In the year 386 the young Augustine rusticated for an extended period with various friends and family members at a large country house at Cassiciacum, a bit north of Milan. There he spent a good deal of time praying, reading, writing and discussing books and their ideas, often al fresco, walking along the field paths or seated amid the shade of the vineyards. This was one of the more consequential vacations in western cultural history. I can’t go into all that now, but I can confirm the reality of literary seminars conducted in vineyards—a feature of the story I had been inclined to regard as poetic license, along with his sitting under a fig tree to read the Epistle to the Romans—because I just participated in one.
On Saturday last, chauffeured by two good friends from New York, we made our way to the Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes, N.J., where the son and daughter of our recently departed friend and mentor, the great Dante scholar Robert Hollander, had arranged a Dante seminar in memory of their father. There were I suppose about twenty-five of us, some family members, but mainly old students of the maestro and alumni of his own legendary summer seminars taught for many years in a Tuscan castle. Our leader was Dr. Frank Ordiway, one of his brilliant students of the 1980s, and a great expert on medieval Italian writers and the Latin classics.
The Divine Comedy is a long poem (about 14,000 lines) divided into three long sections, one devoted to each of the “three kingdoms” of the imagined afterlife—Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso). These long parts are called in Italian cantiche (singular, cantica.) Each cantica is subdivided into smaller units called cantos, of which there are a hundred in the whole poem—thirty-three in each of the two latter cantiche, and thirty-four in the Inferno, with the very first canto acting as a kind of introduction to the whole poem. As you can see, a canto’s average length is about 140 lines. There is a vast body of secondary criticism devoted to Dante, especially in the form of essays that are meditations upon or explications of one of the hundred individual cantos. Frank chose this mode; the particular canto of his choice was the thirtieth of the Purgatorio. We began in the Hollander fashion with a viva voce reading of the whole canto, both in Italian and in the English translation. The Italian reader, Jennifer Borghi, who holds joint American and Italian citizenship and has lived for years in Italy, is an opera singer to boot; the English reader was Katherine Charles, an English professor at Washington College. The high level of the bilingual elocution was a harbinger of Dr. Ordiway’s presentation and the student discussion it stimulated.
In my experience people are likely to make one of two mistakes in reading Dante. The first is to assume that you can simply sit down and read his poem as you would a newspaper op ed or a detective novel. You can’t, at least not with pleasure and comprehension. The second is so to quail before the “otherness” of the poem--with its elaborate and perhaps fantastic structure, its huge and promiscuous catalogue of historical, biblical, and mythological personages, its relentless literary allusions, its obscure historical references, and the strangeness of its religious ideas—as to give up in despair. It was Mark Twain who defined a great book as “a book everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” This is another way of saying that good reading, however pleasurable, sometimes involves real work. I am ready to guarantee that you really do want to read this poem—but you could probably use some help.
Dante certainly needed lots of help himself. I refer to Dante the literary character, the first-person narrator of the poem, a man lost in a dark wood, up the creek sans paddle, as the story begins. Fortunately three heavenly ladies, aware of his situation, conspire to rescue him. What he needs first of all is good guidance—moral and literary—and so a guide is enlisted. Who could be more qualified to lead a befuddled Florentine through a Christian epic than Virgil, the greatest poet in the pagan Latin literary tradition? Well, lots of people, you might think, but you have to get used to surprises in this poem. By historical misfortune, Virgil himself lived “in the time of the false and lying gods”. Tough luck. He is eternally doomed to the Underworld, suburban Hell, so to speak, Hell’s high-rent district, a place without the more sensational torture chambers, but also entirely without hope. Yet he can guide another toward a goal that he himself could not achieve.
There is a difference between leading toward and leading to, a difference dramatized in the canto carefully chosen by Ordiway for our discussion. Virgil apparently can get Dante no further than 62.5% of the way toward the Beatific Vision, by my reckoning. In the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio Virgil abruptly disappears, and his A-Team replacement, a heavenly lady named Beatrice, takes over. It is hard for a reader not to find cruelty in this passage. By this point in the poem Virgil has saved Dante’s bacon more times than a reader can remember. He has taught, guided, comforted, encouraged and literally carried him through intellectual and physical terrors nearly impossible for us to grasp. Virgil now simply vanishes from the poem. Dante is given all of six lines to express his distress—a distress for which he is immediately reprimanded by his new and superior guide. Onward and upward! Ultreia!
So there we were, seated in a vineyard in a wide circle of folding chairs, thinking and talking about all this. In speaking of the suddenly absent Virgil, Dante the pilgrim had called him “the sweetest of fathers.” We were gathered at event convened by a son and a daughter to memorialize their distinguished father. In Germany, where they virtually invented the modern Ph. D. degree, scholars reverently referred to their doctoral supervisors as “Doctorväter,” doctor-fathers.* I have heard the leader of our seminar use that term of his old teacher, as I myself have used it of mine. Analogies are comparisons in which some elements are alike and some unalike; but I believe all of us there grasped the particular poignancy of an extraordinary passage of poetry that invoked at once the sadness of irreparable loss and the promise of continuing vitality offered by great poets and their great interpreters for generations yet unborn. All of us gathered there in that grassy circle were aware that we had had to say goodbye to a trusted guide and mentor. But no more than Dante himself had he left us comfortless. There was a whole warehouse of happy memories; and we were after all reading our text from the bilingual text of the Divine Comedy "in a verse translation by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander.” It was a considerable dantisa of the seventeenth century, John Milton, who perhaps said it best. “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
*In the contemporary scene the term should be recognized as parental rather than exclusively paternal. There are of course doctor-mothers, one of the most notable being Beatrice, Virgil’s supererogator. On that one, Dante was approximately seven hundred years ahead of the Pope.
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