Quote:
Originally Posted by fantasyfan
While I prefer to use the Sayers translation, it has the added value of really wonderful notes--the best I've seen in an English translation. She was an Oxford Scholar herself and a member of the famous Inklings {the only woman in the group}. In her notes she incorporated many comments from The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante by another Inkling, Charles Williams. These notes are remarkably perceptive and if I'm using my Kindle, {I use the Ciardi version in that case} I keep the Sayers pb volume handy to note her useful comments in the "Images" section and see what Williams has to add. For instance, this is his telling comment on the justly famous Francesca and Paolo section:
"It is always quoted as an example of Dante's tenderness. So, no doubt, it is, but it is not here for that reason . . . . It has a much more important place; it presents the first tender, passionate, and half-excusable consent of the soul to sin. . . . [Dante] so manages the description, he so heightens the excuse, that the excuse reveals itself as precisely the sin . . . the persistent parleying with the occasion of sin, the sweet prolonged laziness of love, is the first surrender of the soul to Hell--small but certain. The formal sin here is the adultery of the two lovers; the poetic sin is their shrinking from the adult love demanded of them, and their refusal of the opportunity of glory."
|
I think the episode of Paolo and Francesca is also a great example of the fact that Dante finds it hard to really condemns many of the main characters he presents us - that is, his condemnation goes without saying given that we are in Hell, the terrible punishments constantly reminding us that we are going to meet a string of sinners who all deserve their punishment. But once this point is made, what Dante does is to study almost admiringly the frailty of human nature: he is as likely as the sinners to fall for it, and so is the reader.
One other very powerful scene, almost cinematic in how Dante sweeps us into the Muda tower to witness the terrible end of Count Ugolino and his children. So sure, the count is in Hell, but he can keep his revenge going while gnawing away for eternity at he who was his tormentor in life.