Dante

Dante (1265-1321) - his full name was Dante Alighieri - is the greatest of the Italian poets and author of the Commedia (commonly known to English readers as The Divine Comedy). The name Dante is a shortened form of Durante, which means enduring, and is pronounced DAN-ti, IPA: /'dæntɪ/ in English (and DAHN-te, IPA: /'dante/ in Italian). Alighieri is pronounced a-li-GYAIR-i, IPA: /ali'gjeri/. There are two adjectives from Dante - Dantean and Dantesque - though the first is by far the more usual.

Life

Dante was born in Florence into a prominent Florentine family whose political allegiance was to the party of the Guelphs. (In Italian politics of the period there was intense hostility between two broad groups or factions - the Guelphs, who were supporters of the Pope, and the Ghibbelines, who were supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor.) In 1289 Dante fought at the battle of Campaldino as a cavalryman in the Florentine army against a Ghibelline army from the neighbouring city of Arezzo; in the 1290s he played a significant part in Florentine politics; and in 1300 he was elected one of the six Priors, the most senior magistrates in the city.

By 1300 the Guelphs in Florence were in disagreement amongst themselves about the extent to which the Pope should be allowed to exercise influence in the affairs of the city. The so-called White Guelphs, of whom Dante was one, wanted Florence to be more independent of the Pope, while the Black Guelphs favoured closer ties with Rome. In 1300, while Dante was away on an embassy to the Pope in Rome, the Black Guelphs, with the help of an army under the Pope's ally, Charles de Valois, secured control of the government in Florence and passed a sentence of banishment on Dante and a number of other White Guelphs.

In the next few years Dante took part in several attempts by the White Guelphs to regain power in Florence, but none was successful, and he spent the rest of his life as an exile in various other Italian cities - most notably, in Bologna, in Verona, and finally in Ravenna.

Dante died, perhaps of malaria, while returning to Ravenna from Venice, where he had been sent on an embassy. He was buried in Ravenna, and his remains are still there despite numerous attempts by later generations of Florentines to have them moved to Florence. The final couplet of the six-line Latin inscription on his tomb reads:

Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris ab oris

quem genuit parvi Florentia mater amoris.

(Translation: I am confined here, far from my native country, I Dante, to whom Florence gave birth, a mother with little love.)

Beatrice

The formative event of Dante's emotional life was his meeting when he was nearly nine with Beatrice Portinari, herself eight years old at the time. By his own account Dante immediately fell in love with her without their having exchanged a word, and although he scarcely saw her after this - she married a Florentine banker, Simone Bardi, and died in 1290 - Dante's emotional life was dominated by an idealised love for her. Beatrice is the inspiration, and addressee, of many of his poems; his desire to express his love for her in poetry influenced his adoption of the poetic style then coming into fashion in Italy, the dolce stil nuovo (the 'new sweet style'); and in the Commedia it is Beatrice who comes from Heaven to act as Dante's guide on the third and final stage of his journey through the afterlife.

The Italian pronunciation of Beatrice is be-a-TREECH-e, IPA: /bea'triːtʃe/.

The Commedia

Dante began work on the Commedia in exile, perhaps in 1307, and completed it shortly before his death in 1321. The Commedia is a long epic poem, which gives an allegorical account of Dante's journey through the afterlife. The journey has three stages, which correspond to the three 'places' or conditions to which, according to Catholic theology, the souls of the dead may be assigned. Unrepentant sinners are condemned to eternal punishment in Hell; sinners who in life have repented of their sins undergo punishment for a limited period of time in Purgatory and, having purified themselves, eventually achieve entry to Heaven; while a small number of saintly or exceptionally virtuous individuals go immediately to Heaven without the need of purificatory punishment in Purgatory.

In the course of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven Dante meets, and converses with, many of the dead, some of them eminent figures from the distant past, others contemporaries whom Dante has known when they were alive, some of them friends, some enemies. In the poem Dante describes the different 'locations' in which the dead have been placed, the punishments they undergo, and the conversations he has with them: their thoughts about their lives on earth and their inquiries about contemporary events in the world.

The Commedia has a clear structure. It is divided into 100 canti, each about 120 or 130 lines in length - canti is the plural of canto, which means 'song' or '(lyric) poem'; and after the first, introductory canto the remaining 99 are divided equally into three overarching sections or cantiche - cantiche is the plural of cantica, which means '(narrative or religious) poem'. Each cantica covers one stage of Dante's journey, the first Cantica (Inferno) Hell, the second (Purgatorio) Purgatory, and the third (Paradiso) Heaven. Dante's guide on the first two stages of his journey, through Hell and Purgatory, is the Roman poet Virgil but, Virgil being a pagan and forbidden entry to Heaven, Beatrice takes over and acts as Dante's guide on the final stage of his journey.

The poetic metre of the Commedia is terza rima (or chain rhyme), i.e., the rhyme scheme is aba, bcb, cdc, ... with each canto ending .... ghg, h.

The Commedia is written in Italian, which in Dante's time was not considered a suitable language for the treatment of serious subjects, and, along with other works by Dante (see below), it helped to establish Italian as a literary language. It has also been a major influence on the development of the modern Italian language.

Other Works

As well as the Commedia, Dante is the author of a number of other works in Italian and in Latin.

La vita nuova (The New Life) (1292-1294) and Il Convivio (The Banquet) (?1304-?1307) contain selections of Dante's lyric poems with commentaries in Italian. Both works celebrate Dante's love for Beatrice.

De vulgari eloquentia (On the Art of Writing in the Vernacular) (1304-1306) and De monarchia (On Monarchy) (c1318) are monographs written in Latin. In the first Dante defends the use of Italian for serious literary purposes, while in the second, written to support the position of one of his patrons, Can Grande della Scala, the ruler of Verona, he argues that the Pope has limited authority in secular matters and, in particular, does not have authority over the Holy Roman Emperor.