Hell_Inferno, Divine Comedy(神曲地狱篇)

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The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy,

Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno]

Dante Aligheri

Translated by Charles Eliot Norton

The Divine Comedy

To JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

It is a happiness for me to connect this volume with the memory of my

friend and master from youth. I was but a beginner in the study of the

Divine Comedy when I first had his incomparable aid in the understanding

of it. During the last year of his life he read the proofs of this volume, to

what great advantage to my work may readily be conceived.

When, in the early summer of this year, the printing of the Purgatory

began, though illness made it an exertion to him, he continued this act of

friendship, and did not cease till, at the fifth canto, he laid down the pencil

forever from his dear and honored hand.

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,

1 October, 1891

The text followed in this translation is, in general, that of Witte. In a

few cases I have preferred the readings which the more recent researches

of the Rev. Dr. Edward Moore, of Oxford, seem to have established as

correct.

The Divine Comedy

CONTENTS

CANTO I. Dante, astray in a wood, reaches the foot of a hill which he

begins to ascend; he is hindered by three beasts; he turns back and is met

by Virgil, who proposes to guide him into the eternal world.

CANTO II. Dante, doubtful of his own powers, is discouraged at the

outset.--Virgil cheers him by telling him that he has been sent to his aid by

a blessed Spirit from Heaven.--Dante casts off fear, and the poets proceed.

CANTO III. The gate of Hell. Virgil leads Dante in.--The punishment

of the neither good nor bad.--Acheron, and the sinners on its bank.--

Charon.--Earthquake.--Dante swoons.

CANTO IV. The further side of Acheron.--Virgil leads Dante into

Limbo, the First Circle of Hell, containing the spirits of those who lived

virtuously but without Christianity.--Greeting of Virgil by his fellow

poets.--They enter a castle, where are the shades of ancient worthies.--

Virgil and Dante depart.

CANTO V. The Second Circle: Carnal sinners.--Minos.--Shades

renowned of old.--Francesca da Rimini.

CANTO VI. The Third Circle: the Gluttonous.--Cerberus.--Ciacco.

CANTO VII. The Fourth Circle: the Avaricious and the Prodigal.--

Pluto.--Fortune.--The Styx.--The Fifth Circle: the Wrathful and the Sullen.

CANTO VIII. The Fifth Circle.--Phlegyas and his boat.--Passage of

the Styx.--Filippo Argenti.--The City of Dis.--The demons refuse entrance

to the poets.

CANTO IX. The City of Dis.--Eriehtho.--The Three Furies.--The

Heavenly Messenger.--The Sixth Circle: Heresiarchs.

CANTO X. The Sixth Circle: Heresiarchs.--Farinata degli Uberti.--

Cavalcante Cavalcanti.--Frederick II.

CANTO XI. The Sixth Circle: Heretics.--Tomb of Pope Anastasius.--

Discourse of Virgil on the divisions of the lower Hell.

CANTO XII. First round of the Seventh Circle: those who do violence

to others.--Tyrants and Homicides.--The Minotaur.--The Centaurs.--

Chiron.--Nessus.--The River of Boiling Blood, and the Sinners in it.

CANTO XIII. Second round of the Seventh Circle: those who have

The Divine Comedy

done violence to themselves and to their goods.--The Wood of Self-

murderers.--The Harpies.--Pier della Vigne.--Lano of Siena and others.

CANTO XIV. Third round of the Seventh Circle those who have done

violence to God.--The Burning Sand.--Capaneus.--Figure of the Old Man

in Crete.--The Rivers of Hell.

CANTO XV. Third round of the Seventh Circle: those who have done

violence to Nature.--Brunetto Latini.--Prophecies of misfortune to Dante.

CANTO XVI. Third round of the Seventh Circle: those who have done

violence to Nature.--Guido Guerra, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi and Jacopo

Rusticucci.--The roar of Phlegethon as it pours downward.- -The cord

thrown into the abyss.

CANTO XVII. Third round of the Seventh Circle: those who have

done violence to Art.--Geryon.--The Usurers.--Descent to the Eighth

Circle.

CANTO XVIII. Eighth Circle: the first pit: Panders and Seducers.- -

Venedico Caccianimico.--Jason.--Second pit: false flatterers.-- Alessio

Interminei.--Thais.

CANTO XIX. Eighth Circle: third pit: Simonists.--Pope Nicholas III

CANTO XX. Eighth Circle: fourth pit: Diviners, Soothsayers, and

Magicians.--Amphiaraus.--Tiresias.--Aruns.--Manto.--Eurypylus.--

Michael Scott.--Asolente.

CANTO XXI. Eighth Circle: fifth pit: Barrators.--A magistrate of

Lucca.--The Malebranche.--Parley with them.

CANTO XXII. Eighth Circle: fifth pit: Barrators.--Ciampolo of

Navarre.--Brother Gomita.--Michael Zanche.--Fray of the Malebranche.

CANTO XXIII. Eighth Circle. Escape from the fifth pit.--The sixth pit:

Hypocrites.--The Jovial Friars.--Caiaphas.--Annas.--Frate Catalano.

CANTO XXIV. Eighth Circle. The poets climb from the sixth pit.--

Seventh pit: Fraudulent Thieves.--Vanni Fucci.--Prophecy of calamity to

Dante.

CANTO XXV. Eighth Circle: seventh pit: Fraudulent Thieves.--

Cacus.--Agnello Brunellesehi and others.

CANTO XXVI. Eighth Circle: eighth pit: Fraudulent Counsellors.--

Ulysses and Diomed.

The Divine Comedy

CANTO XXVII. Eighth Circle: eighth pit: Fraudulent Counsellors.--

Guido da Montefeltro.

CANTO XXVIII. Eighth Circle: ninth pit: Sowers of discord and

schism.--Mahomet and Ali.--Fra Dolcino.--Pier da Medicina.-- Curio.--

Mosca.--Bertran de Born.

CANTO XXIX. Eighth Circle: ninth pit.--Geri del Bello.--Tenth pit:

Falsifiers of all sorts.--Griffolino of Mezzo.--Capocchio.

CANTO XXX. Eighth Circle: tenth pit: Falsifiers of all sorts.--

Myrrha.--Gianni Schiechi.--Master Adam.--Sinon of Troy.

CANTO XXXI. The Giants around the Eighth Circle.--Nimrod.--

Ephialtes.--Antiens sets the Poets down in the Ninth Circle.

CANTO XXXII. Ninth Circle: Traitors. First ring: Caina.--Counts of

Mangona.--Camicion de' Pazzi.--Second ring: Antenora.--Bocca degli

Abati.--Buoso da Duera.--Count Ugolino.

CANTO XXXIII. Ninth Circle: Traitors. Second ring: Antenora.--

Count Ugolino.--Third ring: Ptolomaea.--Brother Alberigo.--Branca d'

Oria.

CANTO XXXIV. Ninth Circle: Traitors. Fourth ring: Judecca.--

Lucifer.--Judas, Brutus and Cassius.--Centre of the universe.-- Passage

from Hell.--Ascent to the surface of the Southern hemisphere.

The Divine Comedy

INTRODUCTION.

So many versions of the Divine Comedy exist in English that a new

one might well seem needless. But most of these translations are in verse,

and the intellectual temper of our time is impatient of a transmutation in

which substance is sacrificed for form's sake, and the new form is itself

different from the original. The conditions of verse in different languages

vary so widely as to make any versified translation of a poem but an

imperfect reproduction of the archetype. It is like an imperfect mirror that

renders but a partial likeness, in which essential features are blurred or

distorted. Dante himself, the first modern critic, declared that "nothing

harmonized by a musical bond can be transmuted from its own speech

without losing all its sweetness and harmony," and every fresh attempt at

translation affords a new proof of the truth of his assertion. Each language

exhibits its own special genius in its poetic forms. Even when they are

closely similar in rhythmical method their poetic effect is essentially

different, their individuality is distinct. The hexameter of the Iliad is not

the hexameter of the Aeneid. And if this be the case in respect to related

forms, it is even more obvious in respect to forms peculiar to one language,

like the terza rima of the Italian, for which it is impossible to find a

satisfactory equivalent in another tongue.

If, then, the attempt be vain to reproduce the form or to represent its

effect in a translation, yet the substance of a poem may have such worth

that it deserves to be known by readers who must read it in their own

tongue or not at all. In this case the aim of the translator should he to

render the substance fully, exactly, and with as close a correspondence to

the tone and style of the original as is possible between prose and poetry.

Of the charm, of the power of the poem such a translation can give but an

inadequate suggestion; the musical bond was of its essence, and the loss of

the musical bond is the loss of the beauty to which form and substance

mutually contributed, and in which they were both alike harmonized and

sublimated. The rhythmic life of the original is its vital spirit, and the

translation losing this vital spirit is at best as the dull plaster cast to the

living marble or the breathing bronze. The intellectual substance is there;

The Divine Comedy

and if the work be good, something of the emotional quality may be

conveyed; the imagination may mould the prose as it moulded the verse,--

but, after all, "translations are but as turn-coated things at best," as Howell

said in one of his Familiar Letters.

No poem in any tongue is more informed with rhythmic life than the

Divine Comedy. And yet, such is its extraordinary distinction, no poem

has an intellectual and emotional substance more independent of its

metrical form. Its complex structure, its elaborate measure and rhyme,

highly artificial as they are, are so mastered by the genius of the poet as to

become the most natural expression of the spirit by which the poem is

inspired; while at the same time the thought and sentiment embodied in

the verse is of such import, and the narrative of such interest, that they do

not lose their worth when expressed in the prose of another tongue; they

still haye power to quicken imagination, and to evoke sympathy.

In English there is an excellent prose translation of the Inferno, by Dr.

John Carlyle, a man well known to the reader of his brother's

Correspondence. It was published forty years ago, but it is still

contemporaneous enough in style to answer every need, and had Dr.

Carlyle made a version of the whole poem I should hardly have cared to

attempt a new one. In my translation of the Inferno I am often Dr.

Carlyle's debtor. His conception of what a translation should be is very

much the same as my own. Of the Purgatorio there is a prose version

which has excellent qualities, by Mr. W. S. Dugdale. Another version of

great merit, of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A. J. Butler.

It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I owe much

to Mr. Butler's work. But through what seems to me occasional excess of

literal fidelity his English is now and then somewhat crabbed. "He

overacts the office of an interpreter," I cite again from Howell, "who doth

enslave himself too strictly to words or phrases. One may be so over-

punctual in words that he may mar the matter."

I have tried to be as literal in my translation as was consmstent with

good English, and to render Dante's own words in words as nearly

correspondent to them as the difference in the languages would permit.

But it is to be remembered that the familiar uses and subtle associations

The Divine Comedy

which give to words their full meaning are never absohitely the same in

two languages. Love in English not only SOUNDS but IS different from

amor in Latin, or amore in Italian. Even the most felicitous prose

translation must fail therefore at times to afford the entire and precise

meaning of the original.

Moreover, there are difficulties in Dante's poem for Italians, and there

are difficulties in the translation for English readers. These, where it

seemed needful, I have endeavored to explain in brief footnotes. But I

have desired to avoid distracting the attention of the reader from the

narrative, and have mainly left the understanding of it to his good sense

and perspicacity. The clearness of Dante's imaginative vision is so

complete, and the character of his narration of it so direct and simple, that

the difficulties in understanding his intention are comparatively few.

It is a noticeable fact that in by far the greater number of passages

where a doubt in regard to the interpretation exists, the obscurity lies in the

rhyme-word. For with all the abundant resources of the Italian tongue in

rhyme, and with all Dante's mastery of them, the truth still is that his triple

rhyme often compelled him to exact from words such service as they did

not naturally render and as no other poet had required of them. The

compiler of the Ottimo Commento records, in an often-cited passage, that

"I, the writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other

than he would, but that many a time and oft he had made words say for

him what they were not wont to express for other poets." The sentence has

a double truth, for it indicates not only Dante's incomparable power to

compel words to give out their full meaning, but also his invention of new

uses for them, his employment of them in unusual significations or in

forms hardly elsewhere to be found. These devices occasionally interfere

with the limpid flow of his diction, but the difficulties of interpretation to

which they give rise serve rather to mark the prevailing clearness and

simplicity of his expression than seriously to impede its easy and

unperplexed current. There are few sentences in the Divina Commedia in

which a difficulty is occasioned by lack of definiteness of thought or

distinctness of image.

A far deeper-lying and more pervading source of imperfect

The Divine Comedy

comprehension of the poem than any verbal difficulty exists in the double

or triple meaning that runs through it. The narrative of the poet's spiritual

journey is so vivid and consistent that it has all the reality of an account of

an actual experience; but within and beneath runs a stream of allegory not

less consistent and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself. To the

illustration and carrying out of this interitr meaning even the minutest

details of external incident are made to contribute, with an appropriateness

of significance, and with a freedom from forced interpretation or

artificiality of construction such as no other writer of allegory has

succeeded in attaining. The poem may be read with interest as a record of

experience without attention to its inner meaning, but its full interest is

only felt when this inner meaning is traced, and the moral significance of

the incidents of the story apprehended by the alert intelligence. The

allegory is the soul of the poem, but like the soul within the body it does

not show itself in independent existence. It is, in scholastic phrase, the

form of the body, giving to it its special individuality. Thus in order truly

to understand and rightly appreciate the poem the reader must follow its

course with a double intelligence. "Taken literally," as Dante declares in

his Letter to Can Grande, "the subject is the state of the soul after death,

simply considered. But, allegorically taken, its subject is man, according

as by his good or ill deserts he renders himself liable to the reward or

punishment of Justice." It is the allegory of human life; and not of human

life as an abstraction, but of the individual life; and herein, as Mr. Lowell,

whose phrase I borrow, has said, "lie its profound meaning and its

permanent force." [1] And herein too lie its perennial freshness of interest,

and the actuality which makes it contemporaneous with every successive

generation. The increase of knowledge, the loss of belief in doctrines that

were fundamental in Dante's creed, the changes in the order of society, the

new thoughts of the world, have not lessened the moral import of the

poem, any more than they have lessened its excellence as a work of art. Its

real substance is as independent as its artistic beauty, of science, of creed,

and of institutions. Human nature has not changed; the motives of action

are the same, though their relative force and the desires and ideals by

which they are inspired vary from generation to generation. And thus it is

The Divine Comedy

that the moral judgments of life framed by a great poet whose imagination

penetrates to the core of things, and who, from his very nature as poet,

conceives and sets forth the issues of life not in a treatise of abstract

morality, but by means of sensible types and images, never lose interest,

and have a perpetual contemporaneousness. They deal with the permanent

and unalterable elements of the soul of man.

[1] Mr. Lowell's essay on Dante makes other writing about the poet or

the poem seem ineffectual and superfluous. I must assume that it will be

familiar to the readers of my version, at least to those among them who

desire truly to understand the Divine Comedy.

The scene of the poem is the spiritual world, of which we are

members even while still denizens mu the world of time. In the spiritual

world the results of sin or perverted love, and of virtue or right love, in

this life of probation, are manifest. The life to come is but the fulfilment of

the life that now is. This is the truth that Dante sought to enforce. The

allegory in which he cloaked it is of a character that separates the Divine

Comedy from all other works of similar intent, In The Pilgrim's Progress,

for example, the personages introduced are mere simulacra of men and

women, the types of moral qualities or religious dispositions. They are

abstractions which the genius of Bunyan fails to inform with vitality

sufficient to kindle the imagination of the reader with a sense of their

actual, living and breathing existence. But in the Divine Comedy the

personages are all from real life, they are men and women with their

natural passions and emotions, and they are undergoing an actual

experience. The allegory consists in making their characters and their fates,

what all human characters and fates really are, the types and images of

spiritual law. Virgil and Beatrice, whose nature as depicted in the poem

makes nearest approach to purely abstract and typical existence, are

always consistently presented as living individuals, exalted indeed in

wisdom and power, but with hardly less definite and concrete humanity

than that of Dante himself.

The scheme of the created Universe held by the Christians of the

Middle Ages was comparatively simple, and so definite that Dante, in

accepting it in its main features without modification, was provided with

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