The college administration opposes a widely available, University-sanctioned, translation from Italian, a so-called inferior "living language." They believe that Longfellow's efforts represent a strain of "barbaric poetry" unequal to the beauty of Latin and Greek in translation. This aversion, however, disguises also a deeper suspicion of Dante's Roman Catholicism. Harvard still retains a residual sense of puritan election in the mid-nineteenth century. Holmes notes he had adopted the "new religion" of Unitarianism and found a "kind of shelter in reasoned religion rather than the fear of God."

The novel presents the conflicts between the "Dante Club" and a Harvard officialdom bent on preserving the watered-down puritan patrimony. This amounts to an institutional prejudice against Irish Catholic hooligans, Italian Papists, and runaway slaves flooding into Boston and despoiling Harvard's Brahmin purity. Dante accentuates these troubling patterns. According to Augustus Manning, head of the Harvard corporation, Dante represents "literary charlantry" and "has no place on the book-shelves of upright American citizens." Harvard President Hill complains to James Russell Lowell,

  "And a work like this so ineptly titled a 'Comedy'! It's medieval,
  it's scholastic, and ..."

    Lowell retorts suddenly, "Catholic."

    This shut Hill up. "That is what you mean Reverend President. That
  it's too Italian, too Catholic for Harvard College?"

    Hill raises a sly white eyebrow, "You must own that such frightful
  notions of God could not be sustained to our Protestant ears."

Notwithstanding such ingrained attitudes, the "Dante Club" is determined through the translation to make Harvard the center of Dante studies in the United States. They and their later successors, such as Charles Eliot Norton, Edward Moore, Charles Grandgent, T.S. Eliot, George Santayana, Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Fitzgerald, eventually vanquish early prejudices. A century after Longfellow, T.S. Eliot, the high Churchman and Anglophile, receding as far as he could from his American puritan roots, proclaimed that "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third." Pearl's detailed knowledge about Dante and his significant place in American literary history anticipates Eliot's comment. Professor George Ticknor tells Longfellow, "Shakespeare bids us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of others, bids us know one another."

Longfellow's tedious translation is seminal in the recognition of Longfellow by his English and European peers, and the burnishing of Harvard's reputation as an international, cosmopolitan center of learning on a par with Oxford and Cambridge. Notwithstanding C.S. Lewis's admiration for Longfellow's spooky narrative poems such as Evangeline and the Song of Hiawatha, his translation of Dante is his great achievement. Indeed, Longfellow's translation was to earn him the esteem of Alfred Lord Tennyson, who in Pearl's novel writes letters of praise to Longfellow.

In addition to The Dante Club, Pearl has also edited Longfellow's Inferno, out of print since the 1950s. By the standards of later translations, however, Longfellow weighs down the Commedia in a ponderous Elizabethan idiom. William Dean Howells's in the Nation praised Longfellow for capturing not only Dante's grandeur, but also the grace and the simplicity of his poetry. Howells's judgment, however, does not measure up in the teaching of Longfellow's translation or reading it aloud. Try as he might, Longfellow cannot make Dante in translation sound like Hamlet or Othello. Longfellow's Elizabethan English does not convey the precision of Dante's lines. Shelby Foote once wrote Walker Percy that Dante was a "magician" possessed with succinctness and power conveyed in a sparse Hemingwayesque style that makes him "modern in every sense as modern can be." (3) Longfellow's Commedia, however, does not possess such qualities, and the English diction is often clumsy. Only a Longfellow could call a stream in the Inferno a "tristam brooklet." When students study other translations such as the enduring ones by John D. Sinclair, Lawrence Binyon, Charles Singleton, or the recent one by acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky, the English is clearer, the lines more direct. The reader in effect experiences Dante's vigor, which is the essence of his succinct poetic powers.

This quality of precision eludes Longfellow, as does the equally important fourfold vertical allegorical meaning of the poem that Dante sets forth in his letter to his patron, Can Grande della Scala. In his notes to the Commedia Longfellow places Dante in the canonical community of native writers of English literature such as Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer; in addition, he lists learned allusions; he catalogs comparative images; he parallels similar lines. And he painstakingly shows Dante's vital significance in interpreting English and American literature.

As important as Longfellow's observations are, he often omits or ignores the vital allegorical or theological import of the Commedia. Longfellow writes almost exclusively in the idiom of comparative literature and literary history. The more ambitious, allegorical interpretation of the Commedia would be taken up later after Longfellow by mid-twentieth century English "retro-medievalists" such as Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers. Largely because of their Anglo-Catholicism, they all help to reveal the inexhaustible theological meaning of the poem as a function of the allegory that Dante in his genius embedded in the poem. While Longfellow's translation and notes are historically important for nineteenth-century American literary history, Dorothy Sayers's English rendering with commentary illuminate the moral and theological meaning of the Commedia for readers enduring the "hells on earth" of the latter half of the twentieth century. She understood what Boccaccio said of Dante's masterpiece, "it is clear that not only is poetry theology but also that theology is poetry." (4)

Sayers began translating Dante as Nazi bombs rained on London during World War II and Eliot was redacting Dante's mystical vision of Paradise into the spiritual poetry of the Four Quartets. Sayers's inexpensive translation constituted a "cultural event" that, according to Professor Barbara Reynolds, insured that Dante had "more English-speaking readers in the last forty years than he had in the preceding six and a quarter centuries." (5) Moreover, Sayers's notes provide needed background about obscure historical characters and references; more importantly, the commentary, the detailed drawings, and the cosmological diagrams enable the allegorical meaning to take on a concreteness and an incarnational quality that convey the essence of Dante. Sayers painstakingly shows in her commentary what James Russell Lowell remarks in The Dante Club: "We read Paradise Lost as a poem but Dante's Comedy as a chronicle of our inner lives."

Vincenzo R. Latella's handsome book of paintings of Dante's hell, Dante's Gallery of Rogues, edited by Anne Paolucci, also helps to illuminate Lowell's comment. The color paintings show the Inferno's enduring visual impact and that Dante meant the poem to arouse spiritual reflection and change. William Blake and Gustave Dore, among others, likewise turned Dante's graphic descriptions into memorable scenes of lasting influence. Dore's sparse, detailed drawings from the Commedia are invaluable in teaching Dante to a generation of students whose perceptions television has shaped. Allen Mendelbaum's translation also contains minimalist, yet revealing drawings. Latella's paintings are also striking; unlike the available editions containing Dore's drawings, Anne Paolucci's introduction to Latella's paintings provides an overview. In especial, her interpretative essay lays out for the non-specialist the overall ethical cosmology of Latella's vivid scenes from the Inferno. Latella's paintings, Pearl's Dante Club, and Longfellow's translation show the ongoing and enduring influence of Dante, as well as the initial negative aversion to the Commedia at Harvard. The divine light that moves the "sun and other stars," which Dante sees at the end of his journey, is badly needed in our own times too often shaded by the "dark wood" of sin and error.

1. www.wfzimmerman.com/index.php?topic=Dante. 2. Naguib Mahfouz, The Day the Leader Was Shot (New York, 2000), 10. 3. Quoted in Jay Tolson, ed., The Correspondence of Percy Foote and Walker Percy (New York, 1998), 210. 4. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Life of Dante, translated by Vincenzo Zin Bollettino (New York, 1940), 60. 5. Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter With Dante (Kent, Ohio, 1989), xii.

BENJAMIN B. ALEXANDER is Professor of English and Humanities at Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Steubenville, Ohio.