Receiving Dante: From Florence to Hollywood

'E Dante scavalcò l'Atlantico' ('And Dante crossed the Atlantic') is how Piero Boitani introduced his review of new British and North American books, including two of those mentioned here, in Il Sole-24 Ore (10 April 2005). Behind Boitani's phrase looms the shadow of the domineering, Ulyssean Dante – the powerful influence feared by Petrarch (Familiarum rerum libri 21.15.11). The poet himself had contributed something to the formation of this image through his self-commentary and other attempts to shape readers' responses, as Simon Gilson reminds us at the beginning and end of his book on Dante and Renaissance Florence (pp. 5, 231).

Yet, as Gilson also points out, Dante was 'fully conversant with the axiom that reception depends upon the nature of the recipient' (p. 5); over the past few decades, the idea of socially and culturally based reception has provided a more fruitful approach to his afterlife than have the notions of influence, fortuna, or reputation. Reception theory itself, however, needs to adopt a more flexible stance when faced with the diversity of competing, partial, and oblique readings of Dante's text that Gilson identifies within a limited space and time (Florence from 1350 to 1481) – and still more so when dealing with the diversity of responses evident in the volumes edited by Amilcare Iannucci and by Eric Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds.

Over the 600 and more pages of their anthology, Dante in English, Griffiths and Reynolds take a pragmatic approach to introducing and representing this huge and often bewildering variety. As contributors to the Penguin series 'Poets in Translation', they concentrate on direct translations and imitations, but they also include a number of poets' appropriations and reinventions of Dantean material. The latter ranges from well-known passages in Chaucer (House of Fame, Troilus, Canterbury Tales), Milton (Lycidas, Of Reformation, the Henry Lawes sonnet), Leigh Hunt (Story of Rimini ) and Tennyson (Ulysses) to less familiar items, such as Felicia Hemans's 'The Maremma' (1820), T. S. Eliot's 'The Burnt Dancer' (written in 1914 but not published until 1996) and Stevie Smith's reworkings of Inferno V in 'At School' (1957) and 'Francesca in Winter' (1971). The volume is well considered in its strategy and presentation. It provides concise headnotes for each of the anthologised items, along with focused explanatory Footnotes and a very helpful basic list of further reading (pp. cxxvi–cxxxiv). There is also a brief account of 'Dante's Life' by Reynolds (pp. xii–xviii) and a long introduction by Griffiths (pp. xix–cxxv).

Early in his introduction (p. xxviii) Griffiths makes clear that we are not to expect from him an argument about, or even a sustained approach to, the reception of Dante in English. What he offers, rather, is 'an introduction in English to Dante', one that concentrates primarily on the Commedia and is organised in five sections: 'Pity and History'; 'Dante's Double Tongue: Gramatica and Volgare'; 'How the Story Is Told'; 'The World of the Story'; and 'Returning and Telling'. Responses to Dante by later writers – in English and other languages – are by no means ignored, but the primary concern is with Dante's text: its cultural contexts and its intrinsic qualities as a poem that was to become the subject of so much translation.

Those intrinsic qualities are well characterised, and the long Cambridge tradition of practical criticism is vividly evident in Griffiths's close reading of the Commedia. Particularly striking in this respect are his account of 'pity/piety' in Virgil's compressed and near-untranslatable line 'Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta' (Inferno XX. 28; pp. xix–xxiv), his sense of the stretching between worlds conveyed by Aeneas's journey in Inferno II. 14–15 (pp. lvi–lvii...