![]() ![]() The story begins with the narrator (who is Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy that inspired the latest Dan Brown'sīestseller of the same title describes the poet's vision of Hell. Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illustrations of Dante’s Inferno (1958-60) Hear Dante’s Inferno Read Aloud by Influential Poet & Translator John Ciardi (1954) See more maps of Dante’s Inferno here, here, and here.Ī Free Course on Dante’s Divine Comedy from Yale UniversityĪrtists Illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Botticelli, Mœbius & More Or, short of that, we can take a digital train and escalators into an 8-bit video game version. Though we are within our rights as readers to see Dante’s hell as purely metaphorical, there are historical reasons beyond religious belief for why more literal maps became popular in the 15th century, “including,” writes Atlas Obscura, “the general popularity of cartography at the time and the Renaissance obsession with proportions and measurement.”Įven after hundreds of years of cultural shifts and upheavals, the Inferno and its humorous and horrific scenes of torture still retain a fascination for modern readers and for illustrators like Daniel Heald, whose 1994 map, above, while lacking Botticelli’s gilded brilliance, presents us with a clear visual guide through that perplexing valley of pain, which remains-in the right translation or, doubtless, in its original language-a pleasure for readers who are willing to descend into its circular depths. Michelangelo Caetani’s 1855 cross-section chart, below, lacks the illustrative detail of other maps, but its use of color and highly organized labeling system makes it far more legible that Callot’s beautiful but busy drawing above. Maps continued to proliferate: see printmaker Antonio Maretti’s 1529 diagram further up, Joannes Stradanus’ 1587 version, above, and, below, a 1612 illustration below by Jacques Callot.ĭante’s hell lends itself to any number of visual treatments, from the purely schematic to the broadly imaginative and interpretive. One of the first maps of Dante’s hell (top) appeared in Sandro Botticelli’s series of ninety illustrations, which the Renaissance great and fellow Florentine made on commission for Lorenzo de’Medici in the 1480s and 90s.īotticelli’s “Chart of Hell,” writes Deborah Parker, “has long been lauded as one of the most compelling visual representations… a panoptic display of the descent made by Dante and Virgil through the ‘abysmal valley of pain.’” Below it, we see one of Antonio Manetti’s 1506 woodcut illustrations, a series of cross-sections and detailed views. Indeed, readers of Dante have been inspired to map his Inferno for almost as long as they have been inspired to translate it into other languages-and we might consider these maps more-or-less-faithful visual translations of the Inferno’s descriptions. While readers can follow the poem’s vivid action without visual aids, these lend to the text a kind of imaginative materiality: saying yes, of course, this is a real place-see, it’s right here! We can suspend our disbelief, perhaps, in Catholic doctrine and, doubly, in Dante’s weirdly officious, comically bureaucratic, scheme of hell. The sole advantage, perhaps, of the translation I first encountered lies in its use of illustrations, maps, and diagrams. I’m far from an expert by any stretch, but was much relieved to later discover John Ciardi’s more faithful English rendering, which immediately impresses upon the senses and the memory, as in the description above in the first stanzas of Canto II. ![]() I labored through the text and did not much enjoy it. Gone is the rhyme scheme, self-contained stanzas, and poetic compression, replaced by wordiness, antiquated diction, and needless density. The first Dante that came my way-the unabridged Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed English translation-renders the poet’s terza rimain leaden prose, which may well be a literary betrayal. Maybe it’s fitting that the proverb about translators as traitors comes from Italian. Reading Dante’s Inferno, and Divine Comedygenerally, can seem a daunting task, what with the book’s wealth of allusion to 14th century Florentine politics and medieval Catholic theology. Shall here set down, nor hesitate, nor err. ![]() Of the journey and the pity, which memory The brown air drew downĪll the earth’s creatures, calling them to restįrom their day-roving, as I, one man alone, ![]()
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