We live in a state of constant strife; the truths we relied on no longer seem certain; we are unsettled, shaken, adrift. Even those of us lucky enough to retain our health, homes, families, and jobs feel exiled from the lives we once knew. The bonds of friendship and community that secured us have loosened, and we are cut off in time as well: the past is more remote, the future unimaginable. In crisis, we face a world of danger: war, plague, apocalypse, discord, violence. How odd that the work of literature which most fully describes our state, our emergency, was not written recently, but over seven hundred years ago. The evils and the fears that troubled Dante in his Divine Comedy are uncannily like the ones that threaten us; his world is our world, so much so that the monsters of cruelty and lust that fill his pages are instantly recognizable — one only need change the names to see them as the figures of today’s miserable news. The ever-present relevance of the The Divine Comedy has long been noted. Almost one hundred years ago, Osip Mandelstam, who experienced some of modernity’s worst darkness, observed that “it is inconceivable to read Dante’s cantos without directing them toward contemporaneity. They were created for that purpose. They are missiles for capturing the future…His contemporaneity is continuous, incalculable and inexhaustible.” This immediacy is no accident. Although he was writing in the early fourteenth century, the poet composed his poem to speak to us. All serious artists hope their work will endure, but Dante, as almost no writer before him, sought to address the future, not just the readers of his day. We know this because he says so. At the end of the Paradiso, he states that the Divine Comedy is for la futura gente, the people of the future. The poem is a compendium, an encyclopedia, a summa, and yet there is one subject above all that gives it urgency, and that is exile. Displacement and the longing for return have inspired so much literature, beginning with the Hebrew Bible and the Odyssey. But perhaps no writer is more deeply associated with the theme than Dante. He was cast out from Florence, his birthplace, in 1302, after having served for two years as a high city official, a victim of the interminable political violence of the city. He was stripped of all his property; broken off from his family; threatened with death by fire at the stake if he ever dared to come back. He never did, wandering poor and dishonored through Italy until his death in 1321. With a single exception, all his great works were written in exile; it was exile that made him a master artist, philosopher, and prophet. It was exile, and the causes of exile, that he needed to explain to himself and to warn us about. Before his banishment he was a lyric poet, one of the pioneers of the literary movement known as the dolce stil nuovo — the sweet new style — who wrote love poetry of a philosophical cast. He composed his verses for the admiration of a tiny elite of other poets, a group of a few dozen men whom the great Dante scholar Erich Auerbach compared to a “secret brotherhood.” His chief work of these years is the Vita Nuova, an autobiographical fantasy in poetry and prose about his love for the young Beatrice Portinari, her early death, and his spiritual reaction. (She was to become the avatar of salvation in The Divine Comedy, and thereby the most famous idealized woman in Western literature.) Although a work of great inventiveness, with passages of aching poignancy, other sections are plainly insincere, and Dante’s language can often be vague and periphrastic. No one is sure what some of it means. Auerbach concluded that parts are “baffling…puzzling…obscure.” Dante himself found much of his early poetry dissatisfying, and even called it faticosa, laborious. How utterly different is The Divine Comedy. Written in a mode of Italian of Dante’s own invention — the volgare illustre, or elevated vernacular — and addressing the broadest possible audience, the poetry is characterized above all by its vividness, lucidity, and dramatic appeal. No longer does he want to dazzle a few friends with his brilliance and his erudite allusiveness. Now he wishes to inspire and explain and guide and admonish. He throws away the ambiguities that he once adored and turns instead to “clear words and precise language” — to borrow the terms Dante uses in the Paradiso (the third of the three “canticles” that comprise the work) to praise the speech of Cacciaguida, his ancestor and hero. The new goal is visibile parlare — visible speech, presented in tercets of eleven-syllable lines that makes the reader picture and see and hear the events and the figures that the poet describes in gripping detail. The leap of imagination that this devising entailed would not have been possible without the experiences gained in exile. One of the wanderer’s discoveries, for example, was the diversity of Italian as spoken throughout the peninsula — its richness, range, and dignity. This gave him the conviction that Italian could be a literary language of the highest ambition, worthy of the most serious subjects, a distinction previously reserved only for Latin. Another was his recognition that language, literature, and indeed all of civilization are part of an historical process, and thus evolve continually and ineluctably. We, who have been born and bred on historicism, may take for granted the idea of cultural change, but it was Dante, comparing the dialects in Italy and the Romance languages in Europe, who first realized that it did so. Words mutate; norms shift; poetry can grow, rather than repeat the forms of the past. At the same time, it was only in banishment that Dante came to know Latin literature well. At the end of the Middle Ages, books were still immensely expensive and incredibly rare, and the libraries
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