Embedded Files
Review: Philip Terry, Dante’s Purgatorio (Carcanet: Manchester, 2024)
This new reworking of Dante’s masterpiece is remarkable: for boldness, resourceful inventiveness, and (amidst the jokes, satirical side-swipes, and the gossipy banter) for its emotional and moral heft. As in his version of Dante’s Inferno, published ten years ago, Terry follows the structure of Dante’s original very closely: thirty-three cantos of the same length as Dante’s own, to within a few lines; a vast mountain to climb, its seven terraces corresponding to the Seven Deadly Sins and, episode by episode, characters equivalent to those in the Italian poem. Within those constraints, though, everything is reimagined: Mount Purgatory, at the Antipodes in the original, is located at West Mersea in Essex, though in a parallel universe. (Terry is a member of staff at the University of Essex and his version of Inferno takes place on its campus). Dante’s guide, Virgil, becomes the New York Beat poet, Ted Berrigan; Marina Warner is Beatrice, and Allen Ginsburg figures, along with Damien Hurst, Ronald Blythe and others. Most powerfully perhaps, medieval Italy – war-torn and theocratic – becomes twentieth- and twenty-first-century Ireland.
La Pia from Canto V, for example, who was transferred to London by Eliot in The Waste Land (‘Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew | Undid me’) becomes Siobhan Kearney:
Now a third soul spoke up, after the second,
Quietly: ‘Remember me! My name is
Siobhan Kearney, from Goatstown, South Dublin.
You can follow my story on my Twitter stream.
Ireland made me, the cord of a Dyson
Unmade me. The man who married me,
Brian Kearney, knows all about that.’
(Canto V, ll. 139-45, p. 42)
As many will be aware, this is a real murder, widely publicized at the time it was committed; it is unforgotten in Ireland, coming back into the news whenever Brian Kearney, jailed in 2008, comes up for parole. Comparison with Eliot exposes the pathos The Waste Land yearns for; placed alongside Dante’s original, Terry’s version presents a more outspoken victim, still indignant and protesting. You can feel the justice of that and the need for it. The lack of closure reveals the open wound.
Similarly, in Canto XIV, Terry relocates to Ireland, north and south of the border, Dante’s mournful excoriation of Romagna, voiced by his contemporary Guido del Duca. Florence’s river Arno becomes the Lagan, running north-east through Terry’s hometown of Belfast; Dublin, its artistic heritage lost to corporate greed, repeats the decline of Bologna and Faenza. Similarly, Pope Adrian V, who condemns, in Dante’s nineteenth canto, himself and the Church for its avaricious pursuit of wealth, becomes Archibishop Desmond Connell, made Primate of Ireland in 2001. ‘I wasn’t avaricious in the common sense,’ he tells Dante:
But when the church was rocked by child abuse
Scandals and accused of secretly paying
Compensation to victims to shut them up,
I was parsimonious with the truth.
I learned the whole story too late, and only
When I had been Archbishop for some years
Did the full extent of the abuse become clear:
It was a shocking and damning tale from start to finish.
(Canto XIX, ll. 139-47, pp. 138-9)
It looks, perhaps, like a daring or opportunistic change but is, I would have said, apt and even inevitable. The goals and work of the Church, in all denominations, have been betrayed more by child abuse than anything else in the present moment. It would be quaint to condemn the Church for its greed when this example of its becoming corrupted is so evident and so appalling. The two are, evidently, connected: the Church authorities protected the perpetrators as any other corporation would (and surely did); ‘reputational damage’ is code for losing revenue. Terry’s ‘parsimonious with the truth’ suggests something of this, evoking both Catholic ‘reservation’ and the British Government’s self-protective dissimulation during the Spycatcher scandal. This cover-up was, like every other, a form of greed.
Terry might have drawn that out further, but instead has the Archbishop speak with refreshing frankness. The absence of defensiveness accompanies disavowal of privileges once protected:
As it dawned on me who was speaking, I got
Down on my knees, and I was about to speak
Myself, when the Primate of all Ireland
Cut me off, asking: ‘Why are you kneeling at my side?’
And I replied: ‘You are the Primate of Ireland, your…’
‘Up on your feet, now, young man, I’ll be having
None of that here. You should not kneel before
Such as I, we are all equals here –
I am no longer wedded to my archdiocese.
(ll. 148-56, p. 139)
‘Drizza la gamba, levati su, frate’ in Dante’s poem (Canto XIX, l. 133) has the same forcefulness as Terry’s ‘Up on your feet, now, young man, I’ll be having || None of that here’. The comic surprise is the same too, particularly given the formal, borderline self-important way in which Connell first introduced himself: ‘Know that I was the successor of McNamara’ (l. 123, p. 138); ‘scias quod ego fui successor Petri’ (l. 99) is the equivalent in Dante, the Pope using the Latin of his office. Institutions, then, not only greedily defend their interests, they develop pyramidal power structures which best achieve that goal and become, themselves, the focus of individuals’ greed. The remedy is a brisk and generous insistence on equality.
In all these instances, Terry’s ingenuity is brilliant; it is, though, more than simply ingenuity. Dante meets not only penitents like Adrian V or Guido del Duca; on each terrace, he sees portrayed or hears speaking historical figures who embody either the particular fault or its virtuous alternative. The arts, therefore, contribute to the development of moral awareness and self-awareness; Dante’s writing does the same and, consequently, reflects on the role the arts can play in the challenging business of reforming human behaviour. Terry’s contemporary references respond to that aim. His version recognises too, however, that the solutions Dante believes in may not be credible any longer. Terry thinks, in other words, not only about updating Dante but about the obstacles to doing so. This is achieved also through the deliberate inconsistency of his translation.
In Canto III, for instance, the narrator and Ted Berrigan meet a group of souls, still waiting to start climbing the mountain. They are moving so slowly they seem ‘Like victims of Long Covid’; narrator and guide make bafflingly slow progress too: ‘After we’d trudged the sand for a good five minutes, | The crowd were still as far off | As Peter Shilton might kick a ball upfield’. And when finally the parties do meet up, the souls of the dead:
looked like climbers for the most part, kitted out
With all the gear – ropes, helmets, and bright blue boulder mats
Though some wore dark cloaks, like priests or wizards.
(ll. 70, 76-8, 82-4, pp. 24, 25)
The Commedia is a poem too often revered to death; the off-hand tone here, plus the everyday, popular culture reference-points resist that tendency (and the self-importance and self-elevation it can generate). But then Terry’s mode veers sharply in the other direction:
As sheep come forth from the fold, in ones,
In twos, in threes, and the others hold back,
Casting their eyes and noses about,
And what the first one does, the others copy,
Huddling up to her if she stands still,
Silly and quiet and knowing not why
So then we witnessed the leader of that flock
Take a step in our direction,
Modest in look, head held high.
Yet when those in the fore saw the light
Broken on the ground to my right side
So that the shadow fell from me dancing over the cliff,
They halted and drew back, and
All the others that came behind did likewise,
Not knowing why.
(ll. 91-105, pp. 25-6)
This corresponds, almost word-for-word, with the extended simile of Dante’s Canto III, ll. 79-93; there are lots of rhymes suddenly; the diction in ‘knowing not why’ and ‘those in the fore’, for example, steps back in time and into the literary. Terry writes very well in both registers but the shift is jarring. It’s only, however, one instance of the disruption and self-disruption practised throughout.
The very first canto produces these effects and and shows the rationale for them. The narrator emerges from the underworld of Hell into ‘the real world’:
Like a photoshopped image of dawn
The radiant light of the sunshine coast
Burst from the horizon,
Blinding my dimmed sight with its refulgence,
So that I had to narrow the slits of my eyes
Which had grown accustomed to Hell’s dark.
(Canto I, ll. 17-22; p. 9)
‘Photoshopped’ signals Terry’s determination to swerve – in this case from famous lines:
Dolce color d’oriental zaffiro,
che s’accoglieva nel sereno aspetto
del mezzo, puro insino al primo giro
alli occhi miei ricominciò diletto
tosto ch’io usci’ fuor de l’aura morta
che m’avea contristati li occhi e ‘l petto
(Canto I, ll. 13-18)
‘Tender colour of orient sapphire’ is Laurence Binyon’s 1938 translation of the first line; ‘Sweet hue of eastern sapphire, that was spread | O’er the serene aspect of pure air […] to mine eyes | Unwonted joy renew’d’ is Henry Cary’s Romantic period version. Terry is wary of these pastel shades and that seems, initially at least, startling but, perhaps, when you think about it, predictable. Beauty has been commodified, hasn’t it? Simulacra are everywhere.
At once, though, that perception feels too obvious, too knee-jerk and resistant.
Like distant laughter,
The planet Beckett described in Ill Seen Ill Said
Rose above the fishing boats anchored offshore.
(Canto 1, ll. 19-21, p. 9)
‘From where she lies she sees Venus rise’ is the first sentence of Beckett’s novella; in Dante ‘Lo bel pianeta che d’amar conforta | faceva tutto rider l’oriente’. ‘The radiant planet, that to love invites, | Made all the orient laugh’ (Cary again). Whose laughter is it, though, in Terry’s lines? And is it bleak or mordant, as Beckett might suggest, or enviable and alluring, reassuring after the relentless, exhausting horrors of Inferno? The point is, I think, that you’re not sure, anymore than the speaker is. Saying ‘photoshopped’ is an all too transparent effort to keep your bearings – to keep the experience at arm’s length. The half-line of ‘Like distant laughter’ hesitates; recalling Beckett stabilizes and orientates, though less peremptorily; the iterativeness and stasis of that text are brought to mind and its dealing with ‘last things’. And then the fishing-boats can be looked at, more serenely, in the serenity of their anchorage.
In these three lines, then, Terry’s play on and playing with Dante’s text is less confrontational – more at home with the Italian it departs from. The light of the planet ‘velando i Pesci, ch’erano in sua scorta’ – it was veiling Pisces, the constellation, which was her escort. Dante’s astronomy is hard work mostly and Terry finds an alternative. The same thing happens, more dramatically, in the next lines:
I turned to the right, fixing my peepers on the
Other pole,
where I saw four wind turbines gleaming:
The sky seemed to welcome their giant forms
As their blades began to turn
Bringing clean energy across the waters
(Canto 1, ll. 22-7, pp. 9-10)
Dante turned in the same direction and ‘vidi quattro stelle | non viste mai fuor ch’a la prima gente’: four stars which had never been seen since the Fall. ‘Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle’: the sky seemed to welcome their sparks of fire.
These stars, usually identified with the Southern Cross, have been understood by allegorical commentators as the cardinal virtues of classical culture: prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Later, in Canto VIII, Dante sees three stars rising above them, which, again, are frequently taken to represent virtues: faith, hope, and charity. It’s a relief to be freed by Terry’s version from such heavy-handed allegories and given, instead, an image of wind-turbines as something noble and magnificent. Evidently, the structures are star-like as well, so that knowing the original illuminates Terry’s process and makes the spectacle more uplifting. It is that already though, thanks to the conviction and rhetorical power of his closing line.
The variability of this version highlights what a translator might seek to disguise: the foreignness of the original. Terry’s approach has clear connections with Pound’s modernist translation (in Homage to Sextus Propertius) and perhaps most of all to Ciaran Carson’s 2002 Inferno. Carson features, in fact, in Canto XXIV (pp. 169-71). Terry registers with particular force two sources of the perplexity Dante’s poem creates for his translator: firstly, the poem’s cultural and literary pre-eminence and, secondly, its Christian perspective. Several times, Terry makes explicit that his Purgatory is not strictly Christian but multi-faith and multi-cultural. aA several other points, he reports, in close and accurate translation, Dante’s explanations of the poem’s doctrinal basis (in the concluding section of Canto III, for example, on p. 28). These, as it were, official understandings of ‘purgatory’ are left in stark juxtaposition with other, quite different accounts, invented by the translator, of what is happening to the penitents on the terraces and to the protagonist as he ascends. The discontinuities produced are admirable in refusing to gloss over areas of radical incompatibility. They also bring to light what in Dante’s poem, it’s difficult now to credit or comprehend.
The avaricious, on the fifth terrace of the mountain, are compelled to lie on the ground, bound hand and foot; the whole of the level space is covered with these prostrate figures. Making headway is by no means easy.
Berrigan negotiated
The track ahead, sticking close to the cliff,
Wherever there was space to tread,
For on the other side those sprawling shades,
Who distill in tears the greed for gain that gobbles up
The planet, were too close to the drop for comfort.
‘Fuck you capitalism, you couldn’t give a shit
About anything except your profit margins!
Take a good look at your kind, crawling like worms
On the edge of this mountain, and tell
Me if any six-figure bonus can help them now?
Your never-sated appetite has claimed more victims
Than any plague or famine or natural disaster.
When will the day come when we ditch you for
Good, like toxic waste in a bottomless landfill?’
(Canto XX, ll. 4-18, p. 140)
The lesson of Dante’s poem (possibly the one hardest to see) is that capitalism is within us all. Terry’s rage and frustration, entirely justifiable and invigorating as they are, offer no more than a starting-point. Staying with that is a mistake and, more than likely, a form of denial. Evidently, corporations employ ‘carbon footprint’ as a means of exculpating themselves and blaming instead the individual for the destruction of the environment. It is right to stand up against that distortion: certainly, the capitalist system exerts colossal sway over personal freedom and capacity to choose. Similarly, over the centuries, institutional Christianity has manufactured guilt to effect compliance. So much so that it is hard now to say ‘guilt’ without adding either ‘Catholic’ or ‘morbid’. Given these conditions, penitence must be suspect. It becomes difficult to accept or even to see that acknowledging complicity, and the culpability which follows, may be a path to freedom and a means to self-affirmation.
Dante, though, believes it is. His thinking and poetry correspond to the etymology of ‘penitence’, a term which originates, not in poena, punishment, but in paene, almost: ‘I have fallen short’, ‘there is more I could have done’ and, hence, ‘there is more I can [learn to] do’. Penitence does not mean, then, either self-flagellation or abjection; it’s much more like the ‘owning’ that therapy works towards; closer still to ‘owning up’. Admitting that things could have been and could have been done better, both allows for and looks towards the possibility of improvement. The oppression and fatalism of the consumer are not inevitable or irreversible. The naturalisation of consumerist desire, which is beneficial to capital and encouraged by its cultural forms, is exposed to challenge. With that, responsibility and hope come into play – for the dead, the living, and the artist.
Dante recognises, alongside this, the size of the task and the remoteness of the hope. At the end of Canto XX there is an earthquake; in the next, Dante and Virgil meet the classical poet Statius who explains to them that earthquakes happen when a soul moves from one terrace to the next – when, that is, they have been cleansed of a particular sin, whichever it might be. It then emerges that Statius was the soul released and that it has taken a mere five hundred years for avarice to be washed out of him – in his case, for spendthrift prodigality to be cured. (As elsewhere in Purgatory, errors in opposite directions are coupled together). Even then – even after ‘thousands of moons’, as Statius puts it – finally escaping from a fault resembles (and perhaps involves ) shaking of the foundations.
Five hundred years is so long it feels like forever and that too is part of Dante’s point. Human habit is ingrained and stubborn. Furthermore, and as the Purgatorio maintains consistently, human beings go wrong when their natural instincts are misdirected. Our innate drives wield enormous influence over not only behaviour but perception and understanding. Their realignment, their recovery requires constant effort and determination. Though the task appears punitive, it is (in Dante’s view) an act of self-cherishing – both ultimately in terms of achieving human flourishing and at every stage because the underlying instinct itself is valuable and innocent. Hence, asceticism, mortification of the flesh or other attempts to suppress desire are each an alluring quick fix that brings about self-harm. The real fix is, on the other hand, painfully slow – painful in its slowness and a long-drawn out process that includes pain.
Penitence, therefore, is the moment of conversion repeated time and again; it is a form of tenacity; and vice versa too: tenacity involves penitence; continual re-engagement with a problem or problems (including those within oneself) as part of the enduring search for a remedy not yet attained. Jayne Svenungsson, in her lecture from October 2024, ‘Political theologies at the end of the world’ (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suh_lQJmvIQ) makes this case with exceptional care, discerning among some thinkers on the left an undercurrent of negligence, abstention, and disdain. And Utah Phillips, the anarchist story-teller and folk-singer, should have a place in any Purgatory. Ani DiFranco put backing-tracks to his stories on The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (1996). In one of these, ‘Korea’, Phillips explains to his son that it was while he was fighting in the Korean War that he ‘realised’: ‘right then I knew that it was all wrong, that it all had to change, and that change had to start with me.’
Ralph Pite’s Edward Thomas’s Prose: Truth, Mystery, and the Natural World will be coming out with OUP later this year. His poems and translations from Italian have appeared in previous numbers of Blackbox Manifold. Currently in the final stages of writing a book on ‘Robert Frost and Eco-Georgic’, he is also beginning a study of European ecopoetry.
Copyright © 2025 by Ralph Pite, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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