Nick Havely on Dante

We start with Dante’s Commedia itself. Why have you chosen Inferno over Purgatorio or Paradiso?

Well, it’s mainly through Inferno that what you might call the ‘shock and awe’ of Dante’s impact is felt. Inferno is, of course, where almost all readers start and where many of them indeed stop, which is a pity because Purgatorio is, in many senses, the ‘of this world’ part of the Commedia. It’s largely because of Inferno’s greater accessibility and vividness and indeed the violence. That’s what has always been the attraction. Plus of course it is the way into the Commedia, you can’t reach the higher places until you’ve travelled the lower regions.

You’ve specifically chosen the Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez translation over others.

The OUP edition is not the most easily accessible, nor the most attractive in style. Indeed Durling acknowledged that the style of translation is ‘literal’ and ‘craggy’. Yet it is a close and reliable translation, it gives you the original text on the facing page and it also has excellent notes. It’s very difficult to decide with the profusion of Dante translations that there are at the moment (including a number of good verse translations) what to recommend.

And this edition is suitable for readers approaching Dante for the first time?

It’s the one that students frequently use before they go on to the Italian editions. The notes are thorough and very accessible. Which edition to recommend for the new reader also raises several other questions about how to render Dante’s verse into English, and how much explanation is needed – both in the translation itself and in the form of commentary.

Peter Hawkins’s Dante: A Brief Biography explores Dante’s impact on artists and scholars alike. Does this make for a good introduction?

I think this work stands out as the strongest short introduction for probably three reasons. The first is that it’s lively and accessible without oversimplifying major issues concerning Dante’s politics, religion, poetics and sexuality. It’s also based on his own long study of Dante which resulted in one of the best critical accounts – his 1999 book on Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination. And thirdly it derives from a long experience of teaching the subject. For instance, chapter three begins with the wonderful sentence: ‘There comes a time in every Dante class where someone blows the whistle on Beatrice.’ [Dante’s inamorata and guide.] Then it goes into a dramatisation of conversations between students about Dante’s relationship with Beatrice. That is some indication of its accessibility.

How does Hawkins lay out the history of Dante’s impact?

One way in which he contextualises Dante is to focus initially on his life and another way of historicising the subject is through an important concluding chapter which he calls ‘Dante’s Afterlife’– dealing with the presence of Dante from the Middle Ages onwards and indeed into modern and contemporary culture.

Does Hawkins touch on the preference for Inferno over the other two canticles in popular culture?

He does indicate the prominence of Inferno as what most people associate with Dante. I think he recognises, like anyone who deals with the reception of Dante, that Inferno has this kind of priority for readers. In a sense that was the case from the Middle Ages onwards. For instance, the first mention of Dante by an English writer, Chaucer, identifies him as an expert on hell.

In Dante in English Griffiths and Reynolds present the influence of Dante through other artists’ work. What’s their focus?

They’re concerned with Dante’s impact on the English-speaking world, giving us a substantial sampling of translation and imitation in English poetry from the Middle Ages through to the present. It does have its limitations. The long introduction is incisive but somewhat idiosyncratic, it doesn’t go into much detail with the texts in the anthology, nor very much with wider issues of reception over the centuries – but the whole volume is a very well edited and indispensable selection.

The selection does seem to focus on the canonical writers.

Yes, there is a risk when accepting the Griffiths and Reynolds collection, excellent as it is, as the dominant model for Dante in English. The risk is that it could limit awareness of Dante’s impact mostly to white Anglo-Saxon (and Celtic) poets. Although of course they do include one Caribbean author, Derek Walcott.

Do Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè present a wider scope of influence in Dante on View?

They provide a perspective of impact that goes in several important further directions. The essays deal with what the editors call ‘intermedial cultural practices’. They’re not only concerned with illustrations and paintings on Dantean subjects from the Middle Ages through to Salvador Dalí, they’re also interested in the traditions of bringing the Inferno and the Commedia to life by embodying Dante’s poem in performance, in recitation, in theatrical, cinematic and even televisual adaptation.

So focusing on the mainstream then?

The structuring of the collection leads to the more popular and contemporary media, so part three focuses on Dante in the cinema and multimedia.