TRANSLATED BY NEVILL COGHILL

Bawdy, pious, crudite, absurd, tragic, comic: here in Dryden's words is 'God's plenty'.

With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject-matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. The tales are told by a motley crowd of pilgrims as they journey for five days from Southwark to Canterbury. Drawn from all levels of society and all walks of life (from knight to nun, miller to monk), the pilgrims reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth century that is as robust as it is representative.

Rendered here with consummate skill and sensitivity into modern English verse by Nevill Coghill, The Canterbury Tales (which Geoffrey Chaucer began in 1386 and never completed) retain all their vigour, their humour and indeed their poetry.

Have you ever spent long hours fantasizing some horrible punishment for a person who has done something bad to you? The torture must be perfect: painful, yet relating somehow to the specific wrong the person has done you.
Carry that fantasy to another level. Imagine everyone, past and present, good and bad, getting, finally, exactly what he or she deserves.
Back in the early 1300s in Italy, a man carried through with that fantasy- on paper, of course. He literally told everyone where to go, Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven, and went on to design specific punishments or rewards based on the life each person led. He laid them all end to end and then made himself a character (actually a not-too-bright lost soul) who walks the entire length of the universe.
The work is called the Divine Comedy. The author is Dante Alighieri.
Dante was born in Florence, Italy, in 1265. This would be one of those meaningless, soon forgotten facts if it were not so significant for the works Dante produced. It happened to be the wrong place at the wrong time.
At the time of Dante’s birth, Florence was a prosperous city-state, full of greedy merchants, dedicated scholars, and warring political factions. The two most influential families in Florence were the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The Guelphs were supporters of the Pope and the Ghibellines supported the German emperor, who claimed power in Italy. Shortly before Dante was born, the Ghibel-
lines were ousted from power, and the Guelphs, with whom Dante’s family was associated, took power.
Dante began his own political career in 1295 when the Guelphs were firmly established and many of the Ghibellines were still in exile. At that time, however, a split began in the Guelphs; the two sides became known later as the Whites and the Blacks. The crisis came to a head in 1300 when the Whites, who were in power, decided to prosecute the Blacks who had gone to Rome to ask the Pope to intervene on their behalf. (Remember, the Guelphs had backed the Pope- he owed them a favor.) Dante was one of the six White leaders responsible for this decision. In 1301, the next year, the Blacks staged a successful coup and the White leaders, including Dante, were sent into exile. In 1302, charged with graft, hostility against the Pope, and a long list of other crimes, in his absence Dante was sentenced to death- if he was ever caught in Florence again.
Consequently, Dante never returned to his home city. This exile also meant that Dante’s fortunes, which were not as large as his family had once held, were confiscated. He spent the remainder of his life living at the expense and generosity of friends. He died in Ravenna in 1321.
Dante’s private life is less well defined than his public affairs. He was betrothed to Gemma Donati in 1277 (remember he would have been twelve then!) whom he later married. There were three children: Jacopo, Pietro, and Antonia.
(Some of the historians mention a fourth, Giovanni.) When Dante’s sons were fourteen, they also had to join their father in exile. Both Jacopo and Pietro later
wrote about the Divine Comedy. Antonia entered a convent and took the name Sister Beatrice.
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy while he was in exile. He finished the first part, the Inferno, in 1314 and the final cantos of the Paradiso in 1320. The title of the entire work is The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by Citizenship, Not by Morals.
Dante was a man who lived, who saw political and artistic success, and who was in love. He was also a man who was defeated, who felt the danger and humiliation of exile, and who was no stranger to the cruelty and treachery possible in people. Dante felt that he was the victim of a grave injustice. He also suffered serious self-doubts- natural for a man in exile and eternally dependent. Remembering all this about Dante, we can see his work as the sum of all these experiences and his answers to the basic human questions: What is man? Why does he act as he does? What is Good and what is Evil? When it so often looks like “Good guys finish last,” why should anyone be good? You are probably saying, “So what?” at this point. But trying to understand a work of literature is often a lot like trying to understand other people. You have to figure out where they are coming from and what makes them tick. Dante comes from a medieval Roman Catholic background, and that is extremely important for the Divine Comedy.
What if a reader is not a Catholic or a Christian? What about a 20th-century reader who doesn’t know medieval history? Can that person still understand the
poem, or will the religious and medieval aspects get in the way? Obviously, we can’t promise there will never be a problem, but the work has been read all over the world for centuries.
After all, when you read science fiction, you accept that certain aliens may have certain amazing powers, or that a particular planet has different scientific laws than we have on earth. Science fiction authors use those unusual, supernatural possibilities as elements of their plots. So, too, Dante uses the concepts and symbols accepted in his age and his religion as elements around which to structure his story. You don’t have to believe they are true in order to appreciate how they work in the poem. Let’s examine some of the concepts Dante inherited from
14th-century Italy’s way of thinking.
One feature of Dante’s vision of the universe is the concept of polarities: two extreme opposites, between which people were pulled. To Dante, many aspects of his world were polar in nature:
1. There was a power struggle between the Church and State, represented by the Pope and the German emperor.
2. There was a struggle for intellectual authority between theology (the study of religion and the Bible) and philosophy (which included science and mathematics). Dante himself was a heavy borrower from both sides and quoted such diverse sources as the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato, or the Christian thinkers St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
3. Man was considered to fall halfway between the animals and the angels, and was therefore torn between the brutish and the angelic sides of his nature.
4. Dante also felt that writing should reflect a balance between the ideas and the realities of a man’s life, so we see him moving between two different aesthetic approaches in his poetry: personal realism and symbolism in allegory.
Dante also challenged the accepted practice, which was to write about ideas in Latin and more mundane matters in the vernacular language (for him, Italian). He wrote the Comedy in Italian.
Dante’s religion told him there were three worlds in the afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. How does someone go about describing what no one has ever seen- life after death? Where are these places and what are they like? To answer these questions, Dante borrowed from science and, again, the religion of his day.
For Dante, both the physical and the spiritual worlds were set up as a hierarchy, leading up to God. Basically, what this means is that everything starts with God and exists in layers radiating outwards from Him.
Dante’s idea of the physical universe follows the design of the astronomer Ptolemy, who taught that the earth is the center of the universe and that the following nine levels surround and rotate around the earth:
1. Moon
2. Mercury
3. Venus
4. Sun
5. Mars
6. Jupiter
7. Saturn
8. Starry Heaven
9. Crystalline Heaven (prime mobile) Surrounding all and immobile is the Empyrean, home of God.
On the spiritual level, Dante’s universe is set up so that the more God-like you are, the closer your eternal resting place will be to Him. Hell, then, is in the center of the earth, the farthest point from God. Purgatory is a mountain on the earth and Heaven is close to God.
Dante called his work simply the Comedy; later readers added the word divine because the work deals with God and Satan, sin and the afterlife. The Inferno is Dante-the-pilgrim’s journey through Hell. The scenes he encounters there are as bizarre as anything we might see in a horror film or science fiction fantasy. There’s a huge cast of characters, drawn from the Bible, from Greek mythology, and from the Italian politics of Dante’s own day.
The poem is more than a supernatural travelogue, however. As you will see, it is also a journey through the human spirit, from the depths of evil to the heights of enlightenment.