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).

This Day in Literary History (Birth of Dorothy L. Sayers, Scholarly Queen of Detective Fiction)

June 13, 1893—Dorothy L. Sayers, who advanced the art of the detective story when she wasn’t blazing a trail as a female Christian intellectual in the first half of the 20^th century, was born in Oxford, England, the only child of an Anglo-Irish minister in the Church of England. Years later, that background would inspire her to write of academe and produce a late-life labor of love—a translation (only two-thirds complete at her death in 1957) of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I was first exposed to Sayers as a teen in the 1970s, when Masterpiece Theatre ran not one, not two, but five adaptations of Sayers mystery novels starring Ian Carmichael as her bon vivant detective, Lord Peter Wimsey— Clouds of Witness, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Murder Must Advertise, Five Red Herrings, and The Nine Tailors. (Edward Petherbridge played the role in the 1980s.) They proved so popular that PBS got the idea to create the long-running Mystery series.

How much that would have pleased Ms. Sayers is an open question. During her lifetime, she angrily rebuffed filmmakers’ attempts to translate to the big screen any of her 11 novels and several short stories revolving around Wimsey. 

Perhaps she thought that a mere two hours would have been nowhere near enough time to do justice to her creation. After all, Ms. Sayers had spent a great deal of time etching his portrait over the years—endowing him not even with a monocle and “what, ho!” expression, but also a background as a PTSD WWI victim, not to mention three centuries of titled background lineage she invented for him.

My own favorite of her Wimsey novels was Murder Must Advertise. It might have been due to my own background right out of college as an advertising copywriter in a publishing house, but I got chuckle after chuckle in reading Sayers’ description of life in the profession, as presented by a practitioner:

“We undermine ’em with one hand and build ’em with the other. The vitamins we destroy in the canning, we restore in Revito, the roughage we remove from Peabody’s Piper Parritch we make up into a package and market as Bunbury’s Breakfast Bran; the stomachs we ruin with Pompayne, we re-line with Peplets to aid digestion. And by forcing the damn-fool public to pay twice over—once to have its food emasculated and once to have the vitality put back again, we keep the wheels of commerce turning and give employment to thousands—including you and me.”

Seven years of slaving away in an advertising firm (she is supposed to have even coined the catchphrase, “It pays to advertise”), even while she was turning out one highly regarded mystery after another, gave Sayers an unequaled chance to describe the milieu surrounding a crime with deep acumen. It also amply fulfilled her hope “to make a detective story a novel of manners rather than crossword puzzle.”

Neither as prolific nor as popular as Agatha Christie, Sayers surpassed her in writing style. Although Christie was content to focus on the mystery novel as puzzle, her contemporary devoted far more time to creating compelling atmosphere and characterization, believing this crucial to success. A great admirer of the Victorian mystery writer Willkie Collins, she served as a bridge to later female British crime novelists who would also be acclaimed for their styles, such as P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.

Key to any detective novel are secrets, and Sayers understood their power because she harbored a few of her own, chiefly involving men:

*One affair with a married man ended with him leaving her;

*A second affair ended with her becoming pregnant, not marrying her lover, and placing her son in the hands of a cousin, who raised him with the public none the wiser while she was alive; and finally,

*Marriage to an alcoholic invalid that became increasingly nightmarish over a quarter century until he died.

One delight that the detective story affords those who dabble in the genre is the chance to vicariously kill people who have mentally wronged them. In Strong Poison, the woman that Wimsey will eventually woo and wed, Harriet Vane, goes on trial for allegedly administering arsenic to her former lover, Philip Boyes--a pretty strong example of wish fulfillment on the part of Sayers.

In the mid-to-late Thirties, Sayers turned away from the mystery genre and began to concentrate on religious writing and translations. In 1916, she graduated from Oxford as the first woman to earn a first-class honors degree in medieval literature, but now she broadened her knowledge of languages to encompass not merely French and German but Italian in order to tackle Dante. Her friend C.S. Lewis particularly admired her series of religious radio plays, Man Born to be King.

Quote of the Day (Dante Alighieri, on Steadfastness)

“Be steadfast as a tower that doth not bend its stately summit to the tempest's shock.”—Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Purgatorio (early 14th century), in The Divine Comedy, V. 14.

Photo of the Day: Dante Statue, Dante Park, NYC

Right across from Lincoln Center in Manhattan stands a triangle at Broadway, Columbus Avenue, and West 63rd Street. Dante Park is named for the medieval poet who created the masterful Divine Comedy.

This statue, named in the poet’s honor and created by sculptor Ettore Ximenes, was dedicated in 1921, the 600th anniversary of Dante's death. I took this photograph  several days ago while visiting Lincoln Center.

Quote of the Day (Dante, Back From Hell to ‘The Shining World’)

"To get back up to the shining world from there

My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel;

...Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars." — Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), The Inferno of Dante, translated by Robert Pinsky (1997)

Quote of the Day (Dante, on the Need to be ‘Steadfast as a Tower’)

“Be steadfast as a tower that doth not bend its stately summit to the tempest's shock.”—Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio (early 14th century), V. 14.