Poetry 5: Dante and the noon-day demon

Today's offering is from fourteenth-century Florence: the first stanza of Dante's Divine Comedy. I visited Florence last year, and I had a book which I kept reading during my stay, Prue Shaw's Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, which told me many interesting things, such as how Dante may have been gay for his best friend Cavalcanti, and that the starting lines of the Inferno may be about depression, about having a crisis and not knowing how to go on. That idea has stuck with me; it makes the dark wood and his journey through something quite different.

Dante, Inferno 1

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Tant' è amara che poco è più morte;
ma per trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai,
dirò de l'altre cose ch'i' v'ho scorte.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh –
the very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

Trans. by Robert Hollander

Poetry 5: Dante and the noon-day demon

Today's offering is from fourteenth-century Florence: the first stanza of Dante's Divine Comedy. I visited Florence last year, and I had a book which I kept reading during my stay, Prue Shaw's Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, which told me many interesting things, such as how Dante may have been gay for his best friend Cavalcanti, and that the starting lines of the Inferno may be about depression, about having a crisis and not knowing how to go on. That idea has stuck with me; it makes the dark wood and his journey through something quite different.

Dante, Inferno 1

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Tant' è amara che poco è più morte;
ma per trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai,
dirò de l'altre cose ch'i' v'ho scorte.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh –
the very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

Trans. by Robert Hollander