The divine comedy - The Paradiso (ciardi)

453 Pages·2001·1.57 MB·English

by  Dante & Ciardi

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction

CANTO I
CANTO II
CANTO III
CANTO IV
CANTO V
CANTO VI
CANTO VII
CANTO VIII
CANTO IX
CANTO X
CANTO XI
CANTO XII
CANTO XIII
CANTO XIV
CANTO XV
CANTO XVI
CANTO XVII
CANTO XVIII
CANTO XIX
CANTO XX
CANTO XXI
CANTO XXII
CANTO XXIII
CANTO XXIV
CANTO XXV
CANTO XXVI
CANTO XXVII
CANTO XXVIII
CANTO XXIX
CANTO XXX
CANTO XXXI
CANTO XXXII
CANTO XXXIII

Classic Literature with Biblical Inspiration
DANTE ALIGHTERI was born in 1265. Considered Italy’s greatest poet,
this scion of a Florentine family mastered the art of lyric poetry at an
early age. His first major work, La Vita Nuova (1292), was a tribute to
Beatrice Portinari, the great love of his life. Dante’s political activism
resulted in his being exiled from Florence, and he eventually settled in
Ravenna. It is believed that The Divine Comedy—comprising three
canticles, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso—was written
between 1308 and 1320. Dante Alighieri died in 1321.

JOHN CIARDI was a distinguished poet and professor, having taught at
Harvard and Rutgers universities, and a poetry editor of The Saturday
Review. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1955, he won the Harriet
Monroe Memorial Award, and in 1956, the Prix de Rome. He died in
1986.

SIGNET CLASSIC
Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
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Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R ORL, England Published by Signet Classic, an imprint of New American Library, a division
of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Mentor edition.
Canto I was first published in The Italian Quarterly, 1965.
Canto VIII was first published in Arbor, 1961.
Canto XXI was first published in Hartwick Review, 1967.
Canto XXXIII was first published in The Rarer Action Essays in Honor of Francis Fergusson, ed.
Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler, 1970.
First Signet Classic Printing, August
Copyright © John Ciardi, 1961, 1965, 1970
All rights reserved EGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Mentor edition of this title as follows: 87-072888.

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eISBN : 978-1-101-12734-6
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For Connie—
as all things draw to what they most are.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must thank Professor Mark Musa and especially Professor John
Freccero for reading and commenting on this version of The Paradiso. I
am not a Dante scholar; I have undertaken what I hope is poet’s work.
The learning of these good men has saved me from some of the gaps in
my own. At times I have not followed their suggestions, feeling that the
points raised, though important to scholars, might interfere with the
pleasure of a beginning student reading in translation. If I have been
wrong in so deciding, the responsibility is mine. Their suggestions have
been invaluable, and I owe them a most grateful thanks, gladly offered.
Introduction
Dante’s claim for the Paradiso, the last cantica of his poem, is as
daring as it is clear: “My course is set for an uncharted sea.” History has
in fact granted him the unique place that he claimed with that
navigational metaphor, both as pilgrim and as poet. Just as, within the
fiction of the poem, the pilgrim’s course is privileged beyond the
aspiration of ordinary men, so in its final course the poem accomplishes
what no other poet had ever dared. Throughout the Divine Comedy, the
metaphor of the ship serves to describe both the pilgrim’s journey and the
progress of the poem: on both counts, Dante can refer to himself as a new
Jason, who returns with the Golden Fleece that is at once the vision of
God and the poem that we read.
For the twentieth-century reader, the fiction of the story requires a
great effort of the imagination-few of us still believe in a paradise in any
form, much less in the possibility of reaching it in this life. The claim of
the pilgrim to have reached the absolute seems to us even more fantastic
than the fiction of the Inferno, where at least the characters, if not the
landscape, are quite familiar. For this reason, the Paradiso is often
thought of as the most “medieval” part of the poem. This reputation
should not, however, obscure for us the sense in which, as poetry, it
remains daring and even contemporary. By attempting to represent
poetically that which is by definition beyond representation, this cantica
achieves what had scarcely seemed possible before (even for the poet of
the Inferno and the Purgatorio) and has remained the ultimate
aspiration of poets ever since. The quest of Romantic poets and their
successors for “pure poetry” has for its prototype the Paradiso.
The poetry of the Paradiso represents a radical departure from that of
the Purgatorio, as the latter represented a departure from the poetry of
the Inferno. The changes may be thought of as a gradual attenuation of
the bond between poetry and representation, from the immediacy of the
Inferno to the dreamlike mediation of the Purgatorio to the attempt to
create a nonrepresentational poetic world in the last cantica. This