The Divine Comedy

What It Is

Fourteen thousand lines of Italian verse, written between roughly 1308 and 1321. Three canticles of thirty-three cantos each, plus one introductory canto, making a hundred: a number Dante chose, like every number in the poem, because it meant something. It is written in terza rima, an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme he invented for it and which nobody has bettered.

Dante was a Florentine politician on the losing side of a factional war. He was exiled in 1302, condemned to be burned alive if he returned, and he never returned. He wrote this in other men's houses.

He also wrote it in Italian, when serious work was written in Latin. That decision made Italian a literary language and put the poem in the hands of people who had never seen a university. Comedy, in the medieval sense, means a work that starts low and ends high; it does not mean funny. The Divine was added later by admirers.

Why It Matters

It is the greatest feat of construction in literature. Dante built a complete moral universe in which the structure of every punishment and every reward is an argument about the nature of the act that earned it. Every soul is placed in relation to every other soul, and the placement is the thinking.

It gave Western art its picture of the afterlife more thoroughly than scripture ever did. When you imagine the geography of hell, you are imagining Dante, not the Bible.

What still startles is the nerve of it. Dante puts his friends, his enemies, popes he loathed, poets he loved, and his own moral failures into a cosmic order and passes judgment on all of them, including himself. It should be insufferable. It is instead the most personal poem ever written on the largest possible scale. Eliot said that Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, and that there is no third. Borges, Primo Levi, Beckett and Heaney all lived inside it.

Before You Read

Thirty to thirty-five hours. Read a canto or two an evening — each runs 130 to 150 lines and ends at a natural stop — and take three or four months over it. That is the right pace and there is nothing to apologise for in it.

Notes are not optional. The poem is packed with Florentine politicians, feuding families and thirteenth-century scandals, and without help it reads like a newspaper from a city you have never visited. Read the canto first, then the notes. Reading the notes as you go destroys the verse.

Most people read the Inferno and stop. That is the standard mistake. Hell is the loudest and most quotable third; Purgatory is where the poem becomes humane; Paradise is the hardest and strangest thing in European literature.

Which Translation to Read

• Allen Mandelbaum (Bantam Classics, 1980 to 1984) — recommended. Blank verse, unrhymed, line for line, and it never strains for effect. Mandelbaum keeps Dante's austerity and his forward motion where rhyming versions have to buy their rhymes with padding, and the Bantam paperbacks print the Italian on the facing page for the price of a sandwich. Florence gave him a gold florin for it. The cost: the notes are thinner than a first-timer needs, and the plainness that makes him trustworthy gives up some of the drive of the terza rima. View on Amazon →
• Robert and Jean Hollander (Anchor, 2000 to 2007). Robert Hollander's commentary is the fullest in English and the product of a lifetime on this poem. The verse is capable; the notes are the reason to own it. The cost: three heavy volumes, and the annotation can swallow the thing it annotates.
• Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Classics, 1949 to 1962; completed by Barbara Reynolds). The best-known version that keeps terza rima the whole way, with notes that are opinionated, learned and enjoyable. The cost: the rhyme forces archaism and contorted word order, and the English now feels its age.

Take Mandelbaum, and keep the Hollander notes beside you. That combination is the best available in English. Robin Kirkpatrick (Penguin, 2006 to 2007) is grander and harder; Clive James (2013) rhymes, carries no notes, and reads like a novel: a genuine pleasure and a genuine loss.

The Folio Society has issued the Comedy as a three-volume leather-bound limited edition illustrated by Neil Packer, in 700 signed sets. For most collectors the point is Doré, whose engravings have been reprinted in fine editions for a century and a half.

Getting the Most From This Book

Do not read the introduction first. Almost every edition walks through the poem canto by canto, and this is a book whose power depends on arriving somewhere without knowing what is there.

Keep the structural diagram in your edition open. This is the one poem where a map is genuinely load-bearing: the shape of the place is the argument.

And do not get bogged down identifying every Florentine. Some of them mattered to Dante and to nobody since. Let them go past, and keep reading.