대시인 "단테" 가 추방 중 겪은 고통이 없었더라면 '신곡'도 존재하

이탈리아 시인 단테 700년 만에 추방령 선고형을 취소받았다는 외신기사를 보왔다.   단테 의 신곡에서 말하는 진짜 지옥이란 곳은 어떠한 희망 도 가질 수 없는 곳을 가르킨다.   인간으로 태어나서 살아 있는 한 어떠한 희망을 가지는 것이 사람의 본성일지언데   그러한 희망이 완전히 사라진 곳에 사람이 살아간다는 것은 상상조차 힘들기에 그런 곳을 지옥이라 부른다.   그러나 단테는 그런 지옥에서도 어떤 기쁨을 발견하며 순례를 한다.  모든 희망이 사라진 지옥에서도 사람이 살아 있을 수 있다는 것을 발견하는데 그것은 바로 '두려움' 이라는 공포감을 버리는 것이다.   공포 영화를 즐기는 사람들은 이러한 단테의 발견을 알 것이다.   지옥같은 삶에서 살아날려면 바로 모든 공포감을 걷어차 내는 것이다.   희망의 반대는 절망이 아니다. 사랑의 반대말이 증오가 아니라 무관심이라는 말처럼 지옥에서 살아남는 방법은 희망을 가지는 것이 아니라 공포감을 벗어나는 것이다.   희망이 절대적으로 제거된 지옥같은 삶에서 유일한 수단은 어떠한 두려움에서도 벗어나는 길이다.    <모든 희망을 버리라는 경구가 쓰여진 지옥의 문>     "All hope abandon you who enter here."     ===================다음은 신문기사 카피임.

13세기 이탈리아의 대 시인 단테가 700년 만에 범죄 전과기록을 씻었다.

이탈리아 피렌체 시의회는 이번주 초 단테를 피렌체에서 영구히 쫓아낸 1302년의 추방형 선고를 취소했다고 영국 일간 텔레그래프가 17일 전했다. 시의원들은 19대 5로 700년 전 판결을 철회하는 동의안을 가결했다.

1265년 피렌체 귀족 집안에서 태어난 단테는 젊은 시절 교황의 간섭에서 벗어나피렌체의 독립을 쟁취하려는 투쟁에 가담했다가 실패했다. 교황 충성파가 권력을 잡으면서 단테는 재판에서 500플로린의 벌금형과 2년 간 추방형을 선고받았다. 벌금을지불하지 않은 단테는 다시 영구 추방령과 함께 피렌체에 발을 들여놓을 경우 화형에 처한다는 선고를 받았다.

영구 추방령을 선고받은 단테는 이탈리아를 유랑하며 마지막 20년을 보냈고, 1321년 라벤나에서 생을 마쳤다.

그러나 유랑생활 동안 그는 지옥, 연옥, 천국의 3부로 이뤄진 위대한 문학작품 '신곡'을 완성했다.

피렌체 시장 레오나르도 도메니치는 단테의 추방형을 철회하고, 단테에게 피렌체 최고의 영예를 줄 것이라고 말했다.

그러나 이에 반대하는 사람들은 단테가 추방 중 겪은 고통이 없었더라면 '신곡'도 존재하지 않았을 것이라며 "정치적 홍보전"이라고 일축했다.

 

 

After 700 years, Dante Alighieri, Italy's most famous poet, will have his criminal record scrubbed clean.

Florence's city council has approved a motion revoking a sentence on Dante from 1302 which stated that he would be executed if he stepped foot in the city again.

The sentence forced Dante into exile and he spent the last 20 years of his life wandering through Italy, finally ending his days in Ravenna in 1321.

It was during his exile that he composed his greatest work, The Divine Comedy, a three-part journey through the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise.

Dante was born into a noble Florentine family in 1265 and found himself embroiled in a struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy for control of the city. He is likely to have fought in decisive battles for the city's independence and became a Prior, one of six city leaders, in 1300.

His stint in power came to a bad end, however, when forces loyal to the pope seized power and put him on trial. When he did not appear, he was banished for two years and given a 5,000 florin fine. When he did not pay, he was condemned to death by burning.

The motion to rehabilitate Dante was passed by 19 votes to 5 at the city council earlier this week.

The mayor of Florence, Leonardo Domenici, will now award the poet the city's highest honour and revoke the sentence.

"It is a decisive step forward to his rehabilitation," the council said.

However, opponents labelled it a "stunt" and said that Dante's poetry would never have existed were it not for his suffering in exile.

 

World of Books

I didn't give up booze this year for Lent - I gave up the crossword, devoting the free time to reading through The Divine Comedy.

It is the great masterpiece of our literature. As well as reliving, in the Inferno, so many of the myths of classical times - from the Minotaur to the Titans - it is also the great poem about Europe and its politics, and the great poem about personal salvation.

I read it in the small Temple edition, pocket-sized, with Italian on one side of the page and English on the other. J. M. Dent publish an excellent parallel edition with translation by Robert Pinsky and Penguin publish the even better translation by Mark Musa. (The translation by Dorothy L. Sayers has mercifully been consigned to the dustbin.)

The Musa edition has the best notes and introductions, which you'll need to explain all the many historical references. Or there is the one-volume Everyman edition, which has the most "poetic" modern version, a fine verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum. It also gives you the superb Botticelli illustrations.

In Dante's fiction, The Divine Comedy, it was during the three days between Good Friday and Easter, in 1300, that he made his great journey through the three regions of the after-world, Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.

Were he to do so today, he would find the places much altered, if newspaper reports are to be believed. The present Pope has declared Limbo not to exist. (Much as I honour his name and office, I wonder how he can possibly know?) And he was lately reported as telling a parish in Rome that the fires of Hell are physical, rather than imaginary.

Dante, who is escorted by an inhabitant of Limbo, Virgil, would not necessarily have accepted either judgment. You will remember that he alone, coming to these regions with a body, is able to cast a shadow, which neither Virgil, his guide through Hell and Purgatory, nor any of the departed are able to do. They are not physical as he is.

Dante took popes with a pinch of salt. As the greatest poet of Western Catholicism, he is remarkable for his violently anti-papal stands. For him, the exile of the papacy to Avignon was a gross scandal.

The decision of Clement V, in 1305, to place himself, and the papal office, under the care of a French king and to leave the sacred seven hills was a crucial event in Dante's imaginative life.

The machinations of Clement V's predecessor, Boniface VIII, caused Dante to be accused of that New Labourish offence, selling public office in Florence; hence his life of bitter exile. And for this Dante reserved a place in Hell for Boniface before he even died!

Nevertheless, Dante's reverence for the institution of the Church makes him regard the physical assault on Boniface at Anagni (Sept 7, 1303) as a blasphemy; and, it will be remembered, the souls who arrive like boat-people at the foot of Mount Purgatory started off from the Tiber, the river whence salvation flows.

Clement V's Francophile exile in Avignon further led Dante to develop his fascistic belief that Europe could only be saved by a mighty dictator; that only by a revival of the Roman Empire as a political entity could France be licked, and the popes told to mind their purely spiritual business.

I know that John Ruskin, an ardent Dantean, only read him in translation, carrying the imitation Miltonic version of Cary around in his pocket. I think it is a pity not to savour a poet in his own language, so if you read the Penguin or Everyman, get hold of the Italian text to dip into.

No English version can completely stab you in the way that Dante's concision can, as when Francesca, reading the story of Lancelot, falls hopelessly in love with Paolo - and we read no further that day - "quel giorno piu non vi legemmo avante " - or as when God is described as "che del disio di se veder' d'accora " (Purgatorio v57) - or when, in Paradise, Beatrice tells Dante to open his eyes and see what she really is - "Apri gli occhi e riguarda qual son io ".

Purgatory has lacerated him as Marsyas was flayed by Apollo - and those lines are ones to ponder.

But even if you just read it in English, a life-changing treat is in store. Twenty minutes a day for six weeks, and you will have read the greatest masterpiece of European poetry.

Dante's peaks and troughs

 

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT /08/2001

 

IN the late 20th century, Australian literature came of age by reacting against the so-called "cultural cringe" of deference to English traditions. Seven hundred years earlier, something similar happened in Italy. In a treatise on the Eloquence of the Vulgar Tongue" Dante proposed that serious literary works could be written in Italian just as well as in Latin or Provenal. He thus made possible the creation of a national literature in the mother tongue. The Divine Comedy was written in the Tuscan dialect. The poem still has an element of cultural cringe, in that the Roman Virgil is invoked as a guide, but it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the force of Dante's example enabled Tuscan to become the basis of modern Italian. Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in an Italy of fragmented city-states racked by skirmishes between Guelphs (loyal to the Pope) and Ghibellines (followers of the Holy Roman Emperor). Florence was a Guelph stronghold - as a young man, the future poet fought for his city against Arezzo and Pisa - but it had divisions of its own. Factions known as Black and White Guelphs hated each other with all the passion of the Montagues and the Capulets. Dante was a White Guelph. In 1309, while he was away negotiating with the Pope in Rome, the Blacks seized power and he was sentenced to exile. He never returned to his beloved Florence. Verona adopted him and he eventually died in Ravenna. As in the lives of many later poets, the experience of exile inspired his very greatest work. The Divine Comedy is both allegory and history. It is not only a spiritual journey from Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso, but also an impassioned commentary on contemporary Florentine affairs, narrated in the form of imaginary posthumous meetings with the key players. In this brief biography, R. W. B. Lewis proves himself a sure-footed guide through the rocky terrain of Dante's political context. Thumbnail sketches and judicious quotations introduce the reader to such memorable figures as the poet's tutor Brunetto Latini, the illicit lovers Paolo and Francesca, and the terrible Count Ugolino, reduced to eating his own children. Lewis is, however, a little naive in his biographical assumptions. He tells of how the nine-year-old Dante first laid eyes on a little girl called Beatrice during the May Day flower festival: "He was captivated on the spot, and remained so in fact and in visual and poetic memory all his life." When a biographer resorts to the phrase "in fact", it is usually a sign that he is floundering in speculation. The only "evidence" for this first encounter, and indeed for Dante's unswerving love of Beatrice, is the poetry, in particular the sequence of sonnets and short poems called La Vita Nuova ("new life"). Beatrice is Dante's near-divine image of beauty and chastity. Scholars have argued for centuries over her real identity, and some have even held that she was merely an idealised figment of the poetic imagination. John Ruskin described Dante as "the central man of all the world", the poet in whom "the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties" were held together in perfect accord. Yet 100 years earlier, the waspish Horace Walpole had dismissed him as "extravagant, absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in Bedlam". Dante's influence on English-language culture is a relatively recent phenomenon - Shakespeare and his contemporaries were far more interested in Petrarch, Boccaccio and Ariosto. It was the Victorians who took Dante to their hearts, as part of their revival of all things medieval. They also had the benefit of the first complete English translation of the Divine Comedy, the work of Keats's friend, the Reverend Henry Cary. Lewis's failure to address the question of translation is the principal disappointment of this book, for it is only through good translation that Dante will survive in the Anglophone 21st century. Many English readers have given up the Commedia on account of the execrable attempts at rhyme in Dorothy L. Sayers's Penguin version. Lewis has served his master equally badly by recommending a return to the 19th-century "Temple Classics" translation and making no mention of the highly accomplished version of that fine - and still living - poet, C. H. Sisson.

Who was Dante?

Last Updated: 2:08AM GMT 12/01/2007

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321, was Italy's greatest poet. His major work, The Divine Comedy, is one of the most important poems in European literature and has inspired countless authors including T S Eliot and Karl Marx.

Dante, whose real first name was Durante, was born into a noble, but relatively poor Florentine family.

At the age of 20 he married Gemma di Manetto Donati who bore him at least three children. He subsequently began a political career and rose to the post of governor in 1300. However, his career came to an unfortunate end when he opposed Pope Bonifacio VIII. In The Divine Comedy, Dante chides the Popes for their involvement in politics.

He fell out of favour and was later sentenced to pay a fine for fraud and serve two years in exile. He failed to pay, was sentenced to death, and spent the rest of his life wandering through various Italian courts. He never returned to Florence.

The Divine Comedy, which is a serious work rather than a comedy in the modern sense, was written while in exile.

An epic poem, it describes his journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided first by the famous Roman poet Virgil, and then by Beatrice, the subject of his first love.

He wrote the poem in Tuscan dialect, and was one of the first poets, together with Chaucer and Boccaccio, to use his own language rather than Latin.

In 1320, Dante arrived in Ravenna, where he died the following year. Pope Leo X decided to move his remains to Florence in order for Michelangelo to build a glorious tomb in 1519.

They later went missing after another move in 1677 but were refound by chance in 1865 and returned to Ravenna.