Ulysses’ mad pursuit of virtue and knowledge presumed that an exploration of physical facts can yield an understanding of value. In the examination on love in the heaven of the fixed stars, St. John first asks not what love is, but where Dante’s soul is pointed. To love is to have an aim, a point, a target. It is to value something more than other things and, in the hierarchy of all good things, there must be one that is the best of all. It is from the sphere of the constellations, of which Ulysses necessarily lost sight when he ventured beyond the known world into the southern hemisphere, that Adam reveals that the cause of his long exile was a trespassing beyond the sign. Since language, the logos, is what humans use to discern what is good and what is harmful, it enacts the role of the God of Bible who promised to reveal to Moses “every value.

The chapters in this book are all readings, or interpretations, of key characters and episodes in the Divine Comedy where it can be shown that what is at stake is a kind of faith. What has been argued is that reading itself is an act of faith, a willingness to trust not only in the individual human author or narrator, but in the larger story in which all truthful, good faith narratives somehow fit. A different faith, like a superseded hypothesis in science, is another way of approaching a single truth and it can be read, charitably, as such.

The primum mobile is the largest body of the universe, giving impetus to the whole complex system of natural causes. Limit of the physical world, it serves as a vantage point on the metaphysical structure that undergirds it. The planets are moved by angels that appear to whirl at different speeds in nine concentric fiery wheels variously distant from the common focus of their orbits. The angels are uninterruptedly intent on what they know and love, to the degree that they know and love it. The opening astronomical simile serves to describe a single moment of perfect balance in an ambiguous twilight before the universe took sides and split into light and dark, good and evil. It is a moment of expectation, in which what comes next depends on whether one settles for what appears in the here and now or believes that it promises something more yet to come.

There is a tendency, at least among secular readers, to bracket off Dante’s faith as something no longer true, something to which we no longer subscribe. Yet that would seem to miss not just an aspect of the Divine Comedy, but its central point. The episodes in the Inferno this volume focuses on, paradigmatic for the whole work, point to a problem of faith – lack of a shared belief, misreadings of important stories, failed allegiance, and broken promises. But it is the choice of Virgil as a guide, lost because of his belief in “false and lying gods,” that teaches us how to read ancient books whose culture we no longer share. How indeed can we believe in them?

Among the heretics in the circle of violence, the revered Ghibelline hero Farinata degli Uberti explains that the damned see with bad light (mala luce). Farinata is interested only in keeping score between Guelphs and Ghibellines; his tomb-mate is interested to know only if his own son is dead or alive. A deferential Florentine ends up inadvertently inflicting untold pain on these sinners already burning in hell because of an inability for the lot of them to see the same present, to see the same facts. Dante’s treatment of heresy points at a fundamentally political rather than a religious problem. The reason why people inflict violence on one another in their parties, tribes, and faction, is not because the “sweet light” of day no longer strikes their eyes, as if the facts were evident to all, but because of a lack of shared belief. This is the light they lack, the one even blind fathers can pass onto their sons.

A first shock of the Paradiso is to discover that it has difference, diversity and degrees. Dante questions Piccarda, the lovely sister of his childhood pal, as to whether she doesn’t yearn to have a more exalted station and to be friends with people in higher places. Her response is that the virtue of charity quiets their will so that they do not want anything other than what they have. Since Piccarda was taken against her will by her powerful brother’s henchmen from the convent where she had wanted to sleep and wake with Christ her whole life, and forced into a marriage she did not want, her acquiescence to the will of others seems to endure even in heaven. Yet appeasement in the face of violent threats turns out to be the opposite of resting in the truth of one’s own particular capacity for goodness, in a spectrum of possible goodness that soars way over our heads.

In the wood of the suicides, Pier della Vigna, secretary to the emperor, swears on the thornbush that has become his body that he never broke faith with his lord. Though he is not a traitor, his body will hang from this tree like that of Judas, who was also a suicide. What is at stake in both crimes is a breaking of the fragile bond of faith that makes communication possible. How is it that people believe one another’s words, gestures, and protestations? and what can restore a trust once it is lost? This suicide violently broke the bond between his body and his soul, of which his body was the truest expression, because he could no longer make people believe him by means of his words. On what bond of trust can the emperor’s propagandist rely, if words and truth, like body and soul, have been severed from each other?

Dante’s Francesca, damned for what she claims Love did to her, refers to Lancelot as cotanto amante, “so great a lover,” at the very moment she recounts that her unnamed consort in hell kissed her on the mouth. The problem is not just that she has been befuddled by romance, misapplying it to the facts on the ground, but that she has been seduced by the wrong story and ignoring the greatest of lovers. “If only,” she says wistfully, “the king of the universe were my friend.

What is Volgarizzamento?

The Italian term volgarizzamento refers to a particular condition of translation, where the target language is volgare, vernacular: that is, not a language of literature, but essentially a spoken tongue. It presupposes a situation of diglossia: where two languages are in use, one regarded as higher and the other as lower. In the early period a third language was also in play since many translations were made from French, including translations of French translations of Latin texts. Unlike modern notions of translation, the aim of volgarizzamento was more to explain a given text than to provide a substitute, making it a species of exposition or commentary, a genre characterized by anonymity and mobility. If original texts, particularly ancient ones, were to be carefully copied verbatim and with no intentional alteration, vernacular versions of them were made to be updated, with no expectation of fixity. Such translations as they survive today are the product of multiple authors and multiple layers of authorship, as even the same individual might re-translate or correct prior versions of it. The instability of vernacular languages and of vernacular translation in general is one of the challenges to producing critical editions of these texts.

A Culture of Translation

The phenomenon of vernacular translation in Italy, starting in the middle of the thirteenth century was one of the main catalysts for the beginning of an Italian literature before the Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio triumphed as a cosmopolitan literary language. Emblematic of translation's place at the origins is the lyric translation of Folquet de Marseille's Occitan canso “A vos, midonz, voill retrair’ en cantan,” attributed to the Sicilian Iacopo da Lentini, inventor of the sonnet, at the head of Vatican manuscript Lat.3793, the most important transmitter of the earliest Italian poetry. But the majority of volgarizzamenti, even of poetic texts, are in expository prose: unassuming attempts at rendering a culture of learning accessible to an audience not well-versed in Latin. They are an indicator of the tastes and interests of a particular reading public in a particular time and place.