Vernacular Poetry: Dante’s Secret Weapon against Vice

This article was originally published in Vol. 5 No. 2 of our print edition.

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The bold title of this article may be surprising to some. After all, a non-vernacular sacred language is one of the most treasured patrimonies of nearly every liturgical tradition. Hence, I will begin by affirming the value of non-vernacular languages: they have an important place in our liturgies¹ and in our studies of the great books and church fathers. This recognition, however, inspires a question: If non-vernacular languages are uniquely capable of helping us step out of the workaday world and contemplate divine mysteries, might vernacular languages have a different, but similarly unique, value? In the right setting (such as in poetry), could a vernacular’s closer connection to daily life enable us to encounter those same mysteries from a new, more embodied perspective?

Dante Alighieri, the Florentine poet best known for The Divine Comedy, certainly thought so, but many of his learned fourteenth-century contemporaries were not convinced. In fact, they derided him for writing his epic poem in Italian, as Jason M Baxter recounts. Baxter is the Director for the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College in the state of Kansas and the translator of a new edition of the Inferno, the first book of The Divine Comedy. His translation takes a fresh approach to translating the Comedy by expressing in English what makes the original Italian so unique: its vernacularity.

In his gripping introductory essay to the Inferno, Baxter points to the backlash Dante received from scholars such as the proto-humanist Giovanni del Virgilio. Though Giovanni praised Dante for the encyclopaedic knowledge woven into The Divine Comedy, he also berated him for wasting his poetic craft on the uneducated masses, in a language that was inherently unstable and fragmented. As Baxter summarizes, Giovanni insisted that to acquire lasting renown, Dante needed to ‘avoid street slang (sermon forensi) and follow his master (Virgil) toward a heavenly language (caelo): Latin, of course’.² To help us grasp where Giovanni is coming from, Baxter offers an analogy that may hit close to home for American readers:

‘For us, this letter is annoyingly elitist, but Giovanni could write such a thing because he admired contemporary Italian as much as northerners in the United States admire the southern dialect: it seemed like a defective version. To be fair, before Italian became Italian, it was just Latin mispronounced and missing inflection. And many—perhaps most—of the learned in Dante’s day would have taken Giovanni’s side. A few decades after Dante’s death, one Italian scholar even tried to ‘correct’ the problem, by translating the Comedy into Latin! Still, the elitists had a point. Precisely because of those case endings, Latin can create a refined kind of rhetorical word-art.’³

How could Dante respond to this critique? Was his bold foray into the vernacular doomed from the start, as Giovanni would have him believe? After all, even Baxter admits that ‘Dante was trying to do something impossible, something unaimed-at before’.⁴ To grasp the unique poetic value of a vernacular language, we must first understand the uniqueness of the poem Dante set out to write.

Wrestling with Depravity

Let us begin with another insight from Baxter to set the scene: ‘Unlike other allegorical poems of his time…Dante’s poem is not a dream. Indeed, the sickening realization is that he is no longer dreaming, even though he wishes he were. The dream was pretending everything was all right.’⁵

Dante’s age is teeming with corruption, falsity, and greed, particularly among the elite—not unlike our own time. Through his characters, he laments the tragic fate that has befallen his beloved city of Florence. In only a few generations, the unbounded pursuit of wealth and power upended the city’s traditional mores, dragging down nearly every soul into its net of political and economic machinations. The effects of this decay upended Dante’s life; the Black Guelphs of Florence exiled him for life and stripped him of all his property when they gained control of the city.

What might we have done in the face of such cultural degeneracy? What do we do when faced with it today? We might be tempted to lick our wounds in self-pity or numb our pain with sensible or intellectual delights. Dante, however, invites us to choose another route. To ascend the mountain of purification and arrive at the heights of happiness, we must first descend into the pits of the damned; to finally escape our infernal condition, we must turn inward and reckon with its raw ugliness, which has inevitably infected our own souls.

‘Baxter is uniquely capable of crafting an English translation of The Divine Comedy that preserves the fleshy dissonance and musicality of the original’

As the pagan Virgil guides Dante the pilgrim through the circles of hell, so too does the poet Dante’s ‘vulgar tongue’ (lingua vulgaris) enable the reader of the Inferno to viscerally grasp the meaning of concepts pertaining to vice and punishment. The Italian vernacular is an earthy, humble language of the everyday—as Dante puts it, ‘a tongue that calls out, “mommy” and “daddy”’.⁶ Hence, it furnishes Dante with unique tools to embody lofty concepts in recognizable figures of speech. As a result, his poetry consists of diction that can ‘dig in, prick, and wound, words unforgettably memorable because gritty, haptic, and textured’.⁷

One might expect this expansive and embodied vernacular grit to become lost in translation—and typically, that is exactly what happens. Most English editions of The Divine Comedy lack the ‘aggressive, fast, violent, and, yes, iconoclastic’⁸ atmosphere of the original poem, which was made possible by devices that defy the rules of classical poetry: abrupt statements, verbless sentences, repetitive clusters of harsh sounds. In other words, Dante supercharges his poem with a dissonance that communicates the tension inherent in incarnate reality.  Bereft of the Italian language, a work like the Inferno seems inescapably stuck in a condition which, though still beautiful and impressive, falls far short of the poet’s intention.

Reviving the Vernacular in the Twenty-First Century

As a veritable wordsmith who spent an extended apprenticeship in careful study of the medieval masters (including Dante), Baxter is uniquely capable of crafting an English translation of The Divine Comedy that preserves the fleshy dissonance and musicality of the original. Dante the pilgrim’s initial exposure to the forest within the seventh circle of hell, populated by those who were violent against themselves, offers a prime example:

‘I then could hear, from every side, cries
of pain
but couldn’t see them being made by any
person.
I stopped. I felt completely lost.

And I believed that he believed that I believed
that all those voices whirling among
the branches
were coming from people who stayed
in hiding.

And then my master said: ‘If you’ll snap off
some branch among these plants,
the thoughts inside your head will be
uprooted.’⁹

The commas separating the phrases in the first line inject a pulsating rhythm into the narration, mimicking the nervous palpitation of Dante the pilgrim’s heart in the face of the unknown. Failing to identify the source of the shrieks, he succumbs to the simple and unavoidable realization that he is lost, which manifests in the pair of austere sentences in the third line. In the next stanza, confusion sets in, as the poet spins his story in a web of overlapping beliefs and voices. Hauntingly, the people behind the voices remain in the shadows, even as the pilgrim drowns in an overwhelming sensory experience amidst trees that seem to have come alive with human sounds. Of course, as Dante is about to learn, these trees are alive. They are none other than the inhabitants of this part of hell, who recklessly harmed their human forms on earth and are thus confined to arbored ones here below. With the onomatopoeic word ‘snap’, Virgil audibly pierces through the pilgrim’s anxious and clouded mind, offering an unexpected solution to his disarray: tear off a branch, and dislodge his consternation along with it. The metaphor of ‘uprooting’ in the final line uses forest imagery from the canto to portray the pilgrim’s interior struggle, forging a connection between his own purgation from vice and the form of eternal punishment before his eyes. Dante wants to similarly provoke his readers to conversion by means of the Inferno’s brutal indignities, such that we turn away from inhumanity in pursuit of the highest good, God himself.

Anyone who has read The Divine Comedy knows well that the pilgrim’s conversion is not immediate—and typically, neither is ours. At the foot of a treacherous ridge in a deeper circle of hell, Virgil tells him: ‘There is a longer ladder that you’ll have to climb: / it’s not enough to merely leave these things behind’.¹⁰ Even virtuous pagans realized that habituation to virtue takes time and is initially painful. Each gory encounter with the damned reveals an additional layer of sin crusting over the pilgrim’s heart, giving him the chance to reorder his intellect and will toward truth. Before leaving the forest of the seventh circle, he follows his master’s advice. When he snaps off a branch, the scene that unfolds cuts him to the quick:

Sometimes a log, yet green, will burn
from one end while oozy tears are gurgled out
the other—
hissing forth a windy vapor that flits away—

so from the broken fibers came—all mingled
together—
words and blood. Yes. I let that shoot
fall down, and stood a man afraid.¹¹

To convey the surreal cacophony of pain, Dante the poet again leans into forest imagery, this time with a metaphor that activates the imaginations of his readers. What may for the reader lie nestled within a melancholic memory of sitting by the campfire on a midsummer evening is isolated and refashioned in the context of hell, where the crackling of wood is anthropomorphized as the searing agony of a violent soul. Graphic words like ‘oozing’, ‘gurgled’, and ‘hissing’ fuel this imaginative transformation, while the abrupt statement ‘Yes’ betrays the pilgrim’s shock and horror. The climactic ordering of the final line emphasizes his fear, which arrests his attention and disposes him to meekly receive the warning offered by the soul, Pier della Vigna.

These English formulations of Dante’s masterpiece are a mere taste of what awaits the reader in Baxter’s translation. They are unique to it and provide invaluable aid in fulfilling Virgil’s command to the pilgrim: ‘Stretch forth your vision.’¹² If the eye of our mind is to reach the heights of heavenly glory, it must begin with a renewed vision of what is familiar. Baxter’s poetic skill can rouse us from our infernal torpor, which increasingly takes the form of ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death’ (to borrow a phrase from Hobbes). Despite the moral decay of society, our ordinary, everyday surroundings are densely packed with meaning and sanctifying potential, but we tend to speed past them without a second thought. Again, Virgil stands in the breach with a challenge: ‘Slow your steps, / who race on through this air of darkness!’¹³ Later on, he tells the pilgrim (and us):

‘Because you run ahead
through shadows, much too far away,
it’s normal that you stray in what you picture.

You’ll see—quite well—when you’ve arrived.
Our senses from afar deceive us.
Now stir yourself: go further on!’¹⁴

The fleshy vernacular of this new version of the Inferno forces us to slow down and see, feel, taste, smell, and almost touch the reality of our sin—as Christ did in the Incarnation. Perfect sight awaits us in paradise, but to attain it, our vision needs to be healed, one line at a time.

Note: The Divine Comedy: Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, in a new translation by Jason M Baxter, is available from Angelico Press (2024).

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NOTES

1 See: Pope Benedict XIV, In Defense of Latin in the Mass: The Case for the Church’s Timeless Liturgical Language (TAN Books, 2023); Peter Kwasniewski, ‘The Principle of Elevated Mode’, in: The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile (TAN Books, 2022), 282–283; Peter Kwasniewski, ‘Why We Pray in Latin’, in: Turned Around: Replying to Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass (TAN Books, 2024), 167–190; Peter Kwasniewski, ‘In Defense of Readings in Latin’, in: Close the Workshop: Why the Old Mass Isn’t Broken and the New Mass Can’t Be Fixed (Angelico Press, 2025), 288–99.

2 Jason Baxter, ‘Introduction’, in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. Jason M. Baxter (Angelico Press, 2024), xliii.

3 Baxter, ‘Introduction’, xliii–xliv.

4 Baxter, ‘Introduction’, xlvii.

5 Baxter, ‘Introduction’, xiv.

6 Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, 32:9.

7 Baxter, ‘Introduction’, xlvii.

8 Baxter, ‘Introduction’, liii.

9 Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, 13:22–30.

10 Alighieri, 24:55–56.

11 Alighieri, 13:40–45.

12 Alighieri, 18:127.

13 Alighieri, 23:77–78.

14 Alighieri, 31:22–27.

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