Seven hundred years ago, Dante took up a stylus and scratched the words of the Inferno onto parchment or wax tablet, breathing life into the Florentine language and color into the gray landscape of his exile. The long labor of writing gave shape to dreary days. Although he began the poem sometime after the city’s gates shut behind him in 1302, he did not publish it until 1314, when, midway through his nineteen-year removal, he permitted copies of the manuscript to circulate through northern Italy. My edition, translated with brilliant directness by poet Robert Pinsky, has the year 1994 imprinted on its copyright page. When Dante wrote, the printing press was still more than a century away from its introduction in Europe. Any books this angry itinerant consulted as he composed his epic would have been copied by trained scribes from a noble’s dusty shelf or the nascent libraries of those university towns like Bologna where he found himself sojourning.
While writing this essay in 2008, I often thought of Dante as I hoisted each week’s supply of newsprint to the curb for recycling in my California hometown. A single one of these bags probably weighs more than the poet’s sum of script. Sheets of vellum had to be scraped and dried and stretched before they could be inked, so parchment volumes demanded hundreds of hours of toiling. During his lifetime Dante must have handled several of these treasures, whose leather bindings would have smelled of animal hide and whose hand-cut pages were laden with pigments extracted from minerals gouged out of rock, composed from the crushed bodies of insects, or scraped from copper tools and the embers of fires and pounded powder-fine: cochineal, azurite, malachite, jet. The newsprint our eyes wander through each morning becomes the black we wash off soiled fingers. Costly as the dress of kings, the capital letters of illuminated medieval manuscripts still glitter under glass.
Like many of my contemporaries, I am fascinated by medieval art. Byzantine Madonnas offer their flat Mona Lisa smiles from the cluttered rooms of the Uffizi and the spacious halls of the Louvre. Yet whether I am visiting a foreign town or walking down familiar streets, I worship longest before showcases of old books, tracing their alphabets with devoted eyes. Worlds sprung from words, their vowels and consonants can be as large as the letters of an optometrist’s chart and a thousand times more intricate. One blue capital still hovers before my inward sight, curving gracefully as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in sphinxlike serenity, mint-colored serifs wreathing its form in a gauzy cloud of vines.
Dedicated readers recognize that language transports them without regard to time or place. Still, it seems strange that while we can call up thousands of volumes on our computer screens within seconds, Dante lived almost bereft of books. Walking through a bookstore aisle, I stand within arm’s length of perhaps a trillion letters—an unholy repetition that seems to have little to do with the careful copies made by fourteenth-century monks. But our prosaic print may also dazzle, a fact brought home to me when I worked at a Silicon Valley start-up. Hired in the early 1980s as a font digitizer amid Adobe System’s then small corps of engineers, I spent most of my week alone, laboring in agreeable solitude at my desk. Here, upon a glowing screen, a procession of colossal Times New Roman letters swam with oracular grandeur. In the months that followed, I translated the shapes of this alphabet into the binary language of software with a medieval cleric’s concentration, copying the slope of glyphs and capturing the weight of ascenders in a language a monastic inhabitant would have found puzzling, and with a light pen he would not have recognized. But my eyes followed the geometry of letterforms with equal pleasure.
Some thirty years later, hundreds of millions are familiar with the shapes I traced. Shrunk from their Alice-in-Wonderland height on my office monitor in Mountain View to the ordinary smallness of computer screens around the world, they continue their heedless proliferation. In the murk of throwaway sounds and scripts that besiege us, Dante’s words glimmer with vivid phosphorescence. The drone of a television in the flat above my Berkeley living room gives way to the blue-jay chatter of advertisement. A car alarm blares outside my window and is silenced seconds later. A singer chants a refrain as a truck passes and its mechanical cadence ceases. But the words of the sinners hang, still, in the air. Their centuries-old voices cut clearly through the electronic noise as they shiver in frozen lakes, or run across burning stones, or shriek inside howling wildernesses of winds, their guttural accents rising from the dark to claw for my attention.
The shades thronging Hell envy the living man who walks briefly among them and prophesy spitefully in shame at being witnessed in their degradation. With their fits of pique and bitter groans, their curious questions and unrelenting anger, they vibrate with fury and fear. “Remember my memory when you return to the human world,” one begs Dante. Another demands to know why a living man has come to this wasteland before his time. A third admits that infamy is more painful than dying: “‘That you have caught me here amid this grief,’” he tells the poet, “‘Causes me suffering worse than I endured / When I was taken from the other life.’” The Enlightenment substituted a secular chronology for Dante’s religious calendar, but few eighteenth-century tracts approach the acutely modern psychological understanding that animates the fourteenth-century poet’s verse. While the Dark Ages remain an icon for ignorance, the souls in the Commedia are our own.
A Jew first led me to the gates of Dante’s Hell. When I was thirty years old, I surveyed the poet’s “città dolente” through the eyes of Primo Levi, a man who traveled back from a different city of the dead in 1945, fifteen years before my birth. In its blasted landscape, Levi had toiled as perpetually as the shades who strain and struggle in the Inferno. A few years after he escaped that place, he chronicled his habituation to suffering in Se questo è un uomo (If this is a man), a book U.S. readers know as Survival in Auschwitz, but whose Italian title best captures its calmly incisive meditations. In this work, Levi’s first venture as a writer and one that offers reflection, memoir, and travelogue alongside testimonial, the career chemist leads readers forward with the composed purpose and dispassionate voice of Dante’s Virgil. Yet when Levi recalls his recitation of the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno while breathing the dead air of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man becomes quietly exultant. I am quick to turn away from what seems the too-facile evocation of the concentration camps in film and story. But I cannot forget this prisoner’s recitation of Ulysses’s words as the white ash of souls disperses in Auschwitz’s skies. “ ‘So on the open sea I set forth,’” Levi declaims, no less sure of his purpose than the epic wanderer whose shade murmurs his story to Dante as “ ‘wavering flame / Wrestles against the wind.’”
Who understands the means through which a writer crafts words that keep hold of our imaginations centuries later? If, like Odysseus, Dante ventured toward the farthest shores, we sometimes moor close to his. I recognize the thin face the Florentine writer turned away from his city as much from the portrait Stanley Kunitz offers in “Dante” (a poem he fashioned after Anna Akhmatova’s verse) as from the closer likeness Boccaccio draws in his Life of Dante, a book he composed between 1350 and 1355 to honor his compatriot. “Even after his death he did not return / to the city that nursed him,” Kunitz’s translation of the Akhmatova poem begins. Before the stanza ends, I can see the recalcitrant line of Dante’s bowed back and feel his heart burn for his birthplace: “He sent her a curse from hell / and in heaven could not forget her,” Kunitz continues, but never did Dante “walk barefoot with lighted candle / through his beloved Florence, / perfidious, base, and irremediably home.”
Each time I return to Pinsky’s translation of the Inferno, I hear the modern poet transmute Dante’s Italian into American sound. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” becomes “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.” The music of “the right road lost” moves in spondees as mournful as Kunitz’s “Going away this man did not look back.” In the unrelenting rhythms of both poets I can follow Levi’s weary, unceasing step. Asked what prompted him to translate the poem, Pinsky told a group assembled at the University of California in 1994 for a dialogue on “Image and Text,” that he and artist-collaborator Michael Mazur had been “possessed by the spirit of Dante.” However jestingly, Pinsky chose for his explanation a medieval frame of reference rather than the scientific vocabulary of our time—a language that possesses no synonym for “spirits” or “souls.”
Initially, I found it odd that Levi would describe the ten months he spent in hell by invoking the words of a medieval Christian who had no trouble consigning all but Abraham to the same place. Odd, too, that I, part of whose family escaped the Holocaust by removing themselves from Russia and Poland forty years before war began, would want to spend so much time in the company of both writers. Equally curious was the fact that Pinsky, another Jewish American, would be fascinated by a work, as he explained at the Berkeley symposium, that consists “mostly of physical visions of the torments that Christian souls devise for themselves.” Nonetheless, unlike nations, writers and readers adventure without discrimination. An Auschwitz survivor drew me instantly to Dante’s intensely Christian work just as the verse of a pagan born seventy years before Christ offered Dante his own way through Hell. Levi’s memoir of the Shoah may be the sole book of its kind to foreground the Inferno, but Pinsky is only the finest of many contemporary translators of the poem—and I, of course, am just one of many thousands of the medieval poet’s twenty-first-century readers.
To yoke sin with the Holocaust, Pinsky and Mazur felt, would be to reproach the blameless, so they chose not to illustrate the Inferno’s portal with Auschwitz’s iron gate. But Levi did. Dante’s visions shadow the modern Italian writer’s memoir like the ghost that sometimes lends a televised image a fainter but constant double. If you know the first book of the Commedia, you will see how its images shadow the twentieth-century Italian’s story. Dante’s encounter with “the gray ferryman of the livid marsh” who takes his living soul across the Acheron is the palimpsest for Levi’s casual mention of “our Charon” near the end of the first chapter, “The Journey.” In his second chapter, “On the Bottom,” Levi holds up Dante’s dread at witnessing the letters “inscribed in some dark color” over the Inferno’s portal in order to mirror the despair he feels waiting in Auschwitz after passing under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign (Work Makes Freedom) that translates more freely into “This Is Hell.” (“One cannot think anymore,” Levi writes about his numb expectancy in the anteroom of the concentration camp; “it is like being already dead.”) Nowhere is the prose writer’s cleaving toward Dante more visible, however, than in “The Canto of Ulysses.” Levi’s retelling of the epic wanderer’s story forms the central chapter of If This Is a Man, providing postwar literature with what is arguably its most compelling demonstration of defiance.
Levi calls Dante’s words to mind while dragging himself back to camp with another prisoner, the hundred-pound weight of an iron cauldron suspended upon two sagging poles between them. Because the fragments of the twenty-sixth canto restore Levi to the fellowship of those who exist far beyond the gates of what the prisoners call the lager, its words prove more useful than the piece of rope that holds together the chemist’s ragged pants and the salvaged spoon that helps sustain him for another day.
“ ‘Think of your breed,’” Levi recites to the prisoner walking by his side, “for brutish ignorance / Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence.’” The soup pot sloshes its sickly gruel with each step, but the starving men think only of Homer. Audacious as Ulysses, Levi recites the story of this venturesome traveler who throws himself across barriers. Without home, family, books, or a name, 174517 weaves a net of words to cast himself and his companion beyond the humming wires and the smashing fists and the singing bullets of the lager, a “joyless kingdom of the dead” like the one Homer describes where “the senseless, burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home.” Speaking Dante’s lines, Levi forgets himself and where he walks.
How startling to witness this metamorphosis: the grim horizontal that divides the soiled ground from the smoke-choked sky softening into the sea’s supple surge, the stark verticals of the gray barracks blurring and swaying like green trees onshore, the empty faces around Levi become as expressive as the countenances of Ulysses’s companions provoked by the words of their captain to keen, hungering attention. Dante helps Levi revisit human company: the häftling finds a world outside Auschwitz by replacing the “cold German phrases” that assault him there with the remembered sweetness of their Italian tongue.
Cast beyond the world of the living, Levi experiences, if only for an hour, the same eager intellection that drove the medieval poet onward in exile and the Greek hero toward the open sea. The words of all three speakers in my ear, I begin to sound the lager. Dante tells us that Ulysses and his men traveled to a similar waste at the end of the world only to weep as the prow of their vessel began to sink “beneath the surface” of the water. Shut along with Levi into the cars of a transport train that would never return them to the place where they boarded it, many of the chemist’s fellow travelers must have wept as well. “One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death,” Levi later wrote about the “non-men” who struggled alongside him in the camp, the Musselmänner upon whose faces “not a trace of a thought can be seen.” The sea has “closed up over” the Greek captain’s ship. The same desolation extinguishes the last vestiges of animation in those Levi refers to simply as “the drowned.” What more fitting story for the writer to recall than Ulysses’s lucent despair?
Maybe what prompted Levi to dwell upon this canto of the Inferno was not its reflected gloom but the fierce will that casts its light against the dark landscape. Rather than urging Ulysses forward to joyful reunion, Dante consigns him to a watery grave. Still, the Christian poet lingers in Malebolge; so “yearningly,” Pinsky writes, does the wandering poet’s alter ego “lean” toward this celebrated shade. Dante, who took his own account from Virgil’s rendering, castigates Ulysses for the arrogance of his ambition. But the medieval author must have known himself to be an equal voyager. Seven hundred years later, claiming both Homer and Dante as kin, Levi quite astonishingly describes his own journey through hell as an “adventure,” explaining in an October 1986 interview with Philip Roth in the London Review of Books his “intense wish to understand.”
The misery we know best involves the absence of suffering: the slack faces in Auschwitz that neither hear nor see; the ravaged earth of Rwanda devoid of grave markers; the warehouses in Serbia stacked with corpses whose tangled limbs are more alien than the bodies we bury. Dante makes these blank things blaze. Ulysses’s resolve finds its way skyward from the bottom of Malebolge, his voice murmuring steadily within the flames of Hell.
To be transported to the Inferno is to experience a virtual reality more gripping than any created by computer graphics. Breathtaking in its cinematography, the poem encourages us to scale peaks the nineteenth-century Romantics never witnessed and to fend off imps more repulsive than any who leer from the sermons of a seventeenth-century preacher. The place burns and boils like a planet newly made. Water courses and drips through each page of its scenery: rivers of gore empty into lakes of blood, and streams of sewage trickle toward filthy ice. Part IMAX screen and part roller coaster ride, half dreamscape and half drug trip, the Inferno awes, fascinates, and sometimes nauseates, its word pictures bedeviling readers like black flies: the scorched skin of one whose baked features still compose a familiar face; the nails of another who snags scabs from his body as if he were scaling a fish; the teeth of a third breaking through brain as he gnaws upon the back of a head the way a starving person devours a loaf of bread.
Voyeurism may draw us into the poem, but an unconscious yearning to possess a fuller understanding of experience keeps us there—the need to shake off the half-lives we swim through daily, where bright television and computer screens distract from fear and want. Dazed by a surfeit of spectacle, we struggle to remain awake. Paradoxically, Dante’s dread landscape offers an emotional vitality regular life refuses us. Some of his shades scream shrilly for attention. Others wax from muteness to moan, only to fall back into torpor. A few utter lines as rigid with despairing energy as the hand of a drowning man extended in air. If they assail, these voices also provide an intimacy we crave. In this place that gratifies no wish, the souls hunger with sharp desire: not “deadened” as T. S. Eliot writes in the 1929 essay “Dante,” they are instead “in the greatest torment of which each is capable.”
At the beginning of the Inferno, where the wind is loudest, the din jars like a clap on the ear and pounds the skull like a jackhammer battering concrete. In this place, the dead press close as trains at rush hour and shriek like steel against steel, their “strange languages” rising “in a coil / Of tumult.” Hell quiets at its depths, where the pace creeps like glaciers and grinds the way wind carves rocks. The atmosphere is torpid, and as dense as Saturn’s, a killing temperature zero at the bone. Dante fashions images as sharp as stalactites. Words glitter pitilessly, like fiery ice encasing bare branches. In the ninth circle, a “melancholy hole,” over which “all the other rocks converge and thrust their weight,” the poet looks upon “livid” spirits “locked inside the ice, / Teeth chattering the note a stork’s beak makes.” In Hell’s still center, traitors spitted over frozen floes coldly burn, their flesh mummifying in a glassy lake as frostbite marbles their limbs. Falling tears freeze, fusing lips to silence.
And yet the measured language of the Inferno creates a path through the chaos it builds, guiding reader and pilgrim through sightless night. In the Aeneid the underworld is mist and shadow, a gray monochrome where Aeneas encounters, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, a largely “unmemoried” throng. In this place shuttered by the simulacra of feeling, not even Dido’s passionate “burning” allows “her dim form” to resolve from the dark. But Dante’s words illuminate the interiors of souls as sumptuously as Caravaggio’s light falls upon flesh, burnishing cheekbones and glowing in the scarlet folds of gowns. Maybe it was in the features thrown into relief by the torchlight of the poet’s art that this painter found inspiration.
In the narrowing circuits of the Inferno Ulysses recounts his story and Ugolino grows epic in misdeed. Dante’s anonymous sinners are equally famous, their miseries deeply felt despite their creator’s passing. Racked and disfigured, his souls remain themselves. One spits his words in a fury, pelting the whirlwind with spite. Another musters gentle courtesy, as if he were still a figure to be reckoned with. In the canto of the suicides, a soul sighs out a wheezy breath, each word huffed out with the effort of emphysema. In the eighth circle, thieving Vanni Fucci makes the sign of the fig, gesturing obscenely toward Dante.
There is something miraculous about such strength of character. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief: in Dante’s era portraiture was designed to evoke generic traits, the skills of poets as of painters planing distinct features into allegorical types. The poet’s friend Giotto drafted from nature, but even this artist’s radical technique gives us men and women whose expressions are more Byzantine than bourgeois.
Dante’s art is different. The architecture of the Inferno is sublime in scale, but the faces that swim out of the dark are as homely in their suffering as the poor souls who mutter on the streets and sleep on the sidewalks of my California town. Like the living, who shift in an instant from sweetness to selfishness, the shades behave heroically one moment and gibe with petty cruelty the next. Dante left them to writhe in what is now a seven-hundred-year-old torment—without, I expect, casting a backward glance. Still, he twists a shoot in the “unmarked” woods of the suicides to hear a few broken words. Maybe in quiet moments he listened to the “wailing voices” of Florentines “grieve” again in the branches that stirred around him.
On a trip to Spain in 2007 I listened to the hum of languages spoken by a living throng gathered around a celebrated painting in the Prado. Finished two hundred years after Dante published the Commedia, Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights could serve as rejoinder to the poem. But while Dante remains faithful to the facts of his native city, Bosch depicts surreal landscapes strewn with oddities. Objects morph as uneasily between natural and man-made forms as do the creatures wriggling out of the pens of Pixar animators. Was that strange contraption from which people are emerging a nest of dragons, or a cave of thieves?
I could find no limbo here, nor “wood of thronging spirits,” nor loving shades like those in the second circle of the Inferno moving “so light upon the wind.” Clothed in skin, the souls in the right-most panel of Bosch’s hell are filthy clogs soon to be eaten by worms. Clusters of sinners map pallid roadways through a charcoal horizon. The damned mass indiscriminately in the foreground, denied the privileges of rank they cherished in life. Were they raising their arms upward to shrink from the press of flesh? Or do they huddle together voluntarily in a futile effort to escape torment? Bodies flail and shudder below expressionless faces. Eden is just as creepy, its lawn green-minted as AstroTurf and cheerless as a retirement home. One flesh-colored skyscraper rises out of the shallows near Adam and Eve, its craggy peaks pierced by transparent cylinders that resemble the kind of Lucite rods that hold up shower curtains. The two First People stand ill at ease beside this strew of things, as if expulsion were imminent.
What moved Bosch to create this painting? Maybe, wrenched from nightmare by bells announcing the morning call to worship, he knelt at prayer before rising to Holland’s hazy yellow light. Non posse non peccare, he might have muttered: we cannot resist sin. I looked hard at all three compositions, searching for clarity in their disordered landscapes, but skittered from scene to scene without finding ease. While lively of invention, these tableaux are soulless and unfeeling, and as replete with distractions as twenty-first-century illuminated screens.
Stymied, I stepped away from the canvas and walked out of the museum’s warren of galleries into the sun. On that late spring day in Madrid the breeze moved invitingly through the cypress trees of the Retiro, the queenly park outside the Prado. Stands of rhododendrons opened up to the light, their pink and purple colors recalling the fuchsia and magenta tints of the bougainvillea on my street in Berkeley. Despite its blooming life this garden felt remote, as sequestered as the scenes Dutch artists of the Golden Age obscured behind the doors they set ajar in their painted courtyards.
Curiosity about the lives of others prompts me to travel, but when I leave home for what Elizabeth Bishop calls in “Questions of Travel,” “imagined places,” I remain as distant as if I were standing outside such gateways. I have seen the face Velásquez turns upon watchers from Las Meninas, another work that hangs inside the Prado, and have met the eye with which El Greco regards visitors from the tableau he painted in Toledo’s Church of San Tomé. I have brushed shoulders with people at a Salamanca bar in the early hours of the morning and felt the press of an old woman’s knees against my back at a Madrid bullfight in the heat of afternoon. Still, I feel no closer to these living souls than to the painted self-portraits the artists worked on wood four centuries before.
A book brings other voices near my ear. In Toledo that same spring I walked a street laid out in Dante’s time, past shops selling almond sweetmeats the poet might have purchased had he traveled here, and others displaying damascene bracelets the ladies to whom he dedicated his lyrics might have coveted. Where the narrow way widened into a plaza, I sat down with my copy of the Inferno and started to read. In the thousandth of a second it took my eyes to trace the curves of letters, the medieval poet came to me. Sallow-faced and saturnine, he recited his lines in a voice tight with exasperation. Anger pulsed in the rhythms of his cadenced lines. Eras unreeled and season chased season as my pupils traveled down stanzas. As unconscious of the mild atmosphere as of my book’s rustling pages, I lingered in a city whose unreal bricks and cobbles have been trod by millions of readers before me.
Walk with me. This command is not one Dante urges upon readers of the Inferno. Instead, ever the politician, he models obliquely—through the fellowship he imagines with Virgil—the compact he desires. Still, when the classical poet instructs Dante, “Therefore I judge it best that you should choose / To follow me, and I will be your guide,” the medieval writer implicitly demands we submit to his own direction. Like any author, his request is entreaty and imperative, one submitted despite his choler in a voice that mixes hope and fear. Reading and writing are twin acts of intimacy: because the bond Dante creates with Virgil is the attachment of deepest feeling in the Inferno, it grounds us in the poem. When the poet crosses Hell’s threshold, he accepts the hand Virgil extends. At the same time, Dante reaches across oceans of time toward readers not yet born, spirits as weightless to him as the shades he walks among.
We moderns continue to acquiesce to his guidance, traveling alongside him “among things undisclosed.” We earn the rapture of self-forgetting if we consent “to be drawn away,” as Kafka writes in his Diaries, describing moments when he has fully given himself over to a book. The language that saturates the Prague writer’s discussion suggests that for him as for Dante the act of reading is an act of seduction. “If one doesn’t resist” the “concentrated otherness” of the writer, Kafka muses, one is “newly shaken up,” only to be “brought back to one’s self” with a discovery that “remains behind in one’s own being.”
With the help of Boccaccio I shadow Dante one morning in Siena, the city seven centuries younger than it is today. The poet has just located a book for which he has been searching in an apothecary’s shop, Boccaccio writes in a passage that is as much creative nonfiction as this essay, since, he admits, he observed Dante’s habit of intense study only from the “credible” reports of others. I follow the poet’s lead. Maybe the leather-bound volume he asked for had been wedged in between the treatises on medicine the apothecary habitually consulted. Or perhaps the gilt lettering on its spine caught Dante’s eye as he waited for a poultice to be composed. In any case, as Boccaccio indicates, once the volume was proffered, Dante leaned “against a bench in front of the apothecary’s and put his book there, and began to examine it eagerly.” In his cameo, Boccaccio represents Dante as a reader, and so I picture the poet this way, his thin form hunched over his prize, his unsmiling eyes studying the book-hand script with an attention bordering on concupiscence.
On the street, the tang of dust mingles with the scent of cloves. While Dante reads, young men costumed for one of the city’s festival days parade by, the tremolo notes of their recorders warbling after their passing. Children scrabble among the revelers, and girls lean out of casements to watch the fencers spar below. Men in leather breeches and coarse brown cloaks jeer at the flushed faces of perspiring dandies whose silk-slashed sleeves, adorned with fur, are wet through in the heat. At dusk the files of people start to thin; women come out of doors to empty the scraps from pots; a few muse in the cooling breeze before the cries of their children draw them back inside. The sky turns red and blues to darkness. Only then does Dante look up from his book.
The poet lived much of his life alone. Or rather, he chose to confer his conversation upon those who spoke best from the pages of books. This is no doubt why, despite his overweening arrogance, his undisguised disdain for others, and his unrelenting condemnation of those who lived differently from he, my heart goes out to him. I imagine peering over his shoulder in Florence as he writes in solitude after evensong and then late into the night as the street outside his bedroom slowly empties of passersby—the framework of the Commedia not yet material in his mind. Downstairs, his children and the servants sleep. In the room that adjoins his own his wife too is abed, having long since ceased her cajoling. In the moonlight, water gleams from between the crevices of the cobblestone street, and I envision his window, like those of my twenty-first-century neighbors, as a yellow square lit against the darkness. Dante sits at a wooden table scored from the stroke of the ax that hewed it. Wax tablets are stacked on each side of the inkwell as if to guard the parchment from the mess of spilled wine and spattered tallow. In the shadows the small flame casts, his angular countenance grows gaunter, the dark eyes settling further under the broad brow, the prominent lines running from nose to mouth cutting deeper. The trees list and lean in the breeze outside, but the poet does not attend their swaying. Head bowed over his desk, he listens to the rasp of the stylus as the jet sheen of his words dries a duller black.
Like most writers—the bulk of us less than keen for nonstop company—I understand Dante’s yearning for solitude. But such a wish was out of temper with his time. In the fourteenth century, people often slept three and four together, tore hunks from loaves of bread at meals to sop up the liquid from communal dishes of soup or stew, and rubbed the sleep from their eyes each morning while watching their faces skew in the dirty water of a shared tin bowl. Amid the crowd, the poet’s “disdainful spirit,” as Boccaccio writes in his Life of Dante, stayed “self-contained.” Occupied in thought, Dante withheld reply to questions till he judged he had finished his own deliberations, rebuking the garrulousness of others with silence. I imagine him curtly civil among the babble of idle tongues that surrounded him, ready with acidulous words though regretful in privacy afterward. Intellectually fervid but emotionally aloof, he saved empathy for the characters in books.
Though quick to anger and slow to forgive, Dante labored diligently to gain the political prominence that would also further his recognition as a poet. In 1300, when he was only thirty-five, he was appointed a prior, Florence’s highest honor. The following year he and two other prominent citizens were selected to meet with Pope Boniface in an effort to broker a peace between Florence’s warring parties. Just before Dante reached home after the close of this papal audience, Florence suffered a coup d’état. During one of the days he spent in Siena idling in political limbo, Dante learned that his city had levied a sentence of banishment against him.
How he must have seethed to be cast so decisively beyond the arms of this city he loved. Coldly philosophical and prideful to a fault, he could neither take solace in tears nor prostrate himself at the feet of the people he despised in order to accept the terms of amnesty that would have permitted him to crawl back inside the gates. Eliot, a poet who seems to me to have possessed something of Dante’s temper, pictured hell in a wrecked Europe he mourned in The Waste Land, shoring up the fragments of civilization—lines from the Inferno among them—against his ruin. Dante did not stand by the Styx and weep. Nor did he, as would Eliot, connect “nothing with nothing,” listening helplessly to the broken intonations of the past. Instead, the earlier poet salvaged the Tuscan idiom if not the people who spoke it, buttressing the dazzling architecture of his poem with the polyphony of Florentine accents as he rebuilt the city stone by stone.
Most of us lob unwieldy phrases toward those who have hurt us. During the long years of his banishment, Dante sharpened the blunt instrument of language to a knife’s sharp point. Faithful to the memory of others, if only in spite, he cast a baleful look homeward. From the windows of the way stations where he sat illumined by candlelight, he spat angry expressions in the faces of the men and women of Florence who had watched unmoved as the wooden gates were dragged shut behind him. “After it was the pleasure of the citizens of that fairest and most famous daughter of Rome . . . to cast me out of her dearest bosom,” he wrote with withering fury in the Convivio, a book finished in 1308, he set to wandering. In the streets of Lucca and the mountain valleys of the Casentino he sprung phrases true as arrows to gore unrepentant hearts. From the Verona estate of Can Grande della Scala, he fashioned verses of ice to freeze souls he judged as rigid as the traitors he stationed in the ninth circle’s arctic floes. By Ravenna’s canals he rhymed words of censure and recrimination, his ears tuned not to the plash of water outside his door but to those whispered inflections he conjured from the place he loved and hated a hundred miles away.
Florence was “perfidious” and “base,” but she remained “irremediably home.” In the Convivio, Dante admits bitterly that he longed to end his days there. In the Paradiso the city walls rise redeemed in the shimmering jasper that adorns the city of God in Revelations, the material geography of Florence diffused by the poet into abstraction. But in the smoky air of the Inferno their silhouettes loom as if he had trained a telescope upon every crenelated feature. The poet transforms guildhalls into fortresses, resurrects the skyline denied him in the precipitous wall that rings Malebolge, and retraces its winding pathways in the stony trails he clambers up by Virgil’s side. Fosse and ditch; valley and embankment; bridge, pit, beltway, and wall: every crevice and crag of the Inferno is composed from Florence’s soil. Hell’s horizon is the city’s geography, the poem’s atmosphere of heat and horror as thick with the anguish of the sinners as his home’s piazzas were thronged with tradesmen hawking their wares on market days.
In his twenty years of exile, Dante made a wide, restless sweep through Tuscany—“wandering” as he tells us in the Convivio, “through almost every region to which the tongue of ours extends, a stranger, almost a beggar.” He began the Commedia in the flower-strewn valleys of the Casentino and continued its verses while looking down upon Siena’s red-tiled roofs, then polished sections of the poem by the black waters of the Adriatic and rethought stanzas as he strolled along Bologna’s expansive Roman streets. In front of the pink-toned sandstone of the University of Bologna he dined amid intellectuals who warmly received him. But always the outline of Florence glimmered familiar on the page, close as the lover who rests beside you, reader, and as dear to him in the graying light of dawn.
In the early morning hours my trafficked street is quiet. Outside, a few brilliant yellow squares repel the night from nearby houses. The taillights of a passing car slide red and silent across the window casing before they vanish. I imagine looking down upon this place from a plane, watching the city glimmering remote below the glass, its illumination colder than starlight and seemingly no closer. Is it contact I crave from Dante’s world, a closeness his language invites? Am I simply bedazzled by the medieval world of my imagining, a place of purer color than our own, if of equally transfixing cruelty? Or is my cleaving to this Christian some deeper yearning, a wonder about what it would be to exist as someone else?
In Dante’s time Christianity was compulsory throughout Europe, its rituals the calendar by which life took measure. “Progress through the liturgical order was the closest thing to an agreed-upon time scheme for the London day,” Paul Strohm writes of that city in Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury. Florentines also parsed their time according to the sacred calendar. They were married according to the Church’s rules, castigated by its law, physicked by its medicine, and taught by its books. The rigid rhythms of Christian prayers settled their nerves against the innumerable hazards that could yank them from the arms of the world without a whisper of warning. And yet, for all the Church’s sureties, its life insurance could not stay the terrors that crept nightly to their thresholds to wait like massy shadows in the moonlight outside.
In the Middle Ages the afterlife was not a mirage glimmering far away on the temporal horizon. It was a side street a man or woman turned down absentmindedly when some everyday disaster caused him to lose his way—a cut turned septic, a misstep from a tower window, a fever brought on by typhus or the plague. Unshriven, unrepentant, or just unfortunate—the victim of a landslide or a spring storm—the resident woke to the stink of scalded flesh and the jeers of demons crowding him cliffside. Hell received impartially, welcoming the wicked alongside the unwary. The first and fullest democracy, its gate lay open, a threshold no one was denied.
“ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE”: the phrase “inscribed in some dark color” over the portal of the Inferno remains the poem’s most famous line. How strange that Hell’s most dreadful vision is a sentence, not a sight. The computer-printed capitals glare from the page of my paperback copy of the Inferno, their black magnificence no less scourging there, or on the page of this book, than in the hour Dante first impressed them onto parchment. “Help me escape this evil that I face,” he pleads of Virgil at the outset of the Inferno. As I read, I see Dante hesitate as he stands under this stone inscription. Then together we turn again to the Roman at Dante’s side. I study these pitiless letters and know why the medieval poet asks another to “make clear / Their meaning, which I find too hard to gather.” But why appeal to Virgil for aid rather than to a fellow Catholic author? How can a pagan lead Dante to “Saint Peter’s gate,” interceding with “the God” the Roman “did not know”?
For an answer I return to Primo Levi, my own first guide to the Inferno, a man led through a modern “città dolente” by a writer who did not share his faith. In Auschwitz Levi recited Dante, refusing to resist the “concentrated otherness” of this Christian whose book praises the God in whose name Levi and countless other Jews had been condemned to hell. To my mind there is no more generous gesture for one who suffered in the Holocaust than to “be made into his counterpart,” as Kafka writes in the Diaries of the relationship between reader and writer. But of course, Levi, letting himself be drawn away by Dante, returns to himself, the excursion of reading affording the modern writer renewed understanding, as he indicates in Se cuesto è un uomo.
If words can destroy hope, they can also rebuild trust. Levi survived the long months in a concentration camp by believing in a writer across the gulf of faith. Dante, too, must have been sustained in exile less by his reverence for religion than by his faith in books. Reading seems the purest act of grace, a forgiveness that transforms condemnation into curiosity and enables us to bridge the deepest chasms of thought and belief. Both Dante and Levi, absorbed readers, refused in their turn the isolating path. By consenting to let the words of other writers speak their minds, they found a way to resist the separation of souls in this world—and perhaps, the faithful might say, the loneliness of those divided in the next.
Like open-heart surgery and prayer, writing and reading are not always efficacious. Levi freed himself from Auschwitz with Dante’s help, but the death camps made transport brutish, a conveyance that battered the body and did not sustain the soul. The chemist returned to Turin after the war and settled in to work at a paint factory outside the city, but—Carole Angier tells us in her biography The Double Bond—the writer did not return home. Instead, he hovered on the outskirts of his birthplace, spending his weeknights in the company’s dormitory, where he finished a draft of Se questo è un uomo. In the ensuing years, he worked full-time as a scientist but continued to publish steadily, authoring several semi-autobiographical works, a novel, a second book about Auschwitz (The Drowned and the Saved), and a wealth of stories—many of which returned him to wartime terrors.
Seventeen fictions that appeared posthumously in English in 2007 under the title A Tranquil Star reveal how Levi’s hellish history remained closely present for him. In some stories, such as “The Death of Marinese,” we travel alongside Levi directly back to the battlefield. Others gesture toward World War II by musing about the ethical questions that conflict engendered. Both “The Knall,” an ostensibly lighthearted exploration of a toy that kills, and “Gladiators,” which relocates the appetite for voyeurism in an unspecified future, chart, as Ann Goldstein notes in the collection’s introduction, what Levi called in a letter to his publisher—“an unraveling in the world . . . that annihilates one or another aspect of . . . our moral universe.” Read with the advantage of hindsight, “Bureau of Statistics”—reminiscent of Kafka and Borges—augurs Levi’s suicidal fall from his apartment building in 1987. The story describes a fifty-eight-year-old character as one who “doesn’t fear death and doesn’t seek it, either,” but who “may act carelessly.” Assigned not only to explain the death but to invent its cause, Arrigo, the writer’s proxy, has “him fall from a scaffold: he wouldn’t suffer much.”
Varied in tone, these stories share a quality of loneliness. Barely perceptible, this isolation is the more remarkable for its gentleness of expression: as though Levi could not bear to stay too long in human form, he moves fitfully from shape to shape through the mostly third-person narrations of his book.
In “Buffet Dinner,” a parable about the estrangement survivors experience after reentering what the Inferno labels “the human world,” the narrator slips inside a kangaroo that must negotiate a party despite his obvious difference, privy to casual commentary about his species’ near extermination and the indifference of others to his perception of this trauma. In “The T.V. Fans from Delta Cep.” the central character is transported to the depths of space. This personage, an alien who writes to the host of a popular television show from light years away, is chatty and charming; however, even though the words of his letter are clear, his signature remains “illegible.”
But even this far-flung voice is more down-to-earth than the narrator of “In the Park.” At the outset of this story, Antonio is welcomed to the shores of the afterworld—not the place humans go but a more exotic composite where characters from books find housing. Antonio is as closely linked to the author of the autobiography Levi invents in this story as the narrator of Se questo è un uomo is to the writer himself—yet the chemist does not hesitate to obliterate the memory of this fictive personage. As Antonio grows diaphanous in the final paragraph, he understands his time is near. “His testimony complete,” he sits under a tree waiting “for his flesh and his spirit to dissolve into light and wind.”
As an allegory of Levi’s postwar experience, “In the Park” is no less transparent than its fading hero. Its landscape parodies the Inferno, affording readers a self-consciously breezy tour of literature’s afterlife that provides the writer momentary escape from the survivor’s lingering sorrow even as he testifies to its lasting estrangement. Here as elsewhere in A Tranquil Star, transformation is forgetfulness, an effort to take flight from the human as much as to reaffirm social ties. Circe changes men into pigs in The Odyssey, but the sailors’ swinish language is just trickery, a metaphor Homer exploits to condemn our unchanging gluttony for acquisition. Levi’s late stories are closer in spirit to the metamorphoses of Ovid and Kafka because here, also, men and women do not return to themselves. The modern writer’s stories originate from a secular sensibility preoccupied with chance rather than the ordered world of Dante’s faith, but they illuminate the extent to which Levi, too, remained exiled.
What reader has not sometime hoped for the shock of transcendence, the bolt of lightning that seizes? I search for words brilliant enough to weld “now” to “then” and grope for a language that will bind my imagination to the writer’s understanding, making us twin witnesses to one scene. In Levi and Dante I find this transport, though it is no kin to rapture. In their pages I meet spirits so bereft they could have been torn away from the warm tissue of the lungs and the heart’s comforting murmur. Harder to witness but more deliberate, their twin conveyance of souls is neither a delusional effort to slip the skin nor the romance of easy union with another.
“I spoke / Like one set free,” Dante tells us in the Inferno’s second canto, after Virgil’s narration has restored his “spirit. Now, on,” the medieval wanderer insists: “For I feel eager / To go with you, and cleave to my first intention / From now, we two will share one will together.” Writing wrenches but also permits reunion. Reading likewise cleaves the self twice over, duplicating as it divides: when we lose ourselves in a book, we acquire the “senses, affections, and passions” Shylock demands we look for in those we malign. From a writer’s words we may obtain the “quality of mercy” Portia pleads for listeners to find. The voyage of reading is often dismissed as a flight from reality, but is life less escapist than art? What is experience, after all, but a set of shadows that chase themselves across the skull’s bone? Just as the hand that holds the book is out of focus, and the place where we read a blur beyond the page, the souls of others hover indistinctly on the horizon of consciousness. Absorbed in the closed worlds of our thoughts and feelings—wild woods of neurons as savage as Dante’s selva oscura—we can turn to language that demands we see others more clearly, or we can settle for a televised babble that does little more than beguile.
Contemporary citizens possess no greater insight into injustice than did Dante when he mourned the finest souls confined in limbo. We can offer no better explanation for cruelty than could Primo Levi, who witnessed the blameless scourged in hell. My younger self nodded approbation when hearing philosophers and critics untwist the skeins of ethics from the woof of aesthetics. Older now, preferring to look for parallels rather than to divine distinctions, I trace the upward arc of the “e” these two words share, follow the symmetry of their common “c,” track the grace-note serif that completes the “t,” and admire the swan’s-neck curves of each lovely “s.” Then, as has no doubt been the case for other readers who have picked up the Inferno and yearned for a glance at the outermost shores, I find that the clarity of letters blurs into the dark marks of its words. I listen while the flame of Ulysses speaks from the mind of a man who wrote in rooms long since fallen to dust, the layers of other lives in medieval Bologna and Ravenna and Siena pressed close by time, the rutted street still outside worn smooth by a seeming infinitude of walkers.
The flimsy spine of my paperback Inferno gathers the centuries as closely as the stitches of Dante’s fourteenth-century manuscript once bound its vellum pages. I read outside my flat and the days spool past like those years in a blur of sound half-heard and image half-noticed. A breeze fans my skin, recalling me to the body from which I have slipped away. I look up from a paragraph and watch the moving leaves transmute the invisible world, for a moment, into something seen. In the words writers craft as finely as clerics once labored over illuminated letters, I find an equal intimation of presence, a perception if not a place, an indifferent divinity conferred in an ordinary moment of grace. As I sit with a book and the traffic falls to a hush, the wind stirs a chime to music not unlike the voices Dante might have heard. Then there comes to me a trace of the awe the faithful must know when they are visited by that great beating of wings: a faint, ardent sublime.