Yup, add the Shaw to the list. A balding little artsy-fartsy devil–as dangerous as any.
The Great Divorce has a hell in it, but it doesn’t really have a devil, so while it responds to Shaw, it doesn’t really give grist for what satan is like–IIRC, it implies that we all make our own hells without needing much assistance.
I haven’t read the Heinlein, but didn’t he have unorthodox religious views? Does he write a traditional Christian demon?
And just what does Mr. Daniels mean by “devil’s in the house of the rising sun,” hmmm? Is the morning star stooping to get down with the ladies in New Orleans?
This thread made me actually visit the library to check the book out and try to get through it… So far I’ve gotten through the first two cantos (just got it today, not much time to read it), and it seems a bit dry for my tastes, but everything points to it getting better. So I’ll persevere, and maybe read all three parts.
The traditional Christian view, perhaps. But no review of Satan as literary character is complete without Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita: Satan arrives in Stalinist Moscow accompanied by (among others) naked female witches and a cat the size of a large pig who’s a crack shot with a Browning .45 automatic and loves playing chess. (“It’ll change your . . . life” – Ukulele Ike, in the infamous “Ike recommends books for you” thread.) One of my desert island books.
It’s been ages since I read the DC. I liked Purgatorio, although I have to admit that I found the extended allegorical weird stuff near the end ("…and then there’s this eagle named Clyde with the hindquarters of a bear and the horns of a moose pulling a black chariot with red racing stripes, which then turns into a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax…") really annoying – Dante inserting his own take on Revelation, perhaps, or just a bit of stroking his friends and patrons.
Paradiso is, as noted above, more contemplative. So – no gore, no people being forced to run around burning sands or having long poles rammed up their backsides or having their heads turned around. Just lots and lots of praising God. Which is pretty much what you might expect.
It’s worth reading the entire trilogy. Purgatorio can get a bit slow, but is still interesting. Paradiso is somewhat of a drag through the first half (talk to dead guy, Beatrice smiles, they ascend, talk to dead guy, Beatrice smiles, they ascend…), but the pay-off for it is amazing. The last half of Paradiso was literally breath-taking. After reading the last half, I’m extremely tempted to re-read the entire series–everything makes much more sense when you find what Dante’s universe turns on.
Robert Hollander’s recent translation of the Inferno (with Italian on facing pages)gets my vote for the most “readable” and most faithful to the Italian. The brief notes and summaries before each canto are especially helpful. Hollander is supposed to be publishing translations of the Purgatorio and Paradiso soon.
I found Hollander a lot more accessible, and much closer to the feel of the original, than any of the more deliberately “poetic” translations (like Ciardi or even Pinsky, whose version I generally liked) and a lot more interesting to read than the faithful-but-dry prose translations (Sinclair or Singleton, as I recall). Dorothy Sayers’s translation is just plain strange, although the short essays she wrote about how and why she decided to translate Dante are worth reading.
As for the OP – You really need to read all 3 to understand how all the pieces fit together. Admittedly, Purgatorio and Paradiso require a little more work to appreciate – fewer people being boiled in oil and more abstract images and references – but well worth the effort if you can put yourself into Dante’s Medieval mindset. (It’s a whole lot less dry IMHO than the parts of Milton where he has Adam and Eve discussing theology for several thousand lines.) In any event, you definitely need a good commentary to appreciate what’s going on, of which there are many. (I recently saw one called “To Hell and Back with Dante” or something like that, that seemed to give a good overview of what happens in the entire Commedia.)
If you are reading purely for entertainment, then I would suspect that the Paradiso is not for your taste. I can only get through it if I bone up on Aquinas first and read it as a reaction to Aristotelianism in theology and cosmology. It’s not really a page turner. The Purgatorio is particularly interesting for its reconciliation of classical and Christian learning, and it is also valuable to read it against earlier monastic accounts of the journey to heaven.
Most of the blood, gore, politics, and witty dialogue are definitely in the Inferno, but it is hardly a superior work to the others. It is just a helluva lot more accessible.
Wow. I sometimes wonder if anyone’s paying any attention to anything I say (I have a wife and two children under the age of five, so you can understand why I’d feel that way), then someone goes off and buys something just on my say-so.
I hestiate to ask, under the circumstances, but did you happen to notice which translation/edition you ordered?Either the Michael Glenny translation or the Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor translation are preferable IMO to the Mirra Ginsburg version, which was based on the text as published in the Soviet Union, and hence represents a somewhat altered and expurgated version. It also seems to me (though I admittedly know no Russian and have no basis for an opinion) to miss the spirit of the book as conveyed by the Glenny translation, which was the one I first encountered and fell in love with the book through. The Burgin/O’Connor translation is also based on the full text and gets generally positive comments from those who’re in a position to know. I have and have read all three and I think the Burgin/O’Connor is my favorite, though I’ve only been through it once, unlike the Glenny which I must have read six or seven times now.
Like tullius, I really enjoyed the Hollander translation. It’s a prose translation, and having the Italian on the facing page is really nice. I found Dante’s expression of his mission as a poet and the role of art to be fascinating, and there’s a lot more about that in Purgatorio and Paradiso. Some of his recurrent images and metaphors also develop very beautifully and satisfyingly over the course of the entire poem. For example, there are scattered references to parts of ships in Inferno, Purgatorio opens with an invocation referring to Dante’s poetry as the little bark of his imagination, then Paradiso begins with an image of Dante’s poem/ship guiding a whole fleet of souls.
This tension between Dante Pilgrim and Dante Poet is one of the things that makes it so much fun! The whole trajectory of Dante’s life is stunning to contemplate–the narrative is almost unbelievable arrogant, and yet at the same time he makes the tragedy of his exile a productive, fertile source for his genius. I’d love to get in my time machine and have dinner with him; the man must have had an incredible mind to work in the myriad allusions and references and to develop the whole poem so coherently. I have a secret fantasy of discovering his notes in my attic one day…
I am getting the apparently little known “Glenning” translation (presumably just a typo issue). I had to used-book-search for that out of print classic, “Eyeballs for Breakfast,” for my 8-year-old today anyway, so your recommendation got to me at just the right time.
Yes! the Marlowe Faust! I knew there was another one I was blanking out on. Good catch, Amok.
And, to complete the trifecta of comments, Yersinia Pestis’ neat sig reminds me of a story they tell about Frank Lloyd Wright: he wasn’t getting good milk production from the working dairy farm at Taliesin, so the farm manager suggested the purchase of a few Holsteins (the black and white cows known for their milky prowress). “No,” he answered. “They wouldn’t look right against the green of the grass.”
Just what I was going to say, Amok. (We’re doing Faustus in my Renaissance Drama course next week – woo-hoo!)
(Although to be fair, Satan himself doesn’t get all the good lines in this play – he only appears once or twice. Mephistopheles has a few things in common with Milton’s Satan, though.)
Thanks for the notes on translations – I’ve read the Pinsky translation of the Inferno, and intend to read the rest of the Commedia eventually, as I don’t want to be one of those schlubs who only reads the Inferno… Anyway, I don’t know Italian, but this translation read well, and it had the Italian on the facing page so I could look at it – I do know a thing or two about Romance languages.
Also have to agree, in a general sense, with Yersinia Pestis about the interest of authorial self-presentations. I’m no expert on Dante, but the disparity between Chaucer the pilgrim and Chaucer the poet in the Canterbury Tales is similar in many ways, and I’ve always found that fascinating.
Perhaps, but I was always partial to William Blake’s sketches of hell. He does an amazing job of capturing pain and terror.
I read the Alan Mandelbaum translation on my own in high school and enjoyed it, but I got a lot more out of the John Sinclair translation when I read it again for medieval lit. in college. His comments at the beginning of each canto were a great help in explaining references I wouldn’t have caught without spending an extra few years studying ancient lit., theology and Italian history.
I first read the Divine Comedy in the Dorothy Sayers translation, which I think has a lot going for it - it’s a reasonably accessible verse translation, and it’s copiously annotated. Which last helps, rather a lot - especially in the Paradiso, which constituted my introduction, at the tender age of fifteen, to mediaeval theology.
I’d agree that it can be tough going, but I think you need to read all three parts - they do really tie together into a single big picture.
I might chase down some of the other translations mentioned in this thread, though - apart from the Sayers, the only one I’ve read is Laurence Binyon’s, which I thought was a bit, umm, dense. (Yes, I know, I should learn mediaeval Italian and read it in the original. Maybe someday, when I don’t have to spend all my time at work…)
(We’re doing Faustus in my Renaissance Drama course next week – woo-hoo!)
Anyway, I don’t know Italian, but this translation read well, and it had the Italian on the facing page so I could look at it – I do know a thing or two about Romance languages.