9781593080518

The Infernoremains literature's most hallowed and graphic vision of Hell. Dante plunges readers into this unforgettable world with a deceptively simple--and now legendary--tercet: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark For the straightforward pathway had been lost. With these words, Dante plunges readers into the unforgettable world of the Inferno--one of the most graphic visions of Hell ever created. In this first part of the epicThe Divine Comedy, Dante is led by the poet Virgil down into the nine circles of Hell, where he travels through nightmare landscapes of fetid cesspools, viper pits, frozen lakes, and boiling rivers of blood and witnesses sinners being beaten, burned, eaten, defecated upon, and torn to pieces by demons. Along the way he meets the most fascinating characters known to the classical and medieval world--the silver-tongued Ulysses, lustful Francesca da Rimini, the heretical Farinata degli Uberti, and scores of other intriguing and notorious figures. This edition of theInfernorevives the famous Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, which first introduced Dante's literary genius to a broad American audience. "Opening the book we stand face to face with the poet," wrote William Dean Howells of Longfellow's Dante, "and when his voice ceases we may marvel if he has not sung to us in his own Tuscan." Lyrically graceful and brimming with startlingly vivid images, Dante's Inferno is a perpetually engrossing classic that ranks with the greatest works of Homer and Shakespeare. Features a map of Hell and illustrations by Gustave Dore.

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Peter Bondanella is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Indiana University and a past president of the American Association for Italian Studies. His publications include a number of translations of Italian classics, books on Italian Renaissance literature and Italian cinema, and a dictionary of Italian literature.

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From Peter Bondanella's Introduction to The Inferno

Church doctrine in Dante’s time (as today) holds that Hell’s function is to punish for eternity human souls who died in mortal sin without a sincere confession of their faults that expresses repentance for their misdeeds. These miscreants do not qualify for the purifying punishments of Purgatory, where souls who do not die in mortal sin escape eternal damnation and suffer temporary expiation before receiving their blissful reward in Paradise. When Dante began his poem, he was certainly aware of biblical and classical views of the afterlife. In the Sheol of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Hades of classical antiquity, souls after death did not really receive retribution for their earthly sins or particularly attractive rewards for their earthly merits. But the Christian church, affirmed by the theology of such major writers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, conceived of Hell as a place where the good were separated from the evil, and deeds on earth were weighted and judged. Dante’s famous notice over the gate of Hell underlines the eternity of Hell’s punishment (“All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”), but it is also clear from a reading of the entire poem that Dante considers the greatest punishment possible to be not the incredibly original and grotesque physical punishments he invents for his work but, instead, the eternal loss of communion with God that is enjoyed by the blessed.

Dante’s poetic genius partly resides in his many ingenious inventions for the shape and character of Hell. Dante’s Inferno is a hollow cone shaped by the displaced territory after Lucifer’s expulsion from Heaven and fall to Earth. It is situated under Jerusalem and consists of nine concentric circles that grow ever smaller and house more and more evil sinners. Ultimately, Hell ends at Earth’s core, where Lucifer is imprisoned in ice. Contrary to popular opinion, fire and brimstone are not the typical infernal punishments, although they are present. The place is filled with a number of rivers, swamps, deserts, a burning plain, a huge waterfall, a frozen lake, the towers of the City of Dis, and the ditches and bridges of Malebolge (ten sections of a circle shaped like ditches, pouches, or purses). Because the science of Dante’s day followed the Ptolemaic system of the universe in astronomy and Aristotle’s teachings on physics and biology, Dante considered Hell to be in the center of Earth, which in turn was in the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around it. A great chain of being extended from gross matter, animals, and humanity to the nine orders of the angels, and then to God in the Empyrean Heaven. Dante’s Inferno generally reflects traditional medieval thinking on astronomy and science, but the poet is also capable of enriching this tradition with his own ideas to enliven his picture of the Other World.

The most important rule in the Inferno, as well as in Purgatory and Paradise, is that Dante makes the rules. Laws can be broken or twisted to suit his poetic purposes, but they are always his alone. Such inventive details, often created by the author out of whole cloth, provide the reader with a rich, textured world of real individuals and a universe with its own specifically Dantesque regulations and customs. In many respects, Dante’s Inferno is not an unfamiliar place. Its most interesting inhabitants are not classical monsters, mythological figures, or heroes but instead are contemporary Italians, figures from all over the peninsula. It is an all too human world that we all immediately recognize as the one in which we live. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that Hell is other people. Dante would have said: “We have met the damned, and they are we.”

Apart from all of the entertaining and ingenious “house rules” in Hell that Dante invented, one of the great intellectual achievements of Dante’s Inferno as a work of art is its original synthesis of the Christian and the classical worlds in Hell’s organization. For example, the idea of a visit to the Underworld was suggested to Dante by the obvious example of Virgil’s Aeneid. Since Virgil had been to Hell before, who else would be more qualified to guide an Italian poet who loved Virgil’s epic work on another journey through the same territory? Numerous specific physical punishments in Hell require guardians or bureaucrats (not to mention torturers enjoying their work), just as a prison requires jailors and executioners. Thus Dante employs a wide variety of classical figures to serve in this capacity, including Charon, Minos, and the centaurs. The rivers of Hell are those of classical antiquity (such as Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, and Lethe). Numerous classical figures, such as Alexander the Great, Brutus, Cassius, and Ulysses, appear in the various circles in which they suffer eternal damnation along with Dante’s contemporaries. No more heuristic juxtaposition of ancient and modern, classical and contemporary, will occur in Western literature until the sixteenth-century appearance of The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, two books by Niccolò Machiavelli that effect a similar synthesis by founding a new realistic view of politics upon comparative analyses of ancient Romans and contemporary Italy or Europe.

Excerpted from The Inferno by Dante
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The Inferno (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

The Inferno (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

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