9. False Modesty (Or Maybe Not): INFERNO, Canto II, Lines 1 - 42
And we’re off . . . to a dead stop. Our pilgrim, Dante, is full of self-doubt. He doesn’t know why he should walk across the universe. (And maybe our poet isn’t quite so sure either.) Dante needs reassurance from Virgil, a fellow poet.
The pilgrim offers two examples of people who’ve walked into the afterlife. Both seem more worthy than he. And listen, with one finished work, a couple of uncompleted treatises, and a sheaf of lyric poems under his belt, our poet wouldn’t normally seem ready for this poem.
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The segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[02:02] My translation of the passage: INFERNO, Canto II, Lines 1 - 42.
[04:14] A review of the plot so far--and an overview of what's ahead in Canto II.
[06:08] The opening lines of Canto II, paying particular attention to the questions of temporality. Or to put it another way, our pilgrim is out of sync with the world.
[09:53] The first invocation of COMEDY. It's a prayer. Not to God. To the muses. And particularly to memory.
[11:37] Our pilgrim's first big speech. Am I good enough to do this? As a person? As a poet? Who is good enough to see the afterlife?
[18:01] More about periphrasis: the technique of walking around something without exactly naming it.
[21:52] Who permits this? It’s the big question of COMEDY. Who permits the poet (no less the pilgrim) to walk this path? What if Dante sets out on this walk (or starts writing this poem) and it all turns out to be mad folly.
[25:00] Rereading INFERNO, Canto II, lines 1 - 42.
My English translation of INFERNO, Canto II, Lines 1 – 42:
The day was waning, and the darkening air
Was freeing the creatures who live on earth
From their labors. I alone was left
To get myself ready for the coming war—
That is, of the journey and the sorrow—
Which unerring memory will retrace.
O Muses, O high genius, help me now.
O Memory, that already wrote what I saw,
Your nobility will here become apparent.
I began like this: “Poet, my guide,
Consider if my strength is powerful enough
Before you trust me to the deep passage.
You say that Silvius’s father,
While still corrupted, went
To the immortal regions with his senses intact.
Listen: that the adversary of all evil
Showed him such favor—given who and what he was,
And even the high effect that came from him—
Seems perfectly right to a man of intellect.
For he had been chosen in the Empyrean
To be the father of mother Rome and her empire.
Both of these, to tell you the truth,
Were established to serve as the sacred location
Where Saint Peter’s successors have their throne.
On this journey, which you affirm he made,
He came to know things that moved him to win
And set up things for the papal mantle.
Next, the chosen vessel went there
To bring back the confirmation of our faith,
The first thing on the way to salvation.
But I? Why should I go there? Who permits it?
I am not Aeneas. I am not Paul.
Neither I nor anyone else deigns me worthy.
And so, if I do let go of myself and come with you,
I fear the venture may turn out to be madness.
You are wise. You understand what I’m trying to say.”
And as such a one who unwills what he’s willed,
Changing his mind because of new thoughts,
So that he pulls back from what he’s begun,
Just so was I on that dark slope—
With too much thinking, I’d stopped
What I’d begun.
FOR MORE STUDY
Two translation issues:
I blipped by one particularly troubling tercet: lines 16 - 18. Here’s how it goes line by line. It starts with “Però, se l’avversario d’ogne male. . . .” Easy enough. “Therefore, if the adversary of all evil. . . .” But even given that circumlocution to refer to God, it gets trickier. Line 17: “corese i fu, pensando l’alto effetto. . . .” Something like “was courteous to him, when you consider the high results. . . .” “Corese” is a loaded word in the Middle Ages. It’s not just politeness. It’s deference. Would God show deference to Aeneas? And then the text goes off the rails: “ch’uscir dovea di lui, e ‘l chi e ‘l quale. . . .” Something like “that came from him, as to who he was and what sort he was.” I’ve rendered it to refer to Aeneas: who he was, what he was. But the final phrase could just as well refer to the “alto effetto,” the high results, in which case it could be translated as something like “as to the fact that it happened and what sort of thing that happened”—that is, the founding of Rome and all that ensued. Furthermore, and to make this little phrase more complex, “chi” and “quale” are Florentine renderings of key, scholastic, theological concepts: the “quis” and the “qualis”—something like “the whatness of a thing” and the attributes that adhere to that “whatness.” Like “the essence of you” and then your right- or left-handedness (or perhaps the color of your hair or eyes). In scholastic thought, there’s a big difference between these two. That difference impinges on the very nature of creation and (more importantly) its creator. (More on that ahead in the poem—is there a “godness” beyond what we perceive as the attributes of God?) It seems as if our poet has compressed a tricky set of problems into three lines about a pagan hero in a pagan poem.
For the ease of a first read, I collapsed the sense of another tercet: lines 40 - 42. The pilgrim is talking about his tendency to hesitate. He says: “Tal mi fec’ iö ‘n quella oscura costa” (“such me I was in [or “on”] the dark slope”—line 40). But then he goes on to say: “perché, pensando, consumai la ‘mpresa/ che fu nel cominciar contanto tosta.” Something like, “because, thinking, I truncated the job that was just in the process of quickly getting started.” There are two troubling words here. First, “‘mpresa” (a shortened form of “impresa”). It means something like “job” or “task” or even “enterprise.” It’ll get used again in this canto . . . but then more importantly, in two future spots in COMEDY: at INFERNO, Canto XXXII, line 7 and again at PARADISO, Canto XXXIII, line 95. Down in INFERNO, the word seems to mean not the walking (as here) but the writing about the walking. That’s the real job. And up in PARADISO, where language games become paramount, it seems to refer to both the walking and the writing at one moment, a play on words, or a double-visioned reality: experiencing it and writing about experiencing it all at the same time. Bad enough, but there’s a second troubling bit in the poetry: “pensando.” Look at the translation note just above this one. The same word occurs in that troubling tercet, too. What’s up with so much weight being put on “thinking”?
Four interpretive issues:
The two periphrastic references in the passage are a) to Book VI of The Aeneid, Aeneas’ descent into the underworld (we’ll come back to this repeatedly in the episodes ahead); and b) to Saint Paul’s ascent to the heavens as told in II Corinthians 12:4. Note the two opposite directions: down for Aeneas, up for Paul. Note how much space is given to the downward journey here (and how little to the upward one). Truth be told, two-thirds of Dante’s COMEDY is concerned with a direct ascent: up Mount Purgatory (PURGATORIO) and through the heavens (PARADISO). But you wouldn’t know it from this passage! Does Dante know the scope of the poem he’s writing? Or is this a comment on the pilgrim’s mindset at this moment?
There’s a strange simile at lines 37 - 39. Essentially, this simile doesn’t refer to any classical or Christian figure. It directly describes the pilgrim’s own emotional landscape. In other words, I’m my own simile! This sort of self-referential simile will continue throughout the poem at moments of high emotional import. Watch out for them!
The invocation to the Muses at lines 7 - 9 is a tad murky. It starts out as a plea to the muses, then seems to shift gears to the “alto ingegno” or “high genius,” perhaps a reference to Calliope, although she’s the muse for epic poetry and not necessarily for comedy. By redefining “muses” as “high genius,” the whole thing almost seems like a reference to some abstraction: “O Muse-ness.” But is that the truth? Are “muse” and “genius” the same thing in the line? That question has been debated for centuries and still doesn’t have a certain answer. But then the poet changes the game entirely and invokes “mente” (“memory”) at line 8. In fact, memory is said to “scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi” (“write what I saw”). So memory is a writer? Are we then to believe that this poem is some sort of journal of what actually happened?
The pilgrim definitely sets up two exemplars of cosmic travelers: Aeneas and Saint Paul. The mere mention of these two seems to momentarily block him. “Seems to”—because this whole thing is happening in the poet’s imagination. It’s always important to remember that Dante is setting up the terms and rules of his own game. It’s easy to slip into the position of believing what he tells you . . . because he seems so convinced by it. Hey, I really did doubt myself when Virgil told me where I had to go! Did he? At his desk? As he was making this up? Always keep in mind that even here, Dante is setting up the terms of his own doubt. Like a partner in a bad marriage, he wants you to be unable to ascertain the difference between authentic and performative . . . so that you’ll slip into thinking it’s all authentic.
A journaling prompt:
Dante lived in a time strangely like our own. For the past three hundred or so years, you needed to pass a gatekeeper to get your work into the world: a gallery owner, a patron, an editor, a publisher, someone who controlled access to the market. With the rise of the our social-media world, we can bypass the gatekeepers and get our work out into the world on our own. (For example, as a PhD student in nineteenth-century U. S. literature, I would never have been allowed to teach a course on Dante.) But even our freer world doesn’t mean you and I still don’t seek permission, even subconsciously. Who would you ask permission from, even in your own head? Some other artist or writer? A family member? A spouse? A former spouse? Whose permission do you seek when you want to pull off something you’ve never done before?