Definitive Dante.

Paradiso, by Dante, translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Doubleday, 915 pp., $40)

FOR many years, Robert Hollander, professor of European literature at Princeton, has been working on explanatory notes for this edition of The Divine Comedy, and cooperating with his wife, Jean, on a verse translation. During the 1970s, because Dartmouth at that time had pioneered the academic use of computers, Hollander created the Dartmouth Dante Project, which made available the best Dante commentary since the 14th century. The Hollander Inferno appeared in 2000, to be followed by the Purgatorio in 2003. And now we have the Paradiso.

The consensus is firm that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are the three great poets of the Western world. T. S. Eliot's judgment stands: To "take the Comedy as a whole, you can compare it to nothing but the entire dramatic work of Shakespeare.... Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern [postclassical] world between them; there is no third." Homer belongs with those two great poets both for his achievement and for his civilizational importance. Greek schoolboys read the Iliad and the Odyssey for instruction in arete (excellence of character); these epics provided vivid examples of its presence or absence in particular heroes. Aristotle's Ethics summed this up. Plato, who wanted to be "a better teacher than Homer," established a rival form of arete, heroic philosophy in Socrates (see Werner Jaeger's Paideia). Dante brings to us the great epic of Christian pilgrimage. To these, plus Shakespeare, I would add the epic of Moses, now available as The Five Books of Moses, translated and with indispensable notes by Robert Alter. Put all of these together and you are ready to become a citizen of the West.

For our time and for an incalculable future the Hollander edition of The Divine Comedy will be the one used by serious readers. When I taught the Humanities 1-2 course at Columbia during the later 1950s, we used the 1948 Sinclair edition, a prose translation that included brief explanatory notes. Charles Singleton's edition (1970-75), a prose translation with much more extensive notes, became the one used by advanced readers. Singleton has now been replaced by the Hollander edition, a verse translation with far superior notes.

Dante's terza rima is impossible to recreate satisfactorily in English, but the Hollanders have produced a fine verse substitute. Our contemporary sensibility prescribes a poetic idiom that retains the virtues of prose, and the verse here reflects this with tercets nudged into verse by their stanza form and unobtrusive meter. Let us begin with the famous opening of the Inferno, with the pilgrim Dante lost in the darkest of woods:

   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
   and harsh--
   the very thought of it renews my fear!

That fifth line is hypermetric for good reasons, as is the original: esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte. This must be the greatest midlife crisis in history.

The pilgrim's journey out of pain, danger, and confusion will be long and hard, through Hell and purgation. Dante's first instructor is Virgil; and his portrait of Virgil here is not chiefly an allegorical device, but an admiring presentation of what the author of the Aeneid might indeed be like. Virgil cannot guide the pilgrim to the end, because he has no knowledge of it; so, after a moving separation from his great teacher, Dante must go on with another guide. Hollander sees that Beatrice is not an intercessor (Mary), but a rebuker, like Jesus Christ (see esp. Purg. 31: 25-30). Instead of using Jesus himself, which would present insuperable difficulties, Dante uses Beatrice, implying that the flawed Church of his time inhabited its own dark wood.

With knowledge that goes beyond Virgil's, Dante sets himself the problem of rising to that unique occasion, a poem about the journey through Heaven to God. Even to state his challenge must cause surprise. He is to go where no poet has ever gone before, to the source of the "Love that moves the sun and all the other stars." Is it possible to write about that? Babe Ruth legendarily pointed his bat at the fence beyond the outfield, and then hit the ball over that fence. In Canto 100 at the end of the Paradiso, Dante, in Eliot's judgment, achieved "the highest point that poetry has reached or ever can reach." A few tercets from the Hollander translation will have to suffice here:

   O Light exalted beyond mortal thought,
   grant that in memory I see again
   but one small part of how you then
   appeared ...

   In its depth I saw contained,
   by love into a single volume bound,
   the pages scattered through the universe:
   ...

   and each one seemed reflected by the
   other
   as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third
   seemed fire,
   equally breathed forth by one and by the
   other....

   within itself and in its very color,
   to be painted with our likeness,
   so that my sight was all absorbed in it.

Splendid as this new translation is, the endlessly valuable notes are what make this edition supplant all others. The commentary here has evolved not only from extensive research but also from the famous Dante Seminar Hollander has taught at Princeton for many years; famous, yes, and famously demanding. At the annual Princeton Homecoming parade, most returning Princeton alumni march with their classes. But alumni of the Dante Seminar march as a separate group. Now that Professor Hollander has retired, a bronze plaque commemorating the Seminar has been added to his seminar room.