At first, she first recited poems by heart, and then she began to translate the poems she remembered.
That is how she got through the hours.
Who is to tell me after this that poetry doesn’t matter?
*
Opening Dante’s Inferno enrolls the reader in a millennium-long class in surviving hell with poetry, through music, imagery, and poetry’s willingness to look without flinching at the details of both terror and wonder: in a strange way, this book is a call to courage.
But how?
The adventure begins in the spring of 1300 and lasts for seven days. What are these numbers, I wonder, to the reader who’s about to enter the text like a pilgrim on their own journey? The poem is outside of history, like snow and rain and wind. The pilgrim Dante, poet and politician, barely thirty-five years old, and his guide, the shade of the dead poet Vergil, enter Hell at sunset, and spend the night and next day on foot, turning always to the left, as they go down the spiral. Reaching the center of the Earth, they cross beyond, to the other side of Satan, who’s planted there: they are now on the opposite side of the hemisphere, gaining the time difference of twelve hours. They are headed for Purgatory, which they reach by morning.
In the underworld Dante meets his enemies and heroes—great thinkers, murderers, poets, politicians—but no one is too monumental. They are all trying to stay relevant to a living man, all too human, fragile, grotesque, not unlike ourselves, trying to say something that still matters.
Hell is other people, Sartre wrote, hundreds of years later. Turning the pages, we are aware that Alighieri’s dead are shades, we see he is full of flesh and blood traveling among them, as if entering a busy subway station. What makes this journey so urgent is that while Dante is in hell he behaves like he is among us.
*
Hell is a city between Italy and Central Asia, a vast cavity in the form of an inverted cone, whose apex is at the center of the earth—Dante believed the earth to be perfectly spherical and about twenty thousand miles in circumference.
I can’t help but wonder about a reader opening the book for the first time, perhaps in Italy, or perhaps in war-time Ukraine, several miles from here, perhaps you yourself, among flames and faces of people who were once alive, people who shout at you now, though they have no mouths, people you hate and love.
Night emerges into their faces.
Turn left, and watch the roads. The clang of each voice is like a lamp among stones.
Here we are, reading this version of an old poem, reading it in American English, while the majority of people in our country are numb to all sorts of crises of our own.
Here we are in 2022, in purgatorio, which was once a paradiso of a planet we harmed, and which through our species’ actions, is about to turn into a hell.
What is the role of language in this?
The normative language of any time period—but especially the normative language of twenty-first-century capitalist empire such as ours (e.g. words like “collateral damage” instead of an evocative image of a child shot dead by a soldier in the street) is specifically intended to numb us.
Dante understands this: in his own time of political upheaval, he fills the pages with images, metaphors, unpredictable rhythms. He fills proverbial hell with conflicts of his then present moment. For example, Philippo Agrenti opposed Dante’s return from exile and stole the poet’s possessions for himself. So, Dante uses his language as a weapon: he puts Agrenti in the fifth circle of Hell. Poetry, by definition, opposes the normative, the dull. The poem wakes us up; it must actively cast a spell on the reader now. Regardless of its subject. That freshness of speech ravishes the human in us.
*
Somewhere in Ukraine right now, my friend who publishes books orders printers in the bombed out city of Kharkiv to produce thousands of copies of Inferno. The trucks deliver weapons into Kharkiv. And, going back, empty, they decide to pick up thousands of copies of Dante’s Inferno.
This is an image of war that happens as I write it: cars are bringing weapons into the besieged city that’s bombed daily, and they leave full of books.
*
For me, as one reader, this is what poetry is: not a kind of public posturing but a private language of music and vivid imagery that is strange and compelling enough that it can speak privately and evocatively to thousands of people at the same time.
That is why it just doesn’t die, poetry—despite so many death notices. It is always there, waking us up when we get numb, poking us in the eye.
*
Meanwhile, here in the United States, my favorite English translator of this text is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who understood all too well this ability to shelter oneself with poetry when a crisis comes. The story of Longfellow’s own decision to translate Dante’s great poem of turmoil is compelling, and instructive for us today—he did so as a way of coping with his grief after the traumatic loss of his beloved young wife, who died when her dress caught on fire.
Just as Vergil, beloved poet, teacher and guide (who lived almost as many years before Dante as Dante himself lived before Longfellow) helps our pilgrim to cope, the translator turns toward Inferno in American English, to confront his own monsters, now in translation, learning how to continue, one word at a time, on his sometimes terrible path of grief.
*
Over seven centuries after Dante’s birth, when a Ukrainian city is bombed, a woman hiding in the subway station recites the lines of poetry to herself and others around her. A line of poetry is a kind of invisible shield, a moment of charged silence, a bit of awe, that we carry from one human body to another, that we transport by means of language. That memorable speech, however horrifying its subject matter might be, offers us a balm, offers us a way to go on.
And so today, in 2022, in our own time of crisis, we can hear the echo of Dante in his crisis of exile, as we might hear another exile, Bertolt Brecht, whispering in the middle of World War Two:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
Poetry doesn’t matter, contemporary American culture seems to insist. But this book begs to differ. Dante and his contemporaries have long been laid in the holes in the earth, drowned in rivers, burnt inside their homes during endless wars.
Their bodies have been deposited into the planet.
But this book continues its journey above it. It meets us. The pilgrim keeps walking on.
Dante has no need to defend his art. Poetry matters: he sees it as a primal ancient force and art form, one that’s been here long before our individual lifetimes and will stay long after (Vergil, who lived centuries before him, guides him into the present). What we need, Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks.
I open the book and read poems aloud while somewhere the car full of guns is driving at full speed into the city of Kharkiv, and in a few hours, when it is leaving the city on fire, the car, driving over sidewalks, without stopping at streetlights, hurrying to get out, is filled with books.
