Quote of the Day (Dante, on Opportunists in Hell)

“Here sighs and cries and wails coiled and recoiled
On the starless air, spilling my soul to tears.
A confusion of tongues and monstrous accents toiled
 
In pain and anger, voices hoarse and shrill
And sounds of blows, all intermingled, raised
Tumult and pandemonium that still
 
Whirls on the air forever dirty with it
As if a whirlwind sucked at sand. And I,
Holding my head in horror, cried: ‘Sweet Spirit,
 
What souls are these who run through this black haze?’
And he to me: ‘These are the nearly soulless
Whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise.
 
They are mixed here with that despicable corps
Of angels who were neither for God nor Satan,
But only for themselves. The High Creator
 
Scourged them from Heaven for its perfect beauty,
And Hell will not receive them since the wicked
Might feel some glory over them.’”—Italian poet Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265-1321), “The Inferno” (Part I of The Divine Comedy), Canto 3, translated by American poet John Ciardi (1977)
 
This week marks the 700^th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. I almost forgot to mark the event on this blog until I found a link on the Website for BBC Radio mentioning it.
 
As I wrote this post, I listened to Franz Liszt’s Dante Symphony to put me in the appropriate mood. But so extraordinary was the poet’s imagination and style that I had little need to call to mind favorite passages of his Divine Comedy, which English biographer, translator and literary critic Ian Thomson, in a 2018 article for The Irish Times, termed “the most original and audacious treatment of the afterlife in Western literature.”
 
Many translators have tackled this epic (notably, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and—more surprisingly, to fans of her detective fiction—Dorothy L. Sayers). 

But John Ciardi’s appeals to me the most. It’s the one I first encountered as a high school senior, then used again while in college, and its use of terza rima stanzas (an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme) gives the best sense of how Dante could compress so much into so few words.
 
Canto 3 became a particular favorite of three of the most charismatic 20^th-century Presidents:
 
*Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1911 a well-received essay for The Outlook on “Dante and the Bowery,” and used much of the imagery from the canto in his 1910 address, “The Man in the Arena”;
 
*Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic Party renomination for President in 1936 in his “Rendezvous With Destiny” address, which defended his administration by warning of indifference in the field of the Depression’s suffering: “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales”; and
 
*John F. Kennedy misattributed these words to the poet while being correct about the message that Dante wished to impart: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
 
The neutrality that Dante is criticizing (those “whose lives concluded neither praise nor blame”) springs not from a plague-on-both-your houses disgust with two opponents, but rather from a cold calculation of advantage amid tumult. Its great fictional epitome is Littlefinger in Game of Thrones, who tells the careful, secretive counselor Varys that “Chaos is a ladder.”
 
Here in Hell, Dante warns, such men have all the chaos and tumult they can want, but they reap no advantage from it.
 
Contemporary cynics can’t be faulted for thinking that countless current officeholders are unwittingly clamoring for a chance to join this suffering infernal throng. It just goes to show that technology may change human culture, but not human nature.
 
The image accompanying this post, by the way, is Mappa dell' Inferno (“The Abyss of Hell”), by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510).