Book Review
Dante’s New Guide
Inferno
by Dante Alighieri, edited and translated by Anthony Esolen
New York: The Modern Library (Random House), 2002
(528 pages; $24.95, hardcover)
Purgatory
by Dante Alighieri, edited and translated by Anthony Esolen
New York: The Modern Library (Random House), 2003
(544 pages; $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by R. V. Young
In the fourth canto of the Inferno, where Virgil leads Dante into the Limbo of souls who can never attain Heaven because they were never baptized and lacked faith in Christ, but who are spared the punishments of Hell because of their personal innocence or virtue, Dante is welcomed into the circle of the classical poets as their peer. In his commentary on this passage, Anthony Esolen rightly remarks, “False modesty is but a small-minded form of pride, and Dante, like the other great-souled men in his narrative, will have none of it.”
And yet Dante is more modest than he probably knew. Of the five poets among whom he makes a sixth, only Homer and Virgil (possibly Ovid, certainly not Horace, much less Lucan) attained the same stature in Western letters; and since Dante’s time, one could assuredly place only Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky in the same indispensable class. In fact, Dante is arguably the most important of all, precisely because he is the most explicitly Christian poet of Western civilization, expressing its Christian heart at the historical moment of its decisive realization.
A translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia is, therefore, a formidable undertaking, and in the face of the numerous versions of the poem now available, many by eminent poets or scholars, it is a bold man indeed who will offer a new one. This translation by Anthony Esolen, professor of English at Providence College and translator of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, is, however, not only fully justified, but should, over the coming years, set the standard for editions of Dante read in college classrooms and by educated common readers (an endangered species that receives no federal protection).
Esolen’s version walks the tightrope between fidelity to the original and English readability as well as any rendering that I know, and it distinguishes itself from all but a select few by providing the original Italian on facing pages. What finally sets his Inferno and Purgatorio apart from all the rest (his Paradiso is still in press as I write) is the superiority of his introductions and commentary.
Esolen is thorough and yet succinct: He tells contemporary students what they need to know with an engaging tone and without overwhelming them either with scholarly minutiae or the grim pedantry of postmodern theorizing. Moreover, unlike the typical academic or intellectual of our time, he regards Dante’s Catholic faith as a living reality and an appropriate response to the human condition and treats the poet as his fellow Christian pilgrim, not as an anthropologist would treat the shaman of a primitive tribe.
It is important, first, to recognize what Esolen is not doing. He is not, for example, providing an alternative to Charles Singleton’s bilingual edition in the Bollingen series, which is a monument of literary scholarship with a commentary of more than 300 pages for each of the three parts of the Commedia. Singleton deals with the philological intricacies of Dante’s Italian, provides lengthy passages from often obscure sources and analogues in the original languages, and quotes interpretations from a variety of Italian scholars.
His translation is scrupulously accurate and literal prose, furnishing the same kind of help to scholars who are not experts in Dante’s medieval Tuscan dialect as the Loeb Library does for those who are not professional classicists. Apart from its great cost—even in paperback the three volumes currently list for well over $100—Singleton’s admirable edition is use-less for college students, who would disappear in the depths of this erudition like the simonists in the third ditch of Malebolge: Only the flaming soles of their quivering feet would be visible.
What people are saying about Touchstone:
Esolen’s introductions to the Inferno and the Purgatorio run 15 to 20 pages. The essential notes—the brief explanations required for students to keep reading and following the narrative—are placed at the foot of the page. More elaborate expositions of historical, literary, and doctrinal issues that arise in the poems are handled in the commentaries at the end of each volume, which are both under 100 pages.
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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