Reading Dante by Prue Shaw

Author:Prue Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2013-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Not a bad stab at it. But Byron’s lines seem overripe compared with Dante’s. Byron adds words (“soft hour,” “day’s decay”). He uses more emphatic verbs to describe the emotions (“are torn apart,” “makes him start”). His alliterations verge on the heavy-handed (“sail the seas,” “which wakes the wish,” “dying day’s decay”). The delicate musicality of Dante’s lines, with their distillation of feeling reaching a high point in the last line of each tercet, is diluted and at the same time coarsened. Dante’s simplicity and intensity have been overlaid with a more self-consciously “romantic” melancholy, filtered through an early-nineteenth-century sensibility. The expressions “overegging the pudding,” or “laying it on a bit thick,” come to mind. Dante is purer, more quintessential, closer to universal emotions.

A few hours later, just one canto on, Dante plots the time in purgatory against the time in Italy on a global clock. The concubine of ancient Tithonus is Aurora, or dawn. Tithonus is ancient because Aurora asked the gods to give her lover eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. The constellation of Scorpio is visible in the pale eastern sky. There is an unmistakable surge of linguistic power and energy as Dante hits his stride:

La concubina di Titone antico

già s’imbiancava al balco d’orïente,

fuor de le braccia del suo dolce amico;

di gemme la sua fronte era lucente,

poste in figura del freddo animale

che con la coda percuote la gente . . . (Purg. ix, 1–6)

(The concubine of ancient Tithonus was already growing pale at the balcony of the east, rising from the arms of her sweet lover; her brow shone with gems, set in the shape of the cold animal that strikes people with its tail . . .)

We recognise what Seamus Heaney, talking about true poetry, calls “forcibleness . . . the attribute that makes you feel the lines have been decreed, that there has been no fussy picking and choosing of words but instead a surge of utterance.” The lines pose an interpretative puzzle, about which commentators disagree. This hardly seems to matter.

Time is sequence, movement, progression, succession, change. In human life we pass from generation to corruption, from birth to death, as a continuous sequence measured in hours, days, seasons, years. Time is linear (a forward movement), but its patterns are also cyclical: “grief returns with the revolving year,” in Shelley’s beautiful phrase. This same combination of linearity and circularity shapes the narrative movement of Dante’s journey. There is forward momentum through time, as Dante journeys and as we read. And there is a spiralling movement through space, as he circles down through hell and up the mountain of purgatory on a continuous helical trajectory. There is also what we might call a spatial organisation of the narrative and its component parts which is reminiscent of painting or architecture. This too has a temporal dimension.

Medieval narrative artists (fresco painters) could arrange their sequence of events spatially in two dimensions, and sometimes even in three, in order to create meaning. The frescoes in

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