What Dante Is Trying to Tell Us

A colloquial translation of Paradiso might make people actually read it.

- By Eric Bulson

The Divine Comedy is more than 14,000 lines long and is divided into three parts, but it’s the first part, the Inferno, that gets all the attention.

For centuries, readers have preferred the horrors of hell to the perfection of heaven. Gustave Doré, the celebrated French illustrator, did elaborate engravings for the three canticles in the mid-19th century and devoted 99 out of 135 of them to Dante Alighieri’s darkest scenes.

Who can blame Dante's admirers when hell is filled with so many beautifully flawed characters: Francesca da Rimini, the eloquent adulteress; Farinata, the proud heretic; Ulysses, the defiant king; Ugolino, the father turned cannibal who ate his own sons? And then there are the infernal workers who make sure that Lucifer’s realm runs smoothly, among them farting devils, giants in chains, and a flying monster with the body of a serpent and the face of an honest man. Most readers see little reason to continue with the poem once Dante, guided by Virgil, has safely exited “to once again catch sight of the stars.”

But Dante’s journey has just begun. In Purgatorio, he must summit a massive mountain. Success in that struggle leaves him facing, along with other sinners, a wall of flames that inflict purifying pain but not death. Only then does Paradise await—and it’s not just around the corner. He must travel past the planets and fixed stars to a rose-shaped empyrean. Tackling this culminating challenge in the company of his beloved Beatrice, who inspired the poem, Dante must trasumanar, a magnificent word that he invents to describe the experience of passing beyond what's human.

Dante volunteers to guide us on this last leg, warning in