Tom Simone has taught at the University of Vermont

for more than thirty years. He is the author of books

on Shakespeare and on the beginnings of the Western
Tradition as well as numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett,
Shakespeare on film, and the history of recorded classical
music. He currently is working on a translation of
Dantes Purgatorio for Focus Publishing.

Focus Publishing

DANTE INFERNO TOM SIMONE

Tom Simones translation is simply superb. Of all the

translations with which I am familiar, this is the one that
is the most faithful to whats there in the Italian: no frills,
no poetic sallies, no choosing a word because it brings
the line closer to iambic pentameter -- just unadulterated
Dante with good old Anglo-Saxon words and in highly
readable prose.
- Peter Kalkavage, St. Johns College

R. Pullins Company
PO Box 369
Newburyport, MA 01950
www.pullins.com

Tom Simone

I S B N 978-1-58510-113-9

781585 101139

For the complete list of titles available from

Focus Publishing, additional student materials,
and online ordering, visit www.pullins.com.

Focus

Inferno

The Comedy
of Dante Alighieri,
Florentine by birth, but not by character

Canticle One

Inferno

Translation and commentary by

Tom Simone
University of Vermont

Copyright 2007 Tom Simone

Cover Design by Guy Wetherbee | Elk Amino Design, New England.
elkaminodesign@yahoo.com
Cover image: Domenico di Michelino (1417-1491). Dante and his poem.
Duomo, Florence, Italy. Scala / Art Resource, NY.
Interior illustrations by Sam Kimball.
ISBN 10: 1-58510-113-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-58510-113-9
This book is published by Focus Publishing / R. Pullins Company, PO
Box 369, Newburyport MA 01950. All rights are reserved. No part of this
publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, produced on stage
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Table of Contents

Preface
General Introduction
Inferno
Suggested Reading on Dante
Glossary

vii
xi
1
253
257

Preface
The reading of a major classic text is a great challenge for any serious
reader. Considerations of background, different natures of narrative, allusion,
and all the peculiarities of any important text offer major obstacles and
rewards to the new reader. The case of Dante is particularly difficult. Dantes
Comedy offers the reader innumerable points of interest that cannot be
divined without the aid of at least basic glossing and commentary. Dantes
work is a central poem in world literature, but also an historical text, full of
references to the world of late medieval Italy and the broad history of culture
and thought of the era. Italian, religious, and classical references abound.
And a significant number of references appear only in Dantes work.
Coming out of a period of the New Criticism and maybe further back
from Protestant belief in the availability of the Biblical text to the unaided
reader, a significant number of classic works have been presented in the
United States in a deceptively barebones form. While translations of Dante
appear with annotation, virtually all the major version place annotation at the
end of the volume or sometimes at the end of the canto section. The result is
that the annotation seems incidental or strangely and awkwardly placed.
I know from frequent experience that the most used of current editions
of Dante fall short of the practical needs of todays reader of good will
attempting the daunting task of a first acquaintance with the Comedy. This is
not to say that important aids and reflection are not a part of these versions,
but rather that such tools are inconvenient and all too often neglected by the
reader. Last year, while giving a visiting lecture on translating Dante for a
colleague, I had the chance to speak informally with a sample of the students
in the class. Almost none of them had ever even looked at the notes at the
end of the volume, and some students didnt even know they were there. In
surveying my own students, I know that without great urging, even students
of good will are discouraged from significant use of cumbersome endnotes.

vii

viii

Inferno

I have a colleague at the University of Vermont who is a senior professor

in French literature and language. She is a woman of exquisite intelligence and
elegance of scholarship, who was amazed on her first reading of Dante at how
difficult and challenging the project was. If my colleague, who is the model
of the advanced literate and intelligent reader, had difficulty in approaching
Dante, what must be the situation of the general reader or student when
attempting to learn something of the great poem?
The present translation and commentary are founded on the desire to
assist in providing sufficient tools to allow the beginning student of Dante to
arrive at an informed first reading of Inferno. The translation attempts to stay
as close as possible to the literal meaning of Dantes Italian text while still
suggesting that the work is a poem. I have tried to follow the pattern of Dantes
thought and imagery in a way that is clear and reminiscent of the unfolding
narrative and thought of the poem. A straight prose translation seemed to
me to fall short of articulating Dantes rhetorical and poetic impulse. So,
while any version of Dante must fall short in English, I have tried to summon
aspects of Dantes thought and language that will suggest aspects of the power
and range of the Italian. Needless to say, the idea of a terza rima format was
set aside as imposing too violent an effect on Dantes sense and directness. I
have also adjusted the translation for more straightforward English sense and
accuracy than in earlier versions, based on the thoughtful comments of two
readers for Focus Publishing, who are unknown to me.
The format of this edition is to preface each canto with a short
commentary on the narrative and major issues at hand. And most simply, I
have placed succinct annotation at the foot of the page of the text. As any
perusal of Italian editions will show, virtually every native version of the text
is provided with annotation by footnote. I have keyed footnotes with a raised
circle next to the passage and with line number at the foot of the page giving
the material at hand. In my commentary I have drawn on the Italian editions
of Sapegno, di Salvo, and Pasquini and Quaglio. From English language
material I have relied on Toynbees Dictionary, Lansings Dante Encyclopedia,
and the commentaries of Grandgent, Sinclair, Singleton, Hollander,
and Durling and Martinez in the main. At times I have consulted early
commentators through the internet web sites of the Princeton Dante Project
and its links to the Dante Dartmouth Project. Of Dante, as of Shakespeare,
there is no end to commentary and interpretation.
I have used drafts of this edition over two years in both introductory
Western tradition survey courses and senior level majors seminars. I have also
reviewed the entire text with the assistance of students from the senior level
class to try to find an appropriate degree of annotation and information that
meets the needs of todays students. This edition does not claim to provide

Preface

ix

exhaustive annotation or commentary, but rather to provide a workable level

of information and support to allow for that informed reading that will allow
the reader to appreciate and then continue study at her or his option.
I am grateful for the encouragement and support of many people. My
teachers in Dante were fine guides: David Sices, formerly of Dartmouth
College, and Ricardo Quinones of Claremont Graduate School. A half-year
sabbatical from the University of Vermont in 2004 allowed me the time and
concentration to draft the first version of this edition. And I have received
much support from my students. In particular Alex Spadinger, Peter Quigley,
and Andrew Nelson aided revisions. Megan Alderfer provided especially
extensive help on the manuscript. My editor at Focus Publishing, Kathleen
Brophy, has been consistently alert and supportive of the project, always
keeping an eye on clarity and consistency. My publisher, Ron Pullins, has
been a model of patience and support. Any errors or infelicities are, of course,
my own.
The task has been fascinating and humbling, more extensive, challenging,
and involving than I had at first suspected. However, like the narrator of the
poem,

but to tell of the good that I discovered,
I will speak of the other things that I found there.
With good luck and strength, I hope to be able to proceed, however slowly,
with pilgrim and guide to visit the next realm of Purgatorio and to see

those content in fire,
because they hope to come to the blessed
people whenever that time may be.

Tom Simone
5 January 2007

Introduction
Dantes place in world literature
When Dante composed his Comedy in the early 14th century, the poem
quickly took its place as a major work of Italian literature. In a world of
manuscript transmission, hundreds of copies were in circulation in the
following century, including an impressive array of detailed commentaries. By
the latter part of that century, Dantes importance was recognized far beyond
Italy, as seen in Chaucers many references to the Italian poet in his work.
The appeal of Dante also quickly spread to the medium of painting
and, with the introduction of printing, into many annotated and illustrated
editions. In the visual arts, Signorellis New Chapel at the cathedral in
Orvieto, Botticellis hundred drawing sequence illustrating the poem, and
Michelangelos Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican are three
of the most prominent examples of Dantes fame and influence. After a
waning of interest in Dante in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, fascination
with the poet and the poem increased in the early Romantic period and has
continued unabated ever since. In recent years numerous editions, translations,
commentaries, scholarly studies, and series of illustrations have appeared in
an impressive stream. To this day Dante remains one of the towering figures
of world literature.
What accounts for the immediate and enduring appeal of Dantes poem?
Dante tells the story of the journey of an endangered pilgrim through the
known cosmos and the realms of Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise to allow
him to see the spectrum of human reality and the glory of divine origins that
lead to salvation. Dante makes the pilgrim a version of himself and creates
two major voices: the voice of the pilgrim experiencing the journey for the
first time, and the voice of the narrator shaping and retelling the journey.
The fate of the individual pilgrim has its own urgency in the question of his
knowledge, belief, and fate, but as the poem indicates in its opening line, the
single pilgrims fate is parallel to all of human experience:
In the middle of the journey of our life


Inferno

Dante is careful from the beginning to emphasize that the journey of the
pilgrim is representative of human need in general even though it is interwoven
so fully with his own historical experience. Consequently he measures the
pilgrims journey as in the middle of our life, that is, at the time of the action
of the poem in 1300, he is 35 years of age and at the center of the biblical human
life span of seventy years. The spectrum of all of human life, as portrayed in
the poem, will unfold with breathtaking variety, drama, thought, and beauty.
The poem begins in high drama with the pilgrims life hanging in the
balance. He finds himself in a chaotic wooded place, and three beasts cut off
his escape up a hill of hope and promise back into the darkness. The faint
figure of a man appears to console and lead the pilgrim. This is the Roman
poet Virgil, who becomes a character of great rational and cultural experience
in the poem, a model of the poet in his own time as well as for later readers like
Dante, and now a guide for the struggling pilgrim. Since the pilgrim cannot
escape the menace of the beasts, he has to take the dark road through Inferno
and the realm of the lost souls before he can return to the mountain of hope,
which is transformed into the mountain of Purgatory in the second part of
the poem.
Dantes Inferno remains the most extensive and dramatic portrayal of the
underworld of the dead in Western literature. While Purgatorio and Paradiso
show the recuperation of the human soul and its triumph in the presence
of the transcendent deity, Inferno explores the world of souls remaining in
unhappiness and cut off from the primal sources of life and renewal. The world
of the early 21st century echoes with images and fears of a chaotic existence
with wars, natural disasters, crime, murders, assaults of all kind haunting our
daily awareness. As I write this, we in Vermont are reeling under a barrage
of shootings and murders in a local elementary school while scanning the
horizon for news of foreign wars and looming hurricanes. Dantes Inferno,
while coming from a far distant time in the Middle Ages, speaks of such
fears and troubling events so full of pain and unhappiness that our sense of a
meaningful and orderly life is called into doubt.
Inferno is full of division, both of kinds of transgression and of one soul
from another. Here the great personalities cling to their separateness and their
own concepts of reality. We encounter such memorable figures as the amorous
Francesca (Canto 5), the grand general Farinata (Canto 10), the corrupt pope
Nicholas III (Canto 19), and the bold, ever seeking Ulysses (Canto 26). The
external torments of these lost souls are endlessly varied and often fascinating
in their inventiveness and sharpness: souls submerged in mud, fire raining
down, distorted human figures, and souls frozen in ice.
But as inventive and varied as he makes the external effects of Inferno
on its inhabitants, Dante gives dramatic and even psychological particularity

Inferno
Introduction to Canto 1
The pilgrim awakes in a dark wood.
A hill lit by the sun
The pilgrim opposed by three beasts
The appearance of the poet Virgil to be the guide

The first canto works as both an introduction to Inferno and the Comedy
overall. Here we are immediately brought into the spiritual crisis of the
pilgrim, his fear of death, and his unsuccessful struggle against three beasts to
escape from the terrors of the dark wood to the inviting sunlit hill that stands
beyond. Only extraordinary measures will open the future for the pilgrim,
the intervention of the great Roman poet Virgil and the prospect of a journey
through the lands of the dead: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.
This opening canto seems to take place in a liminal place, on the
boundary between sin and salvation, evil and good, water and land, spiritual
unconsciousness and an abruptly awakened moral concern. The mood mingles
the insubstantial images of dreams with the emotional panic and needs of the
pilgrim. The medieval form of the dream vision allows for a sense of inner
immediacy and a flexible use of symbolic images that suggest a range of other
levels of meaning. The narrator will often address the reader, as at Canto 9.6163, to consider the moral and spiritual meanings of the literal events being
presented. That multi-layered awareness in the poem will become part of the
readers response and growing experience.
The canto opens in a sudden crisis of mortal peril. The memorable opening
lines speak of a spiritual awakening at the chronological and symbolic center
of human life:
In the middle of the journey of our life,
I found myself in a dark wood,
where the straight path was lost.
21

22

Inferno

The pilgrim is thirty-five years of age, the middle of the seventy normative
Biblical years of human life. He is both himself and an everyman, who represents
the pattern of human experience. As he struggles to emerge from darkness, he
moves toward a hill touched by the rays of the sun. The hill suggests an image
of escape from fear and darkness and the prospective expectation of salvation
that will be explored extensively in Purgatory and Paradise later in the second
and third parts of the Comedy. His desire to climb is thwarted by three beasts,
a lion, a leopard, and a wolf, and they drive him back into darkness. These
beasts work as external figures of power in the poem but also symbols the
internal images of weakness and sin. The medieval interest in using animals in
symbolic ways permeates the poem.
In the darkness a shade appears, the image of a man now dead. This is
Virgil, the poet of the Roman epic, the Aeneid. He is the pilgrims artistic hero
and a representative of the excellence of human potential unaided by Christian
revelation. He bears both the supremacy of the art of language and the exercise
of intellect schooled in the ancient world of human virtue and thought.
The time is Good Friday in the year 1300, and the journey to be taken
involves the Biblical concepts of the individual soul and the pattern of eternal
hope in the search for the sources and potential of life. The danger to the
pilgrim is great, but the time of the year suggests the hope of renewal.
Uniquely among the great epic tales, here the narrator is the experienced
pilgrim recounting his own story, and the pilgrim yet to make that journey has
a poignant autobiographical experience. In the time of the action, the journey
itself, the pilgrim is the endangered but inexperienced figure whose task is to
learn of the nature of human reality and its consequences, and to apply such
learning to his own life. The narrator is the pilgrim returned from the whole
journey whose task is to retell the story so crucial to his own life but also to
show how relevant the story is to the lives of his readers. This double narrative
perspective, nave traveler and reflective narrator, establishes a variety of
understandings from the very inception of the poem.
While rooted in the life of Dante and his time, the Comedy lays claims to
being a universal story. The fate of one man, the pilgrim, is crucial because of its
reverberating consequences for his soul through eternity. The absoluteness of
the state of the soul in Dantes Christianity and its endurance, along with the
religious and philosophical framework for the story, give the poem an almost
scriptural status. The opening of the work establishes many expectations as
well as immediate concerns and even puzzling elements. In a way, the reader
would ideally make the journey of the poem and then return, like the narrator,
to reread, reinterpret, and even retell the story. The relationship between
the narrator and the pilgrim works to establish a method of comparative
understanding of the nature of the poem for the reader.

Canto 1 23

Canto 1

13
17

In the middle of the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark wood,
where the straight path was lost.

Oh, it is a hard thing to tell what it was,

that wood was so savage and harsh and strong
that my fear renews even at the thought of it!

It is so bitter, that death is scarcely worse;

but to tell of the good that I discovered,
I will speak of the other things that I found there.

I cannot tell clearly how I entered there,

I was so full of sleep at that point
where I abandoned the true way.

12

But when I had come to the foot of a hill,

there toward the end of that valley
which had pained my heart with fear,

15

I looked up and saw the shoulders of the heights

dressed already with the rays of that planet
that leads each one straight on every path.

18

Then my fear, which had endured in the lake

of my heart, was quieted a little
during the night that I had passed with such fear.

21

I was like one with labored breath,

who struggles out of the surf onto the shore,
who turns to the deadly water and gapes;

24

so my fleeing soul turned back to look again

at the treacherous pass that never yet
let any person escape alive.

27

Dante, the character, is 35 years old at the time of the events of the poem. This is halfway
through the biblical lifespan of 70 years (Psalms 90.10). The poem begins on Thursday evening,
April 8, 1300, before Good Friday. The pilgrim represents his life, I found myself and the life
of all humans, the journey of our life.
The valley, hill and sun prefigure Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.
The sun is seen as the brightest planet circling around the earth. See Glossary for Ptolemaic
world view.

24

30

Inferno
When I had rested my exhausted body a little,
I began to make my way along the deserted slope,
keeping my firm foot always lower.

30

And look, just at the beginning of the rise,

there was a leopard, light and so quick,
all covered with a mottled skin.

33

And it did not swerve from in front of my gaze,

but so completely blocked my upward journey
that I was turned back and spun around many times.

36

It was the time of the beginning of the morning,

and the sun rose up with those stars
that were with him when divine love

39

first moved all those beautiful things;

so that from the hour of the day and the sweet
season there was reason for me to have hope

42

about that beast with the gaudy skin;

but not so much that fear did not show me
the sight of a lion that appeared before me.

45

The lion stalked toward me with head high

and with such ravenous hunger
that it seemed as if the air was trembling.

48

And a she-wolf, that seemed to be weighed down

with hunger in its leanness and longing,
and she had made many people live in grief.

51

This beast put such a burden of fear

on me from the very sight of it
that I lost the hope of the heights.

54

And like one who is so eager to win,

when the time of his losses comes on him,
and his sudden despair drives him to tears;

57

The interpretative tradition has taken firm foot as indicating the left foot, associated with
earthly desires. In this interpretation the left foot representing will proceeds more slowly than
the right foot, which represents intellect.
32
The leopard is representative of either fraud or malice, depending on interpreter.
38-40 The medieval belief that the world was created at the beginning of spring, parallel in the calendar
to the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus. It is now Easter time in 1300, so that the pilgrims
despair is countered by the hopefulness of spring and renewal.
45
The lion represents for most commentators either violence or pride.
49
The wolf is representative for most commentators of either incontinence or wrath.

GLOSSARY
Allegory
An allegory is a narrative that has a literal meaning but also carries hidden or symbolic
levels of significance. In the first canto of the Comedy the three beasts that oppose the
pilgrims journey are literal impediments, but each one symbolizes another meaning.
Medieval thinking is full of such symbolic representations, and Dantes epic involves many
allegorical moments and methods.

Aquinas
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was the great scholastic philosopher and
theologian of the Middle Ages. He worked to harmonize the classical rational philosophy
of Aristotle with Christian belief. Dante has Aquinas appear in the sphere of the sun in
Paradiso, Cantos 10-12, as the spokesman for the theologians.

Aristotle
Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) was the most influential classical philosopher in the Middle
Ages. His Nicomachean Ethics forms the most important background to Dantes structure of
Inferno. His writings on the natural world, human society, and logic provided a systematic
approach to the world that influenced Aquinas and Dante in major ways. Except for the
Bible, Dante refers to Aristotle more than to any other single source. Dante places Aristotle
as the most honored philosopher in Limbo (Inf. 4.131) and calls him the master of those
who know.

Beatrice
Beatrice Portinari (1266-1290) is the idealized woman of Dantes earliest work, La
Vita Nuova or The New Life. In that work Dante starts with aspects of courtly love poetry
but soon raises the object of his love to theological expectations. Beatrice becomes the ideal
of Christian belief and beauty as the pilgrims guide from the end of Purgatorio through
Paradiso. She is introduced in the second canto of Inferno when Virgil explains to the
reluctant pilgrim that Beatrice summoned him from Limbo. According to Virgils narration
(Inf. 2.52-120), Beatrice was encouraged by Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Saint Lucia to
intercede on the pilgrims behalf to save him from spiritual and perhaps physical death.
Beatrices Christian knowledge complements and perfects the humanist knowledge of Virgil
in the Comedy.

Black Guelfs
See entry for Guelf factions: Whites and Blacks.

bolgia
Dante names the ten subdivisions of Circle 8, the circle of plain fraud, as bolge (the
Italian plural form of bolgia), or pockets. Each bolgia contains a class of souls who have used
conscious reason for evil purposes. For instance, bolgia 7 (Inf. Cantos 24 and 25) contains
the thieves.

257

Tom Simone has taught at the University of Vermont

for more than thirty years. He is the author of books

on Shakespeare and on the beginnings of the Western
Tradition as well as numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett,
Shakespeare on film, and the history of recorded classical
music. He currently is working on a translation of
Dantes Purgatorio for Focus Publishing.

Focus Publishing

DANTE INFERNO TOM SIMONE

Tom Simones translation is simply superb. Of all the

translations with which I am familiar, this is the one that
is the most faithful to whats there in the Italian: no frills,
no poetic sallies, no choosing a word because it brings
the line closer to iambic pentameter -- just unadulterated
Dante with good old Anglo-Saxon words and in highly
readable prose.
- Peter Kalkavage, St. Johns College

R. Pullins Company
PO Box 369
Newburyport, MA 01950
www.pullins.com

Tom Simone

I S B N 978-1-58510-113-9

781585 101139

For the complete list of titles available from

Focus Publishing, additional student materials,
and online ordering, visit www.pullins.com.

Focus

Inferno