Definitive Dante.(Paradiso)(Book review)

Paradiso, by Dante, translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Doubleday, 915 pp., $40)

FOR many years, Robert Hollander, professor of European literature at Princeton, has been working on explanatory notes for this edition of The Divine Comedy, and cooperating with his wife, Jean, on a verse translation. During the 1970s, because Dartmouth at that time had pioneered the academic use of computers, Hollander created the Dartmouth Dante Project, which made available the best Dante commentary since the 14th century. The Hollander Inferno appeared in 2000, to be followed by the Purgatorio in 2003. And now we have the Paradiso.

The consensus is firm that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are the three great poets of the Western world. T. S. Eliot's judgment stands: To "take the Comedy as a whole, you can compare it to nothing but the entire dramatic work of Shakespeare.... Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern [postclassical] world between them; there is no third." Homer belongs with those two great poets both for his achievement and for his civilizational importance. Greek schoolboys read the Iliad and the Odyssey for instruction in arete (excellence of character); these epics provided vivid examples of its presence or absence in particular heroes. Aristotle's Ethics summed this up. Plato, who wanted to be "a better teacher than Homer," established a rival form of arete, heroic philosophy in Socrates (see Werner Jaeger's Paideia). Dante brings to us the great epic of Christian pilgrimage. To these, plus Shakespeare, I would add the epic of Moses, now available as The Five Books of Moses, translated and with indispensable notes by Robert Alter. Put all of these together and you are ready to become a citizen of the West.

For our time and for an incalculable future the Hollander edition of The Divine Comedy will be the one used by serious readers. When I taught the Humanities 1-2 course at Columbia during the later 1950s, we used the 1948 Sinclair edition, a prose translation that included brief explanatory notes. Charles Singleton's edition (1970-75), a prose translation with much more extensive notes, became the one used by advanced readers. Singleton has now been replaced by the Hollander edition, a verse translation with far superior notes.

Dante's terza rima is impossible to recreate satisfactorily in English, but the Hollanders have produced a fine verse substitute. Our contemporary sensibility prescribes a poetic idiom that retains the virtues of prose, and the verse here reflects this with tercets nudged into verse by their stanza form and unobtrusive meter. Let us begin with the famous opening of the Inferno, with the pilgrim Dante lost in the darkest of woods:

 
   Midway in the journey of our life 
   I came to myself in a dark wood, 
   for the straight way was lost. 
 
   Ah, how hard it is to tell ...