The divine comedy - The Purgatorio (ciardi)

468 Pages·2001·2.03 MB·English

by  Dante & Ciardi

Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction

Canto I
Canto II
Canto III
Canto IV
Canto V
Canto VI
Canto VII
Canto VIII
Canto IX
Canto X
Canto XI
Canto XII
Canto XIII
Canto XIV
Canto XV
Canto XVI
Canto XVII
Canto XVIII
Canto XIX
Canto XX
Canto XXI
Canto XXII
Canto XXIII
Canto XXIV
Canto XXV
Canto XXVI
Canto XXVII
Canto XXVIII
Canto XXIX
Canto XXX
Canto XXXI
Canto XXXII
Canto XXXIII

How To Read Dante
“A sensitive and perceptive translation.”
—Archibald MacLeish

“Fresh and sharp . . . I think [Ciardi’s] version of Dante will be in many
respects the best we have seen.”
—John Crowe Ransom
DANTE ALIGHIERI was born in 1265. Considered Italy’s greatest poet,
this scion of a Florentine family mastered the art of lyric poetry at an
early age. His first major work, La Vita Nuova (1292), was a tribute to
Beatrice Portinari, the great love of his life. Dante’s political activism
resulted in his being exiled from Florence, and he eventually settled in
Ravenna. It is believed that The Divine Comedy—comprising three
canticles, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso—was written
between 1308 and 1320. Dante Alighieri died in 1321.

JOHN CIARDI was a distinguished poet and professor, having taught at
Harvard and Rutgers universities, and a poetry editor of The Saturday
Review. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1955, he won the Harriet
Monroe Memorial Award, and in 1956, the Prix de Rome. He died in
1986.

SIGNET CLASSIC
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd,
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Published by Signet Classic, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam
Inc. Previously published in a Mentor edition.

Acknowledgment is made to Venture, Italian Quarterly, The Saturday Review, Between Worlds,
The Massachusetts Review, New World Writing, and Arbor, in which excerpts from the present
work first appeared.

First Signet Classic Printing, July 2001

Copyright © John Ciardi, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Mentor edition of this title as follows: 61-18103.

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To Dudley Fitts, Magister
Introduction
One of the qualities which distinguish Dante’s ,Divine Comedy from
most other long narrative poems is the individual character and, as it
were, physiognomy peculiar to each of its three great divisions. Readers
of the Inferno will recall its frequently harsh materialism, the great
variety of intonation, the vivid realism, in which its ghostly figures rapidly
seem to become people and the whole scene appears the “hell on earth”
Dante probably wished it to represent.
To understand the Inferno, some historical background was obviously
essential. It was important to know that Dante, by being born an upper-
middle-class Alighieri in the independent commune of Florence in 1265,
had inherited the political loyalties of a Guelph and that he had also
acquired hereditary enemies called Ghibellines. The history of the civil
strife between these parties was of equal importance, for, even if it
culminated in a Guelph victory just after Dante’s birth, talk of it and of
fears lest it flare up again, filled his mind during his formative years.
Outstanding members of the preceding generation of both parties such as
the great Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti, and the Guelph statesman and
scholar Brunetto Latini, were to supply a number of his infernal figures,
and allusions to victories, exiles, and defeats fill its pages.
Since participation in public life would determine Dante’s fate, we had
to be aware of new dissension among the Guelphs, now divided among
themselves into “Blacks” and the “Whites” to which he belonged, and to
follow the strange fatal parallel between his political progress and the
growth of this new partisan strife. We saw the irony of his rise to the
highest magistracy just as violence broke out in 1300, so his prominence
made him a prime target for his foes.
What happened next, however, was of fundamental importance for all
parts of the Comedy and, indeed, for all Dante’s thinking thereafter. The
Blacks schemed to interest the pope in intervening in the dispute.
Boniface VIII, ever alert for an opportunity to strengthen his political
influence, ignored the protests of the Whites, and invited a supposedly