Dante’s Mastery

Gabriel Josipovici

  • Dante by George Holmes
    Oxford, 104 pp, £95.00, April 1980, ISBN 0 19 287504 3
  • The Divine Comedy: A New Verse Translation by C.H. Sisson
    Carcanet, 455 pp, £8.95, April 1980, ISBN 0 85635 273 X

No one, except perhaps Proust, has been able to express such a sense of totally unexpected joy as Dante, and what most often brings joy flooding through his body is the chance meeting with a revered ancestor or teacher. ‘O sanguis meus, O superinfusa gratia Dei,’ Cacciaguida greets him in Paradise, and Dante, turning in puzzlement to Beatrice, feels that ‘I had touched the limit both of my beatitude and of my paradise.’ Then, he tells us, the spirit continues to speak, and it is ‘a joy to hearing and to sight.’ Many hours before, deep down in the pit of Hell, another meeting had taken place, following a very similar pattern:

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[1] Extended quotations from Dante in the early sequences of this article are given in C.H. Sisson’s translation, except for the passage which begins, ‘Are you then that Virgil ... ’: this is an improvisation based on the Dent translation.

[2] Valerio Lucchesi has some good things to say on this aspect of Dante in much the most interesting essay in The World of Dante: Essays on Dante and His Times edited by Cecil Grayson. Clarendon, 252 pp., £14, 24 January, 0 19 815760 6.