Beyond the Human

Jamie McKendrick

• BuyParadiso by Dante, translated by Robin Kirkpatrick
  Penguin, 480 pp, £12.99, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 14 044897 9
• BuyParadiso by Dante, translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander
  Anchor, 915 pp, $19.95, September 2008, ISBN 978 1 4000 3115 3

What do humans do in heaven? Not too much, though not too little, according to St Augustine, who foresees ‘leisure for the praises of God’ with ‘no inactivity of idleness, and yet no toil constrained by want’. But eternity is a fair stretch: over millennia, any activity might begin to pall. The 19th-century Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli claims in his sonnet ‘Er paradiso’:

                   in paradiso
Nun perdi tempo co ggnisun lavoro:
Nun ce trovi antro che vviolini, riso
E ppandesce`lo

                    in heaven
you don’t waste time with any work:
there’s nothing but violins, laughter
and heaven’s bread

For Belli’s Roman worker, heaven mainly means not having to graft, and there’s the bonus of free food – a cross between communion wafers and panettone, his ‘ppandescèlo’ probably a nod to the ‘pan de li angeli’ in Dante’s Paradiso.