Seven hundred years later and we’re still reading the divine Dante

I’ve been reading a horror story that makes Game of Thrones look like Beatrix Potter. It’s got demons, dragons, harpies, centaurs, rains of fire, lakes of boiling pitch and seething ordure, bodies mutilated in fiendishly ingenious ways, and Satan himself, presiding over a lake of ice.

Yes, it’s Dante’s Inferno, the first poem in his epic work, The Divine Comedy, and I wasn’t prepared for something quite so hellish. Nor was Dante: I’d always imagined him as a stern, impassive spectator to all the agony. But he is stricken with fear and disgust, and faints away with pity at the story of adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca, murdered by her husband.

Despite the riveting horror, my reading is heavy going. My splendid edition is illustrated by Gustave Dore, a dab hand at towering cliffs and naked, muscular souls writhing in torment. But the translation, by the Reverend Henry Francis Cary, is a ponderous piece of poetry. And because I’m not an expert on medieval Florentine politics, many of Dante’s conversations with those talkative damned are hard to follow.

Why read Dante? He’s up there with Shakespeare as one of the greatest influences in world art and literature, and this is his year. It’s the 700th anniversary of both The Divine Comedy and his death, and around the world – particularly in Italy – his fans are having a party. There are concerts, exhibitions, readings and galas galore. Pope Francis has written a letter in his honour and a copy of The Divine Comedy is being launched into space.

Dante Alighieri was not always so feted by his countrymen. He ended up on the wrong side of the feuding warlords of Florence and was banished from his home city. So he wrote The Divine Comedy in exile, and poured all his feelings about politics, theology, philosophy and love into a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. But hell remains the most popular part: as Victor Hugo said, once you reach heaven and everyone is happy, it gets boring.

Maybe we no longer believe in a literal hell, but on a metaphorical level, this journey of grief and healing seems eerily appropriate for our times. It begins with a mid-life crisis: Dante is lost in a dark wood. Who hasn’t felt like that lately?

Dante had two guides – the poet Virgil and his childhood sweetheart Beatrice – and I’m beginning to think I need my own guide to fully understand what I’m reading. Perhaps I need the 700th anniversary edition. It still has the Dore engravings, but it comes with a new translation by J. G. Nichols, extensive notes and an account of the author’s life and works. Nichols’ version has delighted critics with its accuracy and liveliness.

There’s also 100 Days of Dante, the world’s largest reading group, which began last month and will run until Easter next year. If you subscribe, you can read three cantos a week in a translation by Anthony Esolen and also learn from teachers who know and love his work. And the State Library of Victoria is featuring Australian artists’ interpretations of the poem in its World of the Book 2021-22 exhibition.

Everybody from Dorothy Sayers to Clive James has had a go at translating The Divine Comedy, but how should you read it? Dante scholar Joseph Luzzi suggests you start by treating it not as a book but as a collection of poetry you can dip into. The miracle of Dante, he says, is his writing still makes sense after seven centuries “so long as we manage to read slowly, between, behind and around what he called his versi strani, strange verses”.
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