Academic Essays-Saggi Accademici

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter, and Keep Hope Alive!

On Mis/Translating the Most Famous Verse of the Divine Comedy

Sante Matteo

HORS D’OEUVRE

But before ye enter into this essay, let’s start things off with a pop quiz—just two questions: a little antipasto before the main course!

First, a language question:

Choose the correct English translation of this sentence: Finite ogni fagiolo voi che mangiate qui.

A. Finish each bean, you who are eating here!

B. Those of you who regularly eat here, make sure you finish every bean!

C. You who routinely eat here always finish every bean.

D. Those of you who are eating here are finishing all the beans.

E. Those of you who usually eat here are now finishing every bean.

F. You who are eating here always finish all the beans.

G. All of the above.

The correct answer is G: all the proposed translations are correct approximations. In form, both finite and mangiate can be either imperative or indicative. In this particular sentence, however, mangiate can only be indicative—You (you all, plural) eat/are eating—and only finite can be both imperative—Finish (all of you)! or indicative: You finish/are finishing. In the indicative mood, both finite and mangiate can be either the simple present—you finish . . . eat (regularly, all the time)--or the progressive present—you are (in the process of) finishing . . . eating (now). For the second person plural (voi), Italian uses the same verb ending for the imperative, the indicative simple present, and the indicative progressive present.[1]

--[1] A grammar primer for those who have not studied Italian or those who could use a refresher:

In English, as in Italian, the indicative and the imperative have the same form of the verb: eat, but the indicative, in English, is always accompanied by the subject pronoun: you eat, because the same form of the verb, with the same ending, is used for five of the six persons (subject categories) of the verb: first person singular and plural: I/We eat; second person singular and plural: You/You eat; and third person plural: They eat. The only distinct form is for the third person singular: He/She/It eats. So, in the indicative mood, just using eat by itself doesn’t tell us who the subject is.

The imperative, on the other hand, both in English and in Italian, can only be in the second person, addressed directly to the person or persons who are listening, which in English is you in both cases, with the verb in the same form. The first person, I/We, and the third person, He-She-It/They, cannot be the subject of an imperative verb, and so the subject pronoun is unnecessary. Therefore, eat, by itself, is necessarily an imperative, and you eat is the only way to express the indicative.

In Italian, on the other hand, the subject pronoun is not used with verbs in the indicative mood because each person of the verb has a distinct ending that tells us who or what the subject is. Let’s take mangiare (to eat): mangio (I eat), mangi (you, sing, eat), mangia (he/she/it eats), mangiamo (we eat), mangiate (you, plural, eat), mangiano (they eat).

As for the imperative mood, unlike English, in which the only possible subject for the imperative is you, which is both singular and plural, Italian has different forms for the second person singular, tu (thou), and for the plural, voi (you all). In Italian, therefore, it’s possible to tell if an imperative is addressed to an individual or to a group, even though the subject pronoun is not used: Finisci (Finish) addresses an individual (tu); Finite (Finish) addresses a group (voi).

Keep that polyvalence in mind as ye proceed—if ye proceed.

Now, a question on literature:

Which is a famous line from Italian literature in English translation?

A. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

B. Where are the snows of yesteryear?

C. Abandon all hope, you who enter!

D. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

E. A tisket, a tasket, a brown and yellow basket.

F. I think, therefore, I am.

G. All of the above.

The correct answer is C: probably the most quoted verse from Dante’s Divine Comedy. (If ye cheated and got a hint by looking back at the title of this essay, deduct 10 points from your score; or on second thought, add 10 points.)

Even if this had been an open-answer question, without the prompts provided by the multiple choices suggested (7 possibilities, because that’s the number that represents completion or fullness in Biblical, medieval Christian, and Dantean numerology), that line would likely be the one to come to mind for educated English speakers, just as Italian speakers would likely cite the same line in the original: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate” (Inferno, canto III, verse 9).

For many people, whether they’ve read the poem or not, this sentence has thus come to constitute a summation of the whole poem, its essential message. (And, since I’ve now referred to it as a “sentence,” let us note—parenthetically at least—that English has serendipitously acquired two meanings for the word “sentence”: one, grammatical: a statement constituted by a string of words; and the other, juridical: a condemnation to punishment for the commission of a crime. For Anglophones, therefore, the “sentence” that, in the first sense, serves as a thematic summation also happens to be a “sentence,” in the second sense, to eternal, hopeless imprisonment.)

The wording of various English translations might differ: e.g. Abandon/Leave behind/Give up/Forsake/Surrender . . . all/every/any/each/whatsoever . . . hope/aspiration/wish . . . . The meaning remains the same: You are doomed to be punished in Hell for eternity with no possibility of pardon or parole, ever. So, leave all hope at the door! You won’t be needing it from now on.

WHAT’S DONE IS DONE

That commonly accepted meaning, however, relies on a very problematic and deficient translation of the verb “lasciate”; deficient, not in the sense that it’s incorrect but that it’s not fully adequate. Despite the different words, none of the English translations allow for all the possible meanings, connotations, or implications of the Italian original.

Recall the polyvalence in the first part of the quiz sprung on ye upon entering and notice that “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” is similar in structure and tense to the quiz sentence. The verb lasciate can have analogous significations and translations to the verb finite in that sentence. That is, it can be either in the indicative or imperative mood and can express either the simple or progressive present tense, which means that this sentence, too, at least when standing by itself, can be translated in different ways, as was the quiz sentence. With lasciate as an indicative, the line could be read as: Those of you who enter in this place (are the ones who) leave all hope behind; or in the progressive tense: Those of you who are entering are (the ones who are) giving up any hope--as well as the other permutations presented for the quiz sentence, with the simple present and the progressive present alternating.

So, why is it always and only translated as an imperative? And what is lost in translation when the other possible meanings are jettisoned or ignored?

Insofar as this verse has commonly come to serve as a sort of short-hand synopsis for the whole text in the minds of many people, its translation fundamentally determines and alters how the Commedia is understood by the speakers of the language into which it is translated. As crucial as an accurate translation of this important verse is, however, I’m not aware of commentators who discuss its multiplicity of meanings and the difficulty of conveying those possible meanings and implications in English (and presumably, in other target languages).

Before plodding ahead, I should confess to being only an occasional visitor to the vast realm of Dante Studies—a dense, immense forest where I am likely to get lost, not having read widely or deeply in the field. In that sense, I am like Dante the pilgrim at the gate of Dis, cautioned, if the verb is read as an imperative, to give up any hope of emerging from the mess into which I am nevertheless blundering with this exploration, or if read in the indicative, reminded that I have already lost any such hope.

On the other hand, I did benefit from studying with the pre-eminent Dante scholar Charles Singleton in graduate school and from having another excellent dantista as a colleague for several years, Madison Sowell (whose illuminating canto-by-canto study questions I continued to use whenever I taught the Divine Comedy). Mostly, I learned by discussing the poem with many students over the years (usually using Allen Mandelbaum’s bilingual edition, with the vast majority of the students reading his English verse translation and the fewer Italian majors in each class reading the original Italian—with an extra class hour of discussion in Italian each week).

VOICES FROM THE PAST

This present excursion into the forbidding forest of Dante Studies, however, is taking place in retirement, without the students to help me get out if I get lost. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how the rest of this essay goes—while roaming through the Dartmouth Dante Project (https://dante.dartmouth.edu/), I came across two literary guides who have encouraged me to stumble ignorantly ahead: Jacopo della Lana (1278-1348) and Johannis de Serravalle (1350-1445), two early commentators of the Commedia.

Jacopo della Lana was Dante’s contemporary and compiled his commentary in Italian between 1324 and 1328, only a few years after Dante’s death in 1321. In his paraphrase of the verse, he apparently reads the verb lasciate as an indicative, based on the fact that he places its clause at the end of the sentence: “voi ch'entrate in questa cittade lassate ogni speranza” (You who enter into this city leave every hope). The fact that he was reading and writing at the time of the poem’s production and initial circulation would seem to imply that reading the verb as an indicative might have been the default or preferred way of reading the line. (I say that della Lana “apparently” reads it as an indicative because what I claim to be a possible double reading of Dante’s verse could conceivably also apply to della Lana’s reiteration of it. In form and out of context, his lassate could be either indicative or imperative. By a very long stretch of the imagination, the verb lassate could be read as an imperative, despite its positioning at the end of the sentence, albeit not very credibly. I doubt that any Italian speaker today could process it as an imperative. Still, the way language is used and understood does change over time, which is one of the points that I’m trying to make. Plus, it would be hypocritical of me to deny or downplay the importance of syntactic context in Dante’s verse and then affirm it as essential in Jacopo’s reiteration of it. I’m assuming that the use of the exclamation point to signal the imperative is a relatively modern convention not generally in use in Dante’s time.)

In his explication of the passage, Johannis de Serravalle, who produced his commentary in Latin a century later, 1416-17, quotes the verse and supplies a Latin translation: “Lasciate omne speranza, voi che entrate: idest, perditis omnem spem vos qui intratis, nunquam hinc exituri.” The Latin verb he uses for lasciate is perditis, the present indicative, second-person plural (vos) of the Latin verb perdo, perdere (to lose, destroy, ruin, waste, corrupt). The imperative form would be perdite. Since the imperative and indicative have different forms in Latin, there can be no doubt that Johannis reads the verb as an indicative and the verse as a declaration: You lose/are losing all hope, rather than as a command: Give up all hope!

So, with gratias to Jacopo and Johannis and following their lead from seven and six centuries ago, I blunder ahead on the path least taken since then and by now completely covered over.

ABANDON WHAT EXACTLY?

Current Dante scholars I’ve consulted support the imperative as the reading that makes the most sense. Some cite the explanation supplied by Vergil in the tercets that immediately follow this passage, as well as Charon’s words to the souls he is about to ferry across the River Acheron later in the same canto. Those passages, however, seem to me to compound the problem rather than resolve it. But ye, the jury, be the judge!

After reading the inscription above the gate, Dante turns to Vergil and exclaims: “Maestro, il senso lor m’è duro” (v. 12: Master, their sense for me is hard: my literal translation), which is usually taken to mean that Dante finds the meaning difficult, hard to understand—as in Mandelbaum’s translation: “Master, their meaning is difficult for me”—but according to several commentators, “duro” (hard) could also mean: hard on me: what that sign says is hard (threatening, dangerous, accusatory) for me.

In his reply, Vergil also uses the word lasciare, which could serve as a gloss on how to interpret the lasciate of the earlier tercet: “qui si convien lasciare ogne sospetto” (v. 13: “Here one must leave behind all hesitation”; trans. Mandelbaum). The verbal construction, “si convien lasciare,” is not in the imperative mood, and the subject is not voi, the second person plural, but the impersonal third-person si (one). Nevertheless, it does state something that must be done, and it does therefore convey an imperative meaning indirectly. That’s the case, however, only if convenire is taken to imply obligation, which is one of its meanings but not the only one. It can also mean: to be in agreement; to come to a common accord; to be useful or to one’s advantage. But lest we get even more deeply lost in translation, let’s grant that the meaning here is the indirect imperative: one must put aside.

What is it, according to Vergil, that one must put aside? It’s ogne sospetto, which Mandelbaum translates as “all hesitation,” but which could also be: fear, doubt, suspicion, concern, uncertainty. All of these terms, however, are the opposite of hope. In essence, Vergil, in his explanation of the inscription, tells Dante that he—or more accurately: one, which is to say anyone or everyone—must abandon all doubt and hesitation, which means that he/one must keep his/one’s hope alive, not abandon it. It sounds to me like a flat-out contradiction of the divine command posted on the gate, if a command is what it is.

Commentators, including colleagues who have reflected on my hypothesis, however, explain that Vergil is not paraphrasing the saying on the gate but is telling Dante not to worry about it, to ignore the injunction because it doesn’t apply to him, because, thanks to the intervention of Beatrice, he is exempted from the rule. There is no reason for Dante to fear because he is not doomed to Hell, only passing through. But if Vergil is not answering Dante’s question by paraphrasing or explaining the line, why would he re-use the verb lasciare as if he is reiterating and clarifying the sentence that worries Dante? And if he is telling Dante that he, as an individual with special dispensation, can ignore what the inscription says, why does he use the impersonal si (everyone, anyone) rather than tu (you, singular)? The impersonal construction implies that his explanation applies generally to everyone, not particularly to Dante.

Vergil’s admonition would make more sense—without initially appearing to be contradictory—if the inscription’s last line was not a command to abandon hope but a declaration that it’s by losing hope that people get to that point. In other words, Vergil, himself, seems to read lasciate as an indicative, which would also suggest that Dante the author also meant it to be understood that way: Those who abandon hope are the ones who get trapped and can’t get out. So, make sure that you do not abandon hope but keep up your courage! That’s what Vergil not only reiterates but emphasizes by repeating the same admonition in the next verse: “ogne viltà convien che qui sia morta” (v. 14: “here every cowardice must meet its death”; Mandelbaum). This, too, is couched in the third-person, impersonal form, making it generally applicable to everyone or anyone, not directed specifically at Dante. And it, too, would seem to contradict what is written over the gate if lasciate is taken to be an imperative. If Vergil reads lasciate as an indicative, doesn’t it suggest that Dante wrote it as an indicative?

A parallel admonition, near the end of the canto is expressed by Charon, the mythological ferryman who transports dead souls across the Acheron to the Underworld: “non isperate mai veder lo Cielo” (v. 85: “Forget your hope of ever seeing Heaven”; Mandelbaum; more literally, “Don’t hope ever to see the Sky/Heaven!”). Here, too, the verb isperate is taken to be an imperative by commentators and translators. And that is undoubtedly a “correct” reading and translation. Nevertheless, at least in terms of grammatical morphology, this verb, too, could also be read as an indicative: You, anime prave (v. 84: corrupted souls), are the ones who can never hope to see the sky. Without rehearsing all the possibilities again, let’s just say that it fails to serve as convincing supporting evidence that lasciate ogni speranza is perforce an imperative and can only be read as such.

LOST IN THE FOREST OF LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION

To recapitulate, here’s what makes this a textbook case of the traduttore = traditore comparison (translator = traitor; to translate is necessarily to betray the original text): In Italian, lasciate can be read as either an imperative or as an indicative verb. In English, it has to be one or the other (see footnote on first page), and all translators, to my knowledge, have opted for the imperative. All English readers have thus read the verse only as a command: Abandon all hope! What gets lost in translation when the possibility of reading the verb as an indicative is abandoned?

In the Divine Comedy course, taught in English, I would point out that lasciate could be an indicative, which would change the verse to a declaration: "Those of you who go through these gates are the ones who choose or have chosen to abandon hope." Rather than a command issued by a superior force over which we have no control; this description ascribes choices and consequences more directly to us. It thus becomes a description of a psychological state or condition in life instead of an imagined otherworldly punishment. By extension, it describes any addiction to which we are prone as sentient human beings: a condition created by us that we experience in life, not after death.

For supplementary reading in the course, I normally asked students to read a daily newspaper or weekly news magazine. They were to make note of a story in recent news that resonated with the reading assignment in the poem. To their surprise, they had little trouble finding characters and events that were analogous to those depicted in the Commedia. They could thus perceive that Dante was not only writing about cosmology, history, philosophy, and religious doctrine, but also about the everyday life of his Florentine and Italian neighbors, and, even more importantly, also about us, our world, and our neighbors. Reading lasciate as an indicative reinforces the poem’s relevance to other times and places. It defines Hell as a state of our own making, and one that we keep making in each generation. It says: This is what you allow yourselves to become when you lose hope. Dante’s journey becomes the reader’s journey.

Oscar Wilde makes an illuminating distinction in De Profundis, that I think is relevant: “while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.” “Wrongness” is not inherent in individual actions but in becoming addicted to certain behaviors and reaching a state when there is no longer a possibility of changing. And that is Hell: permanent hopelessness created by our own choices (leaving aside considerations of biological, genetic, social, economic, and other material determinants).

A similar insight came at a party when a fellow graduate student introduced me to her date, Willy, whom I had often seen in the gym, where he was usually working with weights. I said: “Oh, nice to meet you finally. You’re the weightlifter I see at the gym, aren’t you?” He smiled and nodded but corrected me: “Well, I lift weights, yes, but I’m not a weightlifter.” He was echoing Oscar Wilde: What he did was not what he had become, not what he was.

The distinction made by Wilde and by Willy can also help us understand Dante’s notion of contrapasso, the form of punishment meted out in Inferno. As John Freccero (also Singleton’s student, two decades before me) pointed out in his brilliant essay, “Infernal Irony: The Gates of Hell” (MLN, 1984), the punishments witnessed by Dante the pilgrim (and invented by Dante the poet) do not correspond to a generalized, pre-established hierarchy nor to a gradation of suffering based on the intensity of physical pain. Dante’s Hell is not just fire and brimstone, and the punishments do not become more severe as Dante and Vergil descend lower. Rather, each form of punishment is custom-made to “fit” the sin being punished. The punishment is actually an extension and reification of the sin, itself. As Wilde might have put it, it’s the condition created when the sinner has become the sin.

Addiction to certain behaviors has brought these people to a state from which they can no longer extricate themselves. Their condition, along with their character, has become static and permanent, and that immobility is their damnation. They have become slaves of the addiction and have lost their capacity for agency and with it, any real hope of change.

Sins and crimes presumably start out with a desire to obtain something that is denied or difficult to attain. Hope of success fuels that desire, bolsters the determination to pursue it, and drives the efforts to make it come true. If the goal is met and the desire is satisfied, success produces pleasure, a sense of empowerment, and the impulse to do it again. And then again, and again, until desire has become a need, a compulsion that no longer allows for choice: an addiction that now controls the addicted, whether it be to drugs or medication, to patterns of behavior, to a rigid set of beliefs, or to ideological convictions.

Hope and desire presuppose and require will, agency, mobility, achievement, change: all of which have been lost through addiction. Through initial desire and hope, addicts have become the hopeless reified victims of their desire. They have produced their own Hell from which they cannot escape. Their self-induced condition resembles Dante’s notion of contrapasso, which can be understood as a version of the jocular warning to “be careful what you pray for because you might get it.” The lesson of Inferno’s contrapasso, as anticipated in the inscription on the entrance gate, could be: Be careful what you hope for; you might get it and be stuck with it.

In this case, too, an essential element of what defines Hell in the Commedia, the contrapasso, seems to make more sense, at least to me, if lasciate is read as a description of what has brought the sinners to that condition rather than as a command of what to do from this point on. In Wilde’s distinction, these are people who are no longer able to “do” anything; they have “become” something. They no longer have the capacity to make a choice and act on it; can no longer anticipate, choose, or determine their future; no longer have the mobility or flexibility to bring about change in themselves or in their circumstances. Commanding them to give up hope is pointless. At best, it’s only rhetorical, to point out the obvious. At worst, it’s a cruel taunt to remind them of what they’ve already given up.

On the other hand, the reading I’m now proposing that focuses on the past, rather than on the future, seems to be just as pessimistic, if not more so. What’s worse, it seems to be an account that “blames the victims,” attributing their condition exclusively to their choices and actions, without allowing for other determinants that might have been outside their control. And yet, paradoxically perhaps, focusing on the sinners’ past experiences allows readers to review causes and consequences more critically than if those experiences were simply occluded, with questions of choice and responsibility removed from sight and consideration. By taking us back to the past, the indicative also allows us to envision possible different futures than the one that has taken us to the gate of Hell. The imperative, precisely because it can be enacted only in the future and thus occludes the past, keeps those other potential futures off the screen, away from the reader’s perception and evaluation.

In pointing out the alternative meaning of lasciate to students, however, my aim was not to contradict or deny the meaning implied by the imperative, but to argue that reading the verb as an indicative can make the passage even more relevant and forceful by switching the cause/effect relationship, thus assigning greater agency to individuals, including the readers—especially the readers. The imperative says: You have sinned and, as a result, you are now commanded to give up hope. The sins come first, and the loss of hope follows as a consequence. The injunction applies only to characters inside the narrative. The indicative says: You have given up hope and thereby you have created a condition for yourself out of which you cannot exit (Sartre's Huis clos). The loss of hope is not the consequence but the cause—the original sin, in a sense—that leads to the condition of no escape. This explanation, unlike an interdiction, applies both to the fictional characters inside the narrative and to the flesh-and-blood readers outside.

JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSYCHE

When I was a graduate student, I heard an enlightening talk by Franco Ferrucci at a summer semiotics seminar I was attending in Urbino. He made a convincing case that Freud's notions of the Id, Ego, and Superego were essentially a reformulation of Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, and that modern notions of psychology were anticipated by and already embedded in Dante's poem. We could learn as much about the human psyche by reading Dante as by reading Freud.

Scholars with whom I’ve discussed his analogy have generally found the Id-Inferno and Ego-Purgatorio comparisons convincing but objected to likening the Superego to Paradiso. Dante’s paradisal vision, they say, is not of a restrictive, punitive conscience that dictates behavior, thwarts dangerous appetites, curbs desires, and creates a sense of guilt, but a state of grace and joy, far removed from what Freud conceived as the nature and function of the Superego.

We have commonly come to regard Freud’s notion of the Superego (uber-ich) as a policing, forbidding conscience that induces guilt, but his own definition also attributed a more positive manifestation to it, as the ego-ideal, or ideal self, characterized by aspirational goals rather than punitive threats: what in popular parlance we sometimes term the “better angels” that guide us to a sense of wellbeing and fulfillment, if not ecstasy and joy.

Dante's Paradiso does indeed depict a state of grace and joy, but represents it as available only to the “saved” and only in an afterlife, not in this life—which is to say, not in life but in death. The joy of Paradiso is hypothetical, a possibility only for those who believe in an afterlife and the existence of a soul and a deity. Dante’s Paradiso and Freud’s Superego, in other words, are both products of the imagination. They conceptualize ideal aspirations created by the mind. Freud's tripartite concoction is just as much a mental, linguistic, conceptual creation as Dante's vision —and thus also a product of poiesis, which explains why the French novelist Romain Rolland nominated Freud for the Nobel Prize in 1937 not for science but for literature.

If the Commedia is to be read as an exploration of our human experience and condition and an investigation of our psyche, it has to remain relevant within different socio-historical contexts, regardless of the inevitable diversity of philosophical, religious, or psychological beliefs to be found in different times and places. Readers need to be able to transpose Dante's language and beliefs—what Umberto Eco called an author’s or a reader’s “dictionary” and “encyclopedia”—into their own conceptual paradigms.

As readers, we have to figure out how texts, whether Dante’s poem or Freud’s treatises, pertain to us individually and collectively. To do that, it’s useful, perhaps even necessary, to be “religious,” but not necessarily in the same way that Dante was, nor in the sense of common usage, which defines religion as believing in and worshiping a supernatural deity. Rather, I mean “religious” in the etymological sense of the word, which derives from Latin religo, religare = to tie things back together; or according to another derivation, cited by Cicero: relego, relegere = to read again, review and reconsider, to gather together. While both etymologies allow for the common meaning of religion as a belief in divinity and an attempt to remain attached to it, they also allow for other possible meanings, for other categories to tie together, other bonds that need to be created and maintained. The essential thing is to establish ties with something beyond ourselves.

Both Latin verbs define the main purpose and function of culture: to recall, assemble, reflect (in two senses: 1, to examine and ponder; and 2, to project back, as in a mirror), establish connections, and tie things together: individuals to society; past events and ideas to present and future ones; facts to ideas; existence to essence; experience to meaning; immanence to transcendence. “Transcendence,” like “religion,” has also come to refer primarily to a supernatural, divine realm, but it doesn’t have to be deistic or mystical. We “transcend” to another realm whenever something takes us out of our individual physical, animal existence and binds us (ligare) to something beyond our biological experiences to a conceptual realm of meaning, be it familial, social, philosophical, political, psychological, theological, magical, or scientific.

Evolution has left us with an organ that produces thoughts, whether we want it to or not, and those thoughts create meanings, forcing us to navigate constantly between bodily existence and mental constructs: in other words, to be “religious” in the sense of tying together immanent experience and transcendent conceptualization. It’s curious that the prefix re- in religare or relegere, and hence in religion, conveys the idea of repetition or retrieval, of tying back to something that existed before but whose bond has somehow been sundered. It suggests that the need to recuperate something that has been lost is already posited as a premise at the outset of thinking: an illusion of loss and reacquisition prepackaged into the term itself. To be in life—with a brain—is to want to transcend it, to “return” to the Garden of creation before and beyond natural life. That little prefix re- immediately transports our quest for significance into the past and to a supernatural realm, beyond the contingency and corruption of biological existence. The fact that we want to go “back” to the Garden before “creation” hides the fact that it’s a fiction we created to have something to look ”forward” to: “salvation.”

The Commedia, as I read it, tells us how to perform that “religious” act of bridging and binding together our immanent (meaningless) reality with a transcendent (meaningful) realm: 1, Avoid the static, hopeless, addictive suffering of Hell; 2, Aim for the pleasure and happiness of Heaven (both of these, mental constructs created by our meaning-making machine, analogous to Freud’s Id and Superego); 3, Laboriously make our way through Purgatory (also a mental or conceptual construct or allegory, but closer to reflecting our physical, biological life).

TRANSCENDENCE READ BACKWARDS

In the classroom and in his writings, Professor Singleton brilliantly and convincingly made a case that Beatrice should be read as a figura Christi (both a symbol and a representative of Christ, a “standing in” in His stead). His allegorical reading is enlightening within a Christian context, especially within the medieval European scriptural and epistemological context he uncovered and evoked and within which he situated Dante’s mental encyclopedia, reconstituting what Dante would have read and learned, the ideas and knowledge to which he would have responded, using the language, information, and beliefs of his time. But does his interpretation also shed light on the possible meanings of the text outside the Christian semantic field?

Singleton’s explication of the poem as a “journey to Beatrice” and, because she is a figura Christi, also as a journey to Christ and to salvation, presumes that Dante, himself, intended such to be the signification to be uncovered by his readers. But, to me at least, Dante’s own intentions are of secondary importance. I don’t think we read literature primarily to find out what a particular person thought about a particular issue at a particular time in a particular place. What we have available to us is the poem, with all the accretions it has accumulated over seven centuries of comments and interpretations. The least fruitful question for me is: What did the author want to say? More interesting and useful questions are: What information does the text convey about the concerns, beliefs, institutions, and customs of the society within which and for which it was produced? How do these cultural traits relate to those of previous times and how did they evolve afterwards, down to our own time? Even more instructive and valuable are questions such as: What do readers find in the work that keeps it vital and seminal over many generations and across the world? How does it help me understand myself, even though I live in a different time and world? What does it disclose to me about other people, so that I can better understand how others influence my life, and I, theirs? As an artifact of cultural production and widespread and long-lived consumption, what does it reveal about the function and value of communication, art, and other cultural products? How do they serve to permit us to make sense of life and to share ideas, to learn from those who came before us and instruct those who come after? How can a work of literature or other form of art help me understand and possibly improve myself, my relationships, my life, the lives of others?

Similar concerns and expectations are echoed in a novel I’m currently reading, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. One of the characters has spent years trying to translate an ancient Greek manuscript by finding the perfectly correct words and syntax. He finally learns from his young students, with whom he is trying to stage the text as a play, that such perfect, “faithful” translation is not only impossible but undesirable, because it would be counterproductive, hindering the forward flow of cultural production, which relies on change and renewal. He realizes from his students’ reactions, that stories continue to live and help us make sense of life by remaining relevant and adapting to the lives and worlds of new readers. It’s not the original intention of authors that matters and needs to be disinterred and preserved, nor the original language that needs to be reproduced slavishly. If a text doesn’t speak to the needs and interests of current readers and re-tellers of the tale in their own terms, it's a dead letter.

I don’t mean to dismiss my revered professor’s thesis as being valid only for Christian readers. His studies illuminated the text for all readers, be they of other religions, agnostic, or atheists, by showing other facets of the poem that had been hidden, or not polished enough to be as visible as he made them. Each time a new facet of the Commedia is shown, the poem becomes more brilliant. If nothing else, new interpretations, if convincing in their own terms, reveal to all readers that there are many dimensions and many paths within the journey Dante depicts; many directions to pursue. The poem has become a canonical masterwork because it has so many brilliant facets and accommodates many expository itineraries through it, but as importantly, in my view, because it reveals how the process of signification works and why signifying is essential, indeed inevitable, for humans with a brain and with language.

Partly thanks to Singleton’s guidance, albeit followed obliquely, I started to read allegorical and metaphorical equations backwards, to see if there were hidden implications hiding on one side or the other. The direction in which we process equations matters. Two plus two always equals four. But reading it in the other direction, if the starting point is 4, it can equal 2 + 2 or 3 + 1. If Beatrice is a figura Christi, is Christ a figura Beatrice? And would it mean the same thing?

Even back in Singleton’s classroom, it struck me that, from a materialist perspective, a divine entity seems a more likely candidate to be a figura than a person, since it’s not a physical or biological object but an imagined ideal, hence a figura by definition. Dante and his fellow poets present the women who are the love objects in their poetry as exemplars of the donna angelicata (woman made angel, angelified), instruments for the distribution of God's grace that, through love, will lead us to salvation, away from this world of woe to a realm of pure, eternal joy: a state that does not exist in the physical universe. Read backwards, however, it’s the metaphysical notions of divine grace and salvation that appear to be the instruments or vehicles that lead us back to life and the world in order to make sense of existence, of people, of our human condition—not merely to understand, in the sense of “standing under” something already made, but to make sense, conceived as something that is created and constructed.

This bi-directional view of the relation between the human and the divine is expressed poignantly in the Commedia, itself, by St. Bernard's prayer to the Virgin Mary at the beginning of Paradiso canto 33: “Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio, / umile e alta più che creatura . . . // tu se' colei che l'umana natura / nobilitasti sì, che 'l suo fattore / non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura.” (vv.1-2,4-6: “Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son, / Humble and high beyond all other creatures . . . // Thou art the one who such nobility / To human nature gave, that its Creator / Did not disdain to make himself its creature”; Mandelbaum). All the paradoxes invite a double perspective: both a virgin and a mother; the daughter of her son; the maker of her Maker, in that the “Creator” was also her “creature.” The paradoxes express a mystery, and it’s likely that Dante’s intention was to express this mystery as a miracle: the divine making itself manifest in our earthly realm; transcendence descending to immanence. But read in the other direction, it also reveals obfuscation achieved through a sort of linguistic and mental prestidigitation: self-contradictory affirmations that simultaneously suggest and hide the fact that we imagine a Creator so that we can believe that we were created by an eternal supernatural force to be special "creatures" who are put on Earth for a purpose and who will never die after we’re freed from our bodies.

Ultimately, and even more fundamentally, Beatrice is also a figura hominis, or more accurately, figura hominum: a symbol and representative of all people: living people with bodies, not just disembodied souls. In representing or symbolizing Christ, she also stands for other human beings: the people we encounter in our daily lives, our neighbors. It’s them we must love and by them be loved. Beatrice, as a figura Christi, is the human made divine. Christ, on the other hand, is the divine made human. By loving Christ, a human, we also love God, and by loving Christ, a God, we also love human beings.

Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have a well-known saint, or one of the Apostles, or a Church Father to serve as a guide through Paradiso? Better yet, why not the Virgin Mary? Having Beatrice, a Florentine neighbor who is not known outside Florence, as both the guide and the goal of Dante the pilgrim’s journey serves to humanize divinity, to “popularize” it, that is, to locate and embody divinity in the populace around us. Beatitude comes from and resides in our relations with other people. Even if we believe in the afterlife of the soul and in eternal salvation or damnation, it is a Beatrice who takes us there: a person we meet in life, a neighbor, a fellow human being.

Beatrice, a woman Dante knew, reveals to us that the sufferings of Hell and the joys of Heaven, which we project onto an afterlife, are also reflections of this life. Her function is not only to take Dante to God in the Empyrean but to bring him back to Florence: to this world and this life. Singleton used to quote St. Paul’s metaphorical aphorism that in this life “we see in a mirror, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), whereas after we’re dead, we will see everything clearly. Reversing the direction of the mirror analogy allows another meaning to emerge: that perfect clarity is a metaphysical ideal that exists outside the boundaries of our natural lives, and the only thing we can do in life, in this world, is to perceive things imperfectly, darkly. At the same time that it’s a call to have faith in a divine, ultramundane realm, it reveals that such a realm is in fact ideal, a product of the mind, of ideas spawned by imagination, desire, and the fear of death and finitude. Read in reverse, the metaphor doesn’t tell us that the imperfect vision of this life is something to dread, despise, and shun, but a condition to accept as natural, as the way things should be in life: acceptance, not abhorrence, of our limits as mortals.

One doesn't have to believe that there is a real Hell underground or a real Empyrean beyond the stars reachable after death to take part in Dante's vision and learn from it. One just has to translate his allegorical framework into one's own allegorical landscape.

TO DO OR TO BE?

And so, back to the quest of how to interpret and translate: Lasciate ogni speranza.

When read as a declarative sentence, Hell can be understood as a condition that we create for ourselves when we "become" our obsession, when we have already "abandoned all hope." The loss of hope has happened before getting to the gate. It's what has brought us there, not what is imposed on us from that point on. We are thus granted greater agency, as well as more responsibility, in determining our own fate, choosing how to act and what to become.

But wait, do not abandon the imperative!

Do not leave with the idea that reading and translating lasciate as an imperative is incorrect! It can and should be read as an imperative. As a command, it conveys a meaning that would, in its turn, be lost if the verb were to be translated always and only as an indicative. The imperative at this point is rhetorically and dramatically more effective and forceful. It engages the reader more directly: the reader inside the text who reads the inscription and also the reader outside the text who reads the poem. For both sets of readers, a command is a speech act that elicits an affective reaction as well as an intellectual perception and is thus more engaging and compelling than a declaration or explication. Narratively and dialogically, it’s not surprising that the imperative has come to be preferred and eventually perceived as the only possible reading in this context.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that both sets of meanings, borne by the same verb performing double duty as imperative and indicative, are not only possible and credible in themselves, when considered independently, but they are also complementary to each other and mutually supportive. One way of reading the verb reinforces the other. The performative force of the imperative serves as a catalyst to process the implications of the explication provided by the indicative, while the explanation offered by the indicative justifies the emotional impact induced by the command.

The verb lasciare is used over a hundred times in the poem (106, by my count). In all but one other case, it is used in a different form, with a different subject or in a different tense or mood. None of the other forms found in the poem present a possible confusion as to whether the verb is an imperative or an indicative, not even the one other use of lasciate.

Can ye guess, dear reader, where lasciate shows up again? Wouldn’t ye know that the only other time it’s used again is in front of another gate: the entrance to Purgatory proper. Dante and Vergil reach it after making their way through Ante-Purgatory, following an itinerary similar to the one in Hell, where they traversed Ante-Hell before reaching the gate of Hell proper.

This time Dante the character does not hear or read the verb used directly but hears it used in Vergil’s account of how they reached the entrance. After Dante had fallen asleep down in the Valley of the Rulers, St. Lucy had arrived and said: “'I' son Lucia; / lasciatemi pigliar costui che dorme; / sì l'agevolerò per la sua via.'” (“’I am Lucia; / let me take hold of him who is asleep, / that I may help to speed him on his way.” Mandelbaum, Purgatorio 9.55-57).

In this case, the verb lasciate can only be an imperative because of the pronoun mi attached to it. In the indicative, the pronoun would precede and be separate from the verb: mi lasciate. Since in this case lasciate is clearly an imperative and seems to echo its use in the previous cantica when our heroes encountered a similar situation, can its use here serve as supporting evidence for the argument that the lasciate of Hell was also an imperative?

Perhaps it does since it does seem to be an echo of the previous usage. But if it is repetition, it’s repetition with several significant differences. First, it is not written but spoken orally, or more accurately, quoted, and so spoken twice. Moreover, it is not addressed to Dante, nor generally to the souls making their way through Purgatory. Lucia was addressing Vergil and the souls of Sordello, Nino, and Currado, who were present when Dante fell asleep. Hence, the imperative verb was not originally uttered at the gate, nor meant for the souls about to enter through that gate. Furthermore, it’s not a warning or a prohibition, as the lasciate at the gate of Hell is taken to be. It’s not a demand not to do something but a polite request to be permitted to do something: allow me to take him.

Given these differences, it could be argued just as persuasively that the repetition of the verb here, now used in such a way that it can only be read as an imperative, could also serve to point out that the lasciate of Hell is, in fact, used differently and should not be read the same way, but as an indicative.

But lest ye give up hope of ever getting out of this discussion, shall we try to retrace our steps and see if we can find a way to sneak out?

The indicative leads us to the individual psyche and the process of self-determination: What can, should, will I make of myself?

The imperative, on the other hand, puts us in the realm of communal responsibility and accountably, making us focus on our social behavior to question how we fulfill our collective roles in relation to others: What is my place in a community? What has society given me? How has it shaped me? What do I owe to others in the community and to the community as a whole?

Is it enough to conform to what my community’s dictates and expectations or is it more fruitful to translate and possibly transform the received culture to help the community adapt and evolve to changing conditions?

By presenting the situation of those who dwell in Hell as a punishment for the violation of a law sanctioned by a higher authority—God in this case, as mediated by Scriptures, the Church, the community of believers—the passage alludes to the importance of adhering to the laws, customs, beliefs, and expectations of the groups to which we belong: demographic, geographic, political, economic, religious, vocational: any affiliation that grants recognition and privileges and makes demands on us, influences our behavior to some extent, and contributes to giving us a sense of identity. If we adhere to a community, we must also adhere to its rules. If not, we will be expelled—either by force, against our will, or by choice and of our own volition: expulsion, in either case. And that’s what Hell is: exclusion more than confinement.

Reading the inscription only in one sense or the other leaves the text and its readers bereft of what has been lost in translation, which, as I hope to have demonstrated, happens to be quite a bit.

So, dear readers and fellow travelers, if ye held on tight to that polyvalence that I told ye to keep on hand, ye can now see that it’s the key that allows entrance through many gates of the “divine” poem, including some that are still hidden. In the meantime, ye can use it to find your way out of this diabolical disquisition and go back to your own meaningful explorations.

But before ye go, do abandon all hope of ever obtaining complete and unique knowledge and do keep hoping to find a little more understanding whenever and wherever ye seek it!

WHAT EVERY FOOL KNOWS

After reading a draft of this essay, my former colleague and stellar Dante scholar, Madison Sowell, who happened to be in Rome planning for the publication of his book on ballet photography (he, too, in retirement, pursuing paths less travelled), asked an Italian friend whether lasciate was indicative or imperative, without giving the context. The friend answered, “Ogni sciocco sa che è tutti e due, indicativo e imperativo” (Every fool knows that it’s both, indicative and imperative). When given the context, the friend’s answer was: “Ogni sciocco sa che è imperativo” (Every fool knows that it’s imperative).

In just a few words, those two statements succinctly restate the argument of this verbose essay; that lasciate can be read either as a command or as a declaration, that the choice depends on the context, and that, in this case, the verb has universally come to be read only as an imperative. Faced with such certainty—available to any sciocco (fool)—my attempt to show that in this very context lasciate can also be read as an indicative seems indeed to be a fool’s errand, a Quixotic quest at best (to mix literary allusions, if not metaphors). But if fools and Don Quixote do rush in where angels and wiser folk fear to tread, to paraphrase Alexander Pope (and jumble literary allusions further), at least fools manage to do some treading.

The responses are also intriguing because of the colorful use of the colloquial formula "Ogni sciocco sa . . .” (Every/Any fool knows), which, unwittingly perhaps, couples knowing with foolishness. While meaning that “everyone knows this, even fools,” the expression also seems to say that “those who know this are foolish.” That implication, I think, is both telling and important in what it suggests about language and knowledge: that ultimately it is foolish to think that one knows something with certainty, without allowing for any doubt.

If language is a mirror through which we attempt to reflect reality, it can only reflect it “darkly” (in the Pauline sense) because it necessarily distorts and hides some facets while revealing others. The word sciocco (fool; probably from Latin ex-sucus, without juice, sap, and by extension, without vigor, force, energy) could be considered a collective Freudian slip, in that while used to affirm certain knowledge, over which there can no longer be any doubt, it also equates such certainty to foolishness; somewhat like Pirandello's Così è se vi pare (That’s the way it is if that’s the way it seems to you), which implies that reality is, after all, a matter of perception. Even though the quip that “perception is reality” has become a cliché in popular psychology, we nevertheless realize that it’s true only up to a point. Perception is what we see, but it can fool us. The reality we think we perceive may not be the full or real reality. It’s “foolish” to believe in our perceptions and to believe that we can grasp and know reality fully.

Translation is a mirror of a mirror. It adds more distortions and hides more facets while uncovering or emphasizing others. But in doing so, it also reveals the arbitrary nature of language and the meanings that we construct and convey with language and then try to replicate in different languages. If language is a deficient medium to convey reality, to create knowledge and meaning, and to express and share our ideas, then translation is doubly so: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che traducete! Abandon all hope, you who translate!

But that, too, can be read otherwise, with lasciate as an indicative: You translators are the ones who give up hope; but giving up hope in a good sense: giving up the expectation of achieving perfection, as in that which is finished and complete; accepting the imperfections that language and life contain and impose; and striving to keep communicating and tying stories, poems, ideas, and people together (religare), across geographical and chronological boundaries, with each other in the present and with the acquired wisdom and beauty (relegere) of other times and cultures, so that we can pass them on to those who come after us.

Language, writing, translation are all makeshift instruments of transmission on which we rely (another term and concept that stem from the Latin root religare, to bind, to tie, and therefore another necessary act of “religion”).

As serendipity would have it (perhaps a more forceful and resourceful guide for our cognitive journeys than tried and true experts who take us down tried and tired paths rather than into new, unexplored territory), while pondering the relationship between foolishness and knowledge, I happened to come on this passage in Doerr’s marvelous novel Cloud Cuckoo Land: “What’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”

Isn’t that how culture is created, maintained, and passed on: with fools, sciocchi, never giving up, never abandoning hope?

MORE TRIPTIKS THROUGH DANTE’S TRIPTYCH

Just in case ye want to continue your wanderings through Dante’s Hell, here are some other questions for ye to consider (ye, not me, because I’m retired and already exhausted by this Hell-bound pilgrimage):

Why are lasciate and entrate in the plural voi, rather than in the singular tu, in the first place?

Charon’s harangue in the plural voi makes sense because he is addressing a group of people and is doing so out loud. And Vergil’s use of the impersonal si also makes sense if he’s talking about everyone and anyone who passes that way. But for the inscription, wouldn’t the singular tu make more sense since it’s a written text that has to be read by each individual? Shouldn’t it therefore be addressed to each sinner individually? (And why, ye might well ask, have I addressed my dear reader—particularly dear if still here—as ye rather than as thou/thee, or why not just stick to our more convenient, dedifferentiated, post-Elizabethan “you”? The devil must have made me do it.)

What’s more, now that reading and writing have come up, why is it an inscription that adorns the gate? Why is it written? Why in Italian? Do only Italians go to Hell? Are there different gates for different languages? Or does the inscription switch to a different language for each sinner? What if the sinner can’t read (which would be the case for just about everybody at that time and a vast majority of folks at most other times)? Or, are only the literate expected to be going to Hell (in which case, be afrid, reader, be very afraid!)? And why would God write in terza rima, using exactly the same rhyme scheme and verse and stanza form that Dante invented specifically for his poem? Or is Dante telling us that that’s how he came up with the prosody of the Commedia, by seeing it on the gate and imitating it for his poem? (Freccero addresses the terza rima question in the above-mentioned essay,”Infernal Irony: The Gates of Hell,” making it the basis of the “irony” he attributes to the gate.)

(Oh, oh, I feel that familiar itch of a hypothesis coming on: could this be a self-referential fractal component in the text: a repetition on a micro-scale of the Commedia, itself, as a written text; it, too, crafted to convey universal truths to an uncertain and varied audience while simultaneously displaying all its localized, material limitations: a way for the text both to justify and to question itself? Written language, or rather, language tout court, regardless of how it’s manifested, even if just thought without any kind of utterance or expression, is necessarily inadequate to contain and convey lived experience and the full material complexity of the world and the universe; but it’s all we have. [Note to self: You’re retired. Abandon any intention of pursuing this!])

But before getting lost in other byways, let’s get back to voi vs. tu. Is the plural voi on the inscription used in order to imply collectivity of some kind; to suggest that sinning, committing a crime, or doing something “wrong” always involves doing it within a group or cohort? If misery loves company, as the saying goes, does the use of the collective voi accommodate that very company that misery loves by involving others in our choices and actions?

Is it significant that, if the subject of the verbs lasciare and entrare had been the singular tu, there would be no possible confusion between the imperative and the indicative, because for verbs of the first conjugation, whose infinitive ends in -are, the second personal singular (tu) endings are different in the two moods: lasci, indicative; lascia, imperative? Is voi used precisely in order to create the confusion, so that lasciate can be read as either or both an indicative and an imperative?

Frankly, my dears, I don’t know whether to give a damn or not because I don’t know if these issues have been addressed in commentaries and critical studies. I suspect, however, that, even if they have been, they open up paths for further investigation. So if ye want to extend your stay and undertake more excursions in Dante’s Hell, these are some possible triptiks to consider. (If ye don’t know what triptiks are--or were?—good! It helps make the point that life, knowledge, and language all go with the wind: not gone, though, just translated, which means moved and adapted elsewhere.)

Abandon all hesitation! Go to Hell! Meander through its circles with abandon! Buon viaggio!

A HEAVENLY DESSERT

But what about those of ye—if there still be any—who prefer to be Heaven-bound and to roam in the realm that is much less frequented, whether it be by souls—many being called but few chosen, as another S. Matteo (St. Matthew, in English) once pointed out—or by readers, as well as by translators, given that there are many more translations of Inferno than of the entire poem or of the other canticles—and even by me in this little excursion? Well, if ye want to be among the select few who make it to and through Paradise, do not abandon hope!

Actually, I had no intention of steering my “piccioletta barca” (little, teeny-weeny boat) in that direction, myself, until a possible direction for that leg of the journey was just pointed out to me by one of the generous scholars who took the time and trouble to persevere through this meandering excursion (which doesn’t seem to want to reach its end, no matter how hard I try to say “goodbye” and go home). Claiming to play the “devil’s advocate,” he posed this simple-enough-sounding question: “Doesn’t everything you suggest about the nature of Hell—its immobility, permanence, changelessness, even hopelessness—also apply to Paradise? Aren’t those souls also without hope, in that there is nothing beyond their present and eternal state for them to desire and strive to achieve? Couldn’t the sign at the gate of Hell just as convincingly be placed at the entrance to Paradise to address the souls who enter there? And couldn’t the verse, even in that setting, be read as either an imperative: “Leave all hope behind; you won’t need to bother with it anymore”; or as an indicative: “Congratulations! You are now leaving all hopes behind you because you have already achieved anything you could ever hope for.”

The devil’s advocate does seem to make a valid point. Leaving it for more skilled and better-resourced investigators and advocates to ponder and debate that question fully, I nonetheless do now wonder why this thought didn’t occur to me and why I avoided Paradiso altogether in my explorations—other than because I was merely following Dante’s advice to stick to my own safe shores if my boat was too small to follow him into that deep, unfamiliar, unchartered realm (Paradiso II.1-6; Mandelbaum translation):

O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,

desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti

dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,

tornate a riveder li vostri liti:

non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse

perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.

O you who are within your little bark,

eager to listen, following behind

my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas,

turn back to see your shores again: do not

attempt to sail the seas I sail; you may,

by losing sight of me, be left astray.

But since my correspondent and devil’s advocate (who happens to share a name with the Magus after whom the sin punished in Inferno XIX is named, but who is instead a good Magus, who is also able to fly, but with his mind, not his body) has now taken me there, let’s take a closer look at these new, less-explored surroundings and especially at those verses just cited.

Unlike Hell and Purgatory, this realm does not have a gate. Nor is the verb “lasciate” written or uttered anywhere by anyone. But here, too, we are entering into another realm, and here, too, we are met with an admonition at the threshold. This time the entreaty is extra-diegetic. It’s Dante the poet, not a character or a written sign inside the narrative, who provides the warning, which is addressed directly to the reader of the poem, not to any character within the story.

But a warning it is, and its language does echo that of the inscription at the gate of Hell, even though it’s not a dictum on how to proceed forward, but an admonition to turn back—unless it’s actually a devious rhetorical use of reverse psychology, which, by pretending to dissuade readers from undertaking something too challenging for them, actually impels them to proceed into those deep seas more eagerly and with greater resolve: “Hey, whose barca are you calling piccioletta! Let me at those deep seas of yours! I’ll show you how big my barca is!”

Let’s take a closer look at the two active verbs of the poet’s admonition: tornate and non vi mettete. Wouldn’t you know it? They just happen to be second person, plural form of tornare and mettersi (subject: voi, you plural).

And what does that mean, class? That’s right: it means that they can be either imperative or indicative, just like lasciate and entrate.

Mandelbaum translates them as imperatives, along with every other translator, and that’s how every Italian reader is likely to read them as well. Read as indicative verbs, the sense would be something like: Those of you in a little boat are the ones who turn back to your own shores and don’t venture into the vast ocean for fear of losing me and remaining lost: not a command or recommendation to turn back, but a chastisement for doing so.

I confess that I, too, find it difficult to read these verbs as indicatives. But that just means that I now need to remind myself, too, along with others, that language changes. Seven centuries have passed since those words were written, when the Italian language had not yet taken shape (Dante was, in fact, in the process of giving birth to it). Let’s remember that Jacopo della Lana and Johannis de Serravalle, not casual readers but leading and authoritative experts in the interpretation of the Commedia, saw the indicative where readers of the past six centuries saw only the imperative.

A DIGESTIVO?

And what if those lines are neither a command nor a dismissal, nor even a dare, but simply a statement of fact that Purgatory is where we belong, because that’s where life happens? If Hell and Paradise are reverse mirror images of each other: eternal, permanent, unchanging, doesn’t it mean that they are also lifeless (even if the term we use is “afterlife”)? Living requires change, growth, evolution, trying, doing, failing, learning, stumbling along , and dying—which does not mean returning to nothingness, but rearranging our cells, molecules, and atoms into other living forms. There is no such thing as “nothingness” in the Universe. Every segment of space-time contains particles or energy traversing through it at any moment. “Nothingness” is a product of our imagination. We do not come from it. We do not return to it. We only imagine it, along with deities, ideals, philosophical constructs, laws, customs, beliefs, poetry.

Anything that purportedly exists before, after, or beyond the confines of our observable, physical universe can only be imagined, not known. Hell and Paradise both fit into all three of those categories. They exist only in our thoughts, where they serve as imaginary poles within which to chart our mental journeys toward the construction of meaning to give sense to our biological existence. They serve as conceptual embankments to try to contain, restrict, and control the constant flow of life, to give it the semblance of having a purpose and a direction: of having meaning. In other words, they are like Inferno and Paradiso bracketing Purgatorio: on one side, the barrier of fears, prohibitions, taboos, evils to avoid; on the other side, the virtues, bliss, sense of fulfillment to seek: a negative and a positive pole to fuel our mental and cultural activity.

Purgatory is the only one of the three realms that is not fixed and permanent. Souls there suffer, reflect, come to understand the causes and effects of their actions, repent, are purged, move on, climb up the mountain, if not toward salvation in a mystical sense, then toward an acceptance of the human need to navigate in the turbulent, exhilarating, meaningless flux of life by riding on a notional vessel—a piccioletta barca, if you will—made of the forms, regulations, and systems we construct and superimpose on that vital flow. As my brilliant friend and devil’s advocate put it, Purgatory is the temporal hinge around which the two conceptual eternities, infernal and paradisiacal, revolve. As eternal states, both inclinations invite or beguile us to “become” rather than to “do.” Purgation means cleansing. When we wash off the grime we’ve accumulated, is it to remain pure and unblemished forever thereafter or to resume our way up the mountain and get dirty again, over and over, following the path toward life, not death?

But wait! Something is still not right in the picture I’ve just sketched, in which Purgatory is presented as real, based on and reflective of our lived reality, while Hell and Paradise are purely conceptual, imaginary, existing only in our minds. In the fiction of the poem, on the other hand, the picture is different. Hell and Purgatory are physically part of the Earth. Hell is a cavernous abyss under the ground, created when God plunged Lucifer to the bottom of the Universe (which would have been the center of the Earth). Purgatory is a mountain on the opposite side of the globe, created by the material expelled from the hole of Hell. They have a physical, geological location and material earthly substance. Paradise, on the other hand is the realm that is outside of this world, and its last stage, the Empyrean, is completely outside the physical universe: a non-place where God is both a single point and all-encompassing: the center and the all-embracing periphery.

So, given their geological placement, are Hell and Purgatory more real? Let’s try a test. Take a shovel and go digging around the planet! Did you find the entrance to Hell? Probably not. Go around the globe with binoculars! Did you locate Mount Purgatory? Nope. Now, go outside on any clear night and look up! With or without a telescope, you will definitely see Dante’s Paradise, or most of it: all but the Empyrean. The astral bodies he visits are all really there, even if their configuration and positions are now understood differently. In that sense, it’s Paradise that is the most “real” realm of the three, the one that corresponds to what we can actually observe and experience outside the fiction of the text.

And yet, as my students discovered, it’s Hell that seems to correspond more closely to the world we see depicted in our newspapers and other media. The human behavior recounted in that canticle seems most to reflect the behavior we encounter in “real life.” In that sense, Inferno seems more realistically descriptive or our social world, whereas Purgatorio and Paradiso seem to be corrective and aspirational, existing more in the realm of possibility than actuality. Put another way: Hell is the diagnosed illness; Purgatory, the prescribed treatment; Paradise, the prognosis of eventual results, if the treatment is followed and if the cure works.

So, we have three contenders claiming to be the most “real.” Will the real “most real” now please stand! Is it: A, Inferno; B, Purgatorio; or C, Paradiso?

Oh, no! They all stand up and claim to be the “most real real.”

Could they all be telling the truth? Indeed, that is what the journey of the Commedia has revealed: that there are many dimensions and facets of reality, each perceptible through a different cognitive lens and from a particular existential perspective. Dante, himself, provided four possible lenses to adopt to understand his poem: literal, allegorical, moral, anagogic. But there are more. Many interpretative schemata have been fashioned and deployed by subsequent critics and theorists. And I suspect that many others remain buried in the Commedia, itself, to emerge when new hermeneutic resources are devised and perfected.

No other text I’ve encountered is as multi-dimensional or reveals as many facets of life and reality—not Homer, not Virgil, not Milton. The Divine Comedy is most apparently about religion, ethics, and history, but also about politics, economics, physics, geology, cosmology, art, philosophy (natural and conceptual), mythology, and even about fields not yet invented or discovered in Dante’s time: psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology. All those disciplines, and more, provide lenses with which the text can be read and interpreted. Given its all-encompassing complexity, seems likely continue to generate new readings and interpretations if it continues to resonate, the poem and the journey it describes will likely remain a productive mine of meaning and inspiration.

We have already considered how Freud’s conception of the psyche resonates with the poem’s tripartite structure. A similar claim could be made about another tripartite model of nature that started to circulate around the same time, promoted by scientists and philosophers, such as Russian-Ukrainian bio-geo-chemist Vladimir Vernadsky, French Jesuit priest and philosopher-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and American engineer-inventor-designer-etc. Richard Buckminster Fuller. In that model, our world consists of three layers: the geosphere, the region of inanimate materials; the biosphere, the region of living beings that lies above the geosphere; and the noosphere, the region of mind, thought, and knowledge that lies above both. This model, too, could be super-imposed on the regions described by Dante.

To test that hypothesis, let’s try out a pseudo-anthropological/archaeological reading of the poem. (I don’t know if such a reading has actually been proposed before. I’m just making it up as I go along.) We can start by noting that the poem’s very structure reflects the evolution of human existence. We notice this merely by looking at the poem’s “architecture” from the outside, how it’s put together.

First comes Hell, a cavity inside the Earth. It recalls the dwellings of early humans, troglodytes who found shelter in empty, covered, secluded spaces. Such “found” natural caverns were eventually followed by the fashioning of tools to create “negative architecture,” shelters excavated from the terrain where none were found ready-made by nature. The concept of creating and enclosing an empty space might also have led to the invention and creation of pottery and basketry (analogous to the circles and pouches of Inferno: smaller, specialized containers within the larger container of Hell). The manufacture of enclosed empty space (vases, pots, baskets, and other vessels) allowed things to be collected, separated, individuated, contained, preserved, which is also the structure and function of Hell: an articulated cavity, or excavated negative architecture, that represents humans’ first cognitive leap into thinking, reasoning, imagining.

Mount Purgatory, then, suggests the next archaeological development: positive or protruding architecture: construction, reshaping, adding new structures to the natural environment: walls, roofs, stairs, poles, as well as sculpture and statuary. Such manufactured structures erected on the surface of the world, rather than carved into the earth, represented the second cognitive leap in the human mental landscape: design, engineering, manufacturing, social collaboration, a material cultural legacy that would be passed on to subsequent generations. The sense of passing on to others also contained the idea of progress, change, improvement, which are also the characteristics and the purpose of Purgatory (purgation as cleansing of set and harmful behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs in order to advance to a better state).

Paradise, finally, represents the third major cognitive phase: the passage into the “noosphere,” outside the confines of matter, in other words, the development of civilization, the transition from pre-history into history, which occurs once events, ideas, tabulations, and designs can be recorded and transmitted, with such tools as language, numeracy, art, and other means of representation that express and promote symbolic thinking and ritualization, which in turn spawned traditions, customs, taboos, laws, beliefs, music, theater, narration, poetry, painting: all of which are means of superimposing meaning on experience and on objects.

It is telling that Dante’s Paradiso is presented as a multi-staged theater or a multi-screen movieplex with 3-D projection. The souls that Dante encounters in the various planetary and astral spheres of the physical universe aren’t really there. Dante is told (Paradosp IV) that the real souls reside in the Empyrean. What he sees are virtual projections that have momentarily appeared in the celestial spheres specifically for this occasion. This proto-television (vision at a distance, tele), takes place so that Dante, still in his body, can perceive them with his corporeal senses and converse with them in his own language: a grand celestial command performance for just one lost individual trying to find his way—but, of course, also for the many readers who have accompanied him on his journey and the many who will continue to do so.

So, which are more “real”: the figures Dante sees and hears with his senses or the souls in the Empyrean of whom the images are ephemeral representations? Within the fiction of the poem, the projected manifestations are unreal, figments of the “real” beings who cannot be seen. Outside the fiction of the poem, however, it’s the Empyrean that has no basis in physical reality. Unlike the planetary spheres, it does not exist in the material universe but beyond the reaches of bodily perception. The Empyrean where the souls dwell permanently is the product of imagination, not observation. The poem is thus using what it defines as false apparitions to stand for, justify, and bolster the greater fiction that the reality they represent is in a metaphysical realm, inaccessible to the body and its senses.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW AND BACK

The paradox echoes a similar one that arises in St. Paul’s claim that, in life, “we see through a glass, darkly,” whereas in Heaven, we will see clearly and fully. This, too, suggests that the world we see and the existence we experience in life are unreal, or deceptive, hence somehow “fictitious,” whereas the invisible, imperceptible spiritual realm that exists after life, beyond the confines of physical existence, is true and real. The essence of Pauline transcendence is to deny the veracity of the physical world and to use that very denial as negative proof of the existence of a metaphysical world that is more pure, more permanent, more “real.”

A similar perplexity also emerges from Plato’s “allegory of the cave.” Socrates describes what we see in the world as shadows of the “real” objects behind our backs, invisible to us, which are being moved in front of a fire so that their shadows are projected on the cave wall in front of us. The enlightened philosopher is able to escape the shackles of bodily existence and sensual perception and ascend out of the darkness of the life of the body into the light of the life of the mind and thus to perceive the universal truths and ideals of which physical objects are imperfect approximations.

In these views of the faculty of vision, seeing with our eyes is a form of blindness and whatever we perceive bodily, with all our senses, is unreal, or less real than what we can conceive with our imagination.

The Wizard of Oz repeats that same scenario, but then demystifies it by unveiling the conceptual prestidigitation that makes it possible. While Dorothy and her three fellow travelers are following Plato’s and St. Paul’s script and looking upward at the image of the great magical wizard, her little dog, Toto, keeps his eyes and nose to the ground and eventually discovers the real-life person behind the illusion: a little old man, lost in this land, who has created the illusion of a mystical super being to protect or empower himself, only to be obscured and engulfed by the illusion he created. The illusion, once accepted by the dwellers of Oz, becomes much more powerful than he, its creator, is. When the dog pulls back the curtain, the “wizard” desperately tries to keep up the illusion, but in doing so also reveals that it is a trick. He can be seen speaking into the microphone while the voice booms out thunderously from the superhuman image of the Great Wizard overhead: “Don’t pay any attention to that little man behind the curtain!”: a plea that seems to echo the injunctions of Socrates and Paul, while simultaneously revealing their mendacity. Dorothy’s and her companion’s eyes have been brought back down to earth, and they now see how the magic trick works. (But don’t worry, kids, there are still the Witches in Oz; and their magic must be real, no?)

By tracing the trajectory of transcendence backwards, as suggested earlier, we can also detect the return path that will take us back from the realm of imaginary speculation to the natural world of sensation. The poles of reality and unreality are thus switched back, aligning reality with what can be observed rather than with what can only be imagined. (Perhaps like the north-south magnetic polarity of the Earth, the immanent-transcendent gnostic poles also switch roles periodically.)

Does this mean that those who don’t share Christian Pauline convictions or a belief in Platonic universal ideals should dismiss notions of transcendence as mere delusions that stem from a fear of death, impermanence, and uncertainty, or as futile wishful thinking for secure, permanent, ubiquitous, and unquestionable guideposts to give direction and meaning to our existence? Are ideological products of the imagination, in fact, less “real” than the physical objects that we construct: buildings, vehicles, tools, weapons?

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were also products of human imagination and design, given a solid form by human and machine labor. And so were the airplanes that flew into the skyscrapers. Which were more real: these very solid material objects, which were destroyed and annihilated, or the ideas and convictions that drove the terrorists to destroy them? Unlike the living organisms of the “biosphere” and the material elements and constructions of the “geosphere,” the unphysical ideas and convictions of the “noosphere” were not destroyed; they live on. If not materially real, they are historically, psychologically, and experientially very real.

Regardless of whether such religious, political, ideological beliefs are seen as fanatical delusions or as inspired revelations, they become no less “real” as human constructs than the physical objects we build and leave behind. Once created, they persist and spread through the world and are passed on from generation to generation and end up shaping and transforming the purportedly more “real” physical, material objects of our world. Once an idea or belief takes root and propagates in the “noosphere” (to borrow mixed metaphors of roots and spores from the “biosphere”), it becomes just as real and determinant in the human landscape as elements found in the “biosphere” and “geosphere.”

That, too, is what the Divine Comedy tells us: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise and what they represent are all real. Furthermore, not only does each canticle represent reality, but paradoxical as it may seem and is, each canticle represents reality more fully and more accurately than the other two canticles, the “most real real,” because each looks at different facets of reality and from different points of view. For, as ye know, dear and tired readers, reality, like something else named Legion, has many facets and guises that can and do possess us.

ARE YE STUFFED YET?

But, dear reader, enough with the “furthermores,” “what ifs,” “but waits,” and “and yets”! Now it really is time for a post-prandial pisolino (nap).

What I’ve served up is just a pell-mell, potluck smorgasbord, nowhere near the culinary standards of Dante’s Convivio (Banquet). But my meager and less nutritious offerings go all the way from hors d’œuvres to a heavenly dessert, and even include a digestif to aid digestion, unlike Dante’s Convivio, which advertised fifteen courses but delivered only four before the chef decided to get out of the hot kitchen and got lost in a dark wood instead. Maybe he realized that it was better to leave readers hungry for the really big dish he was planning to cook up next.

I, too, hope to have left my banqueteers not too sated with answers but stuffed with questions to take home with them: a copious cud on which to ruminate.

But first, that needed and overdue pisolino. Sweet dreams!

***

Acknowledgments: Even though I did not cite them directly, I am grateful to many colleagues and friends whose responses to my queries on this topic and early drafts of this essay helped me better to formulate and articulate my thoughts, albeit often in disagreement with their generously offered reflections and well-founded conclusions. Any lingering idiocy that I refused to abandon, despite their sage arguments, is stubbornly my own. Grazie to: Susan Bennett, Ted Cachey, Phil Cass, Alison Cornish, Judith de Luce, Simone Dubrovic, Wiley Feinstein, Lloyd Howard, Chris Kleinhenz, Richard Lansing, Dennis Looney, Lara Mancinelli, Barbara Newman, Peter Pedroni, Alessandro Scafi, Paul Sandro, Madison U. Sowell, John Took, Paolo Valesio, Rebecca West.

[1] A grammar primer for those who have not studied Italian or those who could use a refresher:

In English, as in Italian, the indicative and the imperative have the same form of the verb: eat, but the indicative, in English, is always accompanied by the subject pronoun: you eat, because the same form of the verb, with the same ending, is used for five of the six persons (subject categories) of the verb: first person singular and plural: I/We eat; second person singular and plural: You/You eat; and third person plural: They eat. The only distinct form is for the third person singular: He/She/It eats. So, in the indicative mood, just using eat by itself doesn’t tell us who the subject is.

The imperative, on the other hand, both in English and in Italian, can only be in the second person, addressed directly to the person or persons who are listening, which in English is you in both cases, with the verb in the same form. The first person, I/We, and the third person, He-She-It/They, cannot be the subject of an imperative verb, and so the subject pronoun is unnecessary. Therefore, eat, by itself, is necessarily an imperative, and you eat is the only way to express the indicative.

In Italian, on the other hand, the subject pronoun is not used with verbs in the indicative mood because each person of the verb has a distinct ending that tells us who or what the subject is. Let’s take mangiare (to eat): mangio (I eat), mangi (you, sing, eat), mangia (he/she/it eats), mangiamo (we eat), mangiate (you, plural, eat), mangiano (they eat).

As for the imperative mood, unlike English, in which the only possible subject for the imperative is you, which is both singular and plural, Italian has different forms for the second person singular, tu (thou), and for the plural, voi (you all). In Italian, therefore, it’s possible to tell if an imperative is addressed to an individual or to a group, even though the subject pronoun is not used: Finisci (Finish) addresses an individual (tu); Finite (Finish) addresses a group (voi).