It’s Better in the Second Kingdom

Inspired by Elif Batuman’s piece in the September Harper’s, I finally finished the Hollanders’ translation of The Inferno, which I started last year. Naturally, when I had finished the Inferno (Spoiler! Hell is pretty much as you’ve heard: a frozen wasteland with Satan at its very center, half-buried in ice, chomping on the body of Judas), I plunged straight into The Purgatorio.

In a way, The Purgatorio is what you’d expect. Dante has emerged from Hell and stands with Virgil at the bottom of the mountain he must climb to expunge his sins and enter paradise. The mountain has seven levels, one for each of the mortal sins. The Hollanders’ translation is laid out in their typically helpful format: a brief outline of each canto, followed by the Italian original and their English on facing pages, and finally extensive notes for each verse in each canto.

But something different about The Purgatorio surprised me right away: It’s better than The Inferno. In a way this shouldn’t be surprising. The Purgatorio is about redemption, about light, about climbing up from the depths of despair — all subjects that are more pleasant to read about than evil, hopelessness, loneliness, and terror. But it’s not just the subjects — Dante’s language is also more beautiful and more accessible. It makes me wonder if Dante made The Inferno difficult on purpose. We are in Hell, after all. Maybe the difficult allusions and obscure political references are meant, in part, to illustrate Hell’s unpleasantness. (Dante scholars: e-mail me at seancarman@speakeasy.net to support or debunk this speculative hypothesis.)

I also wonder: Why is The Inferno the volume everyone talks about, if, as it seems, The Purgatorio is the better read? Could it be that hardly anyone makes it to the sequel, and so all the talk is about the first volume?