Dante
R.W.B. Lewis (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2001)

193 pp.  First reading.
Posted 6 September 2006.


I have sometimes heard people argue that the personal lives of artists are irrelevant to the appreciation of their art; the work is all that matters.  If there were ever an artist of whom this was false, it is Dante Alighieri.  La Divina Commedia is bursting with details about his family history, the people he knows, and the local politics of his time.  In a sense, one cannot know Dante the poet without knowing Dante the man. And besides, who wouldn't want to know something about the author of the greatest epic poem of the Western world?

This biography does a good job of introducing the reader to Dante.  Despite its brevity, it covers the main events of his life, the political unrest that resulted in his exile from Florence, his literary production, and his artistic influence through the years.  Lewis, an American living in Florence, obviously loves both Dante and his native city, and relates many fascinating details -- fascinating, at any rate, to someone who knows the city -- about where in Florence certain events alluded to in the Comedy took place.  More generally, he takes special care to describe the contemporary context for a number of obscure episodes. All this will be quite helpful when next I read the great work.

Much of the book is devoted to Dante's poetry. He gives considerable attention to the early poetry, which culminated in La Vita Nuova. There is no detailed analysis of the poems, but he does describe the circumstances behind their composition, and the artistic innovations Dante was making.  As for the Comedy, he not only writes about the circumstances under which it was written, but also provides a short summary of the plot and flags notable episodes for each panel of the triptych (though he missed some of my favourite passages.)

Dante's influence in the intervening 700 years since his death has been vast.  According to Lewis he remains the towering figure of Italian art, and it is also true that many of the great English writers -- Shelley, Browning, Byron, Emerson, Longfellow (who himself translated the Comedy), Pound -- have owned their debt to him, or struggled against him, or otherwise felt his presence in their art. The poet who perhaps sensed this presence most acutely in modern times was T.S. Eliot, whose poetry, from the early Prufrock to the late Quartets, is rife with allusions to Dante and his work. 

I was shocked to learn that the Comedy was first translated into English in 1814!  Considering that we now have our pick of a half-dozen good translations, this beggars belief.  We are blessed, indeed.

The edition of this biography that I read had one novel peculiarity: the page numbering forecast in the Table of Contents bore little resemblance to the actual page numbering of the chapters. Perhaps this explains why I found the book on the discount table.

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