'And Then We Emerged to See the Stars Again'

On Twitter a doctor in Italy wearing a surgical gown and two masks holds a handwritten sign that says in Italian, “When this Hell ends . . .” followed by the final line of Dante’s Inferno: E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

In C.H. Sisson’s translation of The Divine Comedy (1980), Canto XXXIV, line 139 reads: “And then we emerged to see the stars again.” Optimism at the moment seems a paltry word but the doctor’s gesture is stirring. Recall that Dante has just seen the three-faced Satan trapped waist-deep in the frozen lake. From his mouths, eternally devoured, hang Brutus, Cassius and Judas Iscariot. Dante is speechless in Hell. Sisson translates the opening tercets of Canto XXXII:

“If I could write in harsh and raucous verses,

As would be suitable to the sad pit

On which all the other rocks weigh down,

“I could press out the juice of my conception

More fully, but because I have not that skill,

Not without fear I bring myself to speak;

“For it is not a matter to take lightly,

Describing the lowest point in the universe,

Not something to be done in baby-talk.”

And later, in Canto XXXIV, on first sighting Satan:

“How frozen and how faint I then became,

Do not enquire, reader, description is useless,

For any speech would be inadequate.”

I’m always struck by Dante’s refusal to linger on the scene. It’s as though he has taken his snapshot of the horror and Virgil hurries him along. Why contemplate what is incomprehensible? In a modern horror film the camera would remain focused on Judas: “. . . at times his spine / Was left stripped of every scrap of skin.” Sisson on the departure from Hell:

“We mounted up, he first and I second,

So that I saw some of the lovely things

That are in the heavens, through a round opening;

“And then we emerged to see the stars again.”

It’s essential to remember that Dante concludes each section of his Commedia with a view of the stars. Here is Canto XXXIII, lines 144-145 of Purgatorio: “. . . and so I was / Clear and ready to go up to the stars.” And Canto XXXIII, lines 142-145 of Paradiso:

“At this point high imagination failed;

But already my desire and my will

Were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,

“By the love which moves the sun and the stars.”

[In his 2005 review of Sisson’s translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Eric Ormsby judges Sisson’s Dante “the best available in English.”]