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A
Today on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, we are starting our journey into Dante's Purgatorio for Lent. Today, we're going to be joined by Dr. Jason Baxter, who's going to give us a wonderful introduction to what is the Purgatorio and why should we read it? And also kind of give us an inside look at what it means to translate Dante. So why should you read the Purgatorio with us for Lent? Why should you even read it? The Purgatorio is a wonderful map. It's like a guidebook for the soul. So in the Inferno, we saw Dante the poet kind of rip the veneer off of sin. He showed us the ugliness of human desire and its disorder. In the Purgatorio, we get something much more structured and much more beautiful. We get a guidebook. How does the soul ascend to God? How can it climb the mountain of Purgatory and engage in sanctification theosis to become something more beautiful, like Christ is beautiful. For this read through of the Purgatorio, I'll be reading Dr. Jason Baxter's translation. I've read Musa, I've read Esalen. This time I'm reading Baxter. I'm almost already done with it. It's beautiful. I really appreciate it. There's some key moments in which his translations, I think, really actually bring out Dante the poet's intent. And I've really appreciated discussing those. And we have a few good opportunities for you to dive deeper into the Purgatorio. 1. Next week we should upload a guide. We'll have a question answer guide to the Purgatorio. We're finishing that up this week, so go check out our Patreon page next week for that guide to the Purgatorio. 2. If you go to JasonMbaxter.com you can check out all of his writings, his translation. He also has an audiobook in which he reads the Purgatorio. And if you put a send into the promo code on his website, then you'll actually get 20% off of his audiobook. So go check it out. It's a wonderful opportunity. We thank Dr. Baxter for his generosity. But wait, what if you haven't actually read the Inferno? What should you do? Well, actually, last Lent, we read the Inferno. So all of our videos, all of our podcasts, and our Gods guide are already up and ready for you. It's structured to read over each week during Lent. So go back and join us for the Inferno and then come read the Purgatorio with us. This is a really wonderful opportunity to read the Purgatorio for Lent. The Purgatorio is an invitation to become more beautiful, as Christ is beautiful, to ascend the mountain and engage in that purification. If you're looking for a way to really kind of enrich your spiritual life, come read the Purgatorio with us this Lent. It's going to be a fantastic journey. Lots of great guests. I'm really looking forward to it. But this week, join us as we discuss an introduction to Dante's Purgatorio and what it means to Translate Dante with Dr. Jason Baxter. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five, and serve as a chancellor and general counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording on a beautiful afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend to our weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books, we can be like a small group to you. We have episodes up on the Iliad, the Odyssey, many of the Greek plays, Plato, and much, much more. Go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters who have access to community chats, including a chat on the Purgatory, and also a whole library of written guides. We create question and answer guides to help guide you through the great books. We have one for the Iliad, the Odyssey, almost every work that we've covered in two years. Go visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for more information in our reading schedule. Okay, today, today is a good day. We are starting our journey in Dante's Purgatorio, the second part of his Divine Comedy. We'll be reading the Purgatorial for Lent over the next seven weeks and have some amazing guests lined up, like Dr. Donald Prudlow, Dr. Jessica Houghton Wilson, some Dominican friars, and many, many more. But today we are introducing the Purgatorio as a whole and discussing a new translation by Dr. Jason Baxter, who serves as a director for the center of Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College. He is also a speaker and author of seven books, including A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Comedy, a new translation of Dante's Inferno, and most recently, why Literature Still Matters. You can find his popular writing on his substack called Beauty Matters. Welcome back to the podcast.
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B
It's great to be back.
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A
Thanks. Yeah, we had a wonderful conversation last year as part of our study on Dante's Inferno. Greatly enjoyed that. But now, since then, you have released or hold it up here. For Those joining on YouTube, you have released a new translation of Dante's Purgatorio. I'm incredibly excited to talk to you about it and kind of understand, like, what you learned going through this process, why your translation is unique, what you were kind of trying to capture in Dante's voice.
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B
Yes.
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A
But first, tell us a little bit about the center for Beauty and Culture.
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B
Yes, the center for Beauty and Culture. And in Atchison, Kansas, it's a group of fellows. They're named after the Dominican painter Fra Angelico, who, incidentally, I think, was very influenced by Dante. I think he did in paint what Dante did in words, but that's another story for another time. So they're Angelico fellows. I accept about 40 fellows per year, and there's special programming options for them. We go to symphonies, we go to string quartets, we go to museums. Perhaps most excitingly, we hiked from Melrose, Scotland, all the way to the coast of England last year to Lindisfarne Island. And when the tide rolled out, we crossed over the pilgrim sands and. And went to Lindisfarne, the ancient home of 7th century Catholic monasticism up in the Northeast, one of the powerhouses of prayer up there with Iona. And then we made a film about it. And the film, you know, is live, premiered in January on ewtn, is also available on demand. So, yeah, so this is a group of people, as I like to say, a group of students who agree with me and Dostoevsky that beauty can save the world. Because we believe that beauty and the arts practiced well, which they rarely are, but the arts practiced well are a tool. You could call it a technology for inwardness or a tool for promoting interiority. That is, the arts, as I put it in my little book, why Literature Still Matters, are one of the ways which we try to close the gap between what we see and who we are. And so my Angelico fellows believe in that. And so we kind of consider all of the arts in the visual arts, music, theologically speaking, in terms of souls, in terms of philosophy, in terms of literature. We're interested in beauty as a phenomenon and all of its possible manifestations. And so we've created this kind of small honors group of students who have a special class that I've made for them. So I would say if there are serious high school students out there who believe that beauty matters and have a sense of kind of moral gravity, and you want to go deep in your college career, then this is the sort of thing which could, no matter what the Major is, but the sort of thing which could anchor you in this quest for depth.
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A
Yeah, beautiful. No, I really appreciate, I think the vision and the mission that you guys have taken up. I think it's incredibly important. Yeah. Beauty will save the world in a lot of ways. I think today's culture is so starved for beauty and offering something beautiful. I think it's a very much a particular way to actually unlock a lot of people's intellects and their kind of hunger for truth and goodness, even if they don't really understand that's what they mean and that's what they want. Beauty has a way of simply kind of unfurling that in people. And I think Dante is a fantastic example of this. So again, I just want to say thank you because the center is helping to promote our read of Dante's Purgatorio. So you guys are doing good work. Very happy to partner with you guys. Okay, so your new translation of the Purgatorio. So maybe like before we dive into this, because there's a lot of questions I have and like I was reading your introduction. It's just fantastic. I think it really does a great job of laying out just the brilliance of Dante and Dante.
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B
Yeah, right.
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A
Maybe like we might have, like a lot of first time readers who aren't familiar. Maybe they joined us last year and read the Inferno with us. Now they're coming into this flint to read Purgatorio. You just get the snapshot of like, what is the Purgatorio and why is it worth reading?
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B
Yeah, no, I think, I think readers who hung with you after Inferno, who crawled through that, you know, jagged cave at the end of Inferno 34 are going to show up in Purgatorio for a real treat. Because unfortunately, Inferno is almost synonymous in our culture's mind with Dante. Dante's the author of Inferno and Inferno was written by Dante. And of course, Dante meant it to be a three part afterlife trilogy. And so people, I think, walk away having a sort of distorted image of the Middle Ages, that it's, you know, that it's all about Last Judgment. It's all about, you know, depravity of, you know, of sin. It's all about judgment. It's all about darkness and torture and that kind of stuff. It's our sort of, you know, confused imagination. Right. But by the time you get to Purgatorio, as I love to say, it's a key change or I even stated even more strongly, right. I say it's like, what happens if Schubert came on Your playlist after an evening of heavy metal, of like, I don't know, like Russian circles or something like that. Like, whoa, this is different. And just, I mean, just a brief sort of taste. At one point, Dante meets the heir to the Holy Roman Empire, Manfred, who introduces himself and says all kinds of interesting things, but he admits they were horrible, those sins of mine. But infinite goodness has such encompassing arms. It will embrace whoever comes back to it. And another point, he says, as long as there are sprigs of green, there is hope. So Purgatorio is exciting. Purgatorio is a place of mercy. It's a place of unexpected mercy. It's a place of hope, it's a place of change. It's a place of eternal New Year's resolutions, right? It's a place, as I like to put it, everyone is saved in Purgatorio, right? They have repented of a life of emptiness. They have said in various degrees, right, Lord, I'm sorry, apart from you, there is no path, save me, Lord Jesus. And they are in, you know, they're on the road, but they're not yet good at love and they're not yet good at communion, and their souls are not yet clean. Or, to borrow an image that Virgil himself uses, God's love, God's mercy, God's grace is like the sun which is always shining, but our souls are like mirrors which are tarnished. And so the goal of Purgatorio is, in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, is to use my freedom to allow the Holy Spirit to create in me desire, which then I act upon through a series of spiritual exercises. I don't really like to call them penances, but, you know, you could call them penances. But I prefer to think of them as exercises, right? Because in our sports loving culture, right, we get, you know, why you would stay on a mountain bike for an extra hour even after your quadriceps began to burn, right? You know, but these are exercises which reverse engineer conditions of the soul so that it's capable of praying almost for the first time, right? Those who come from liturgical traditions, right? Everyone knows the Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be the name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. Right? We say that prayer, you know, good Catholic, right, Good liturgical. Some from a good liturgical tradition might say that 10 times a day rarely mean it. And thus Dante sort of constructed this mountain, what Thomas Merton called the seven story mountain, in which there's a particular spiritual exercise. The prideful have to carry ginormous boulders which are so heavy they think they're just about to tip over at any single second, but then they don't. So they're brought to their breaking point. They're sustained. They understand that it's not their own strength which is holding them up, but they're sustained by someone else. And then they pray the Our Father under those conditions. So Dante's created this beautiful mountain in which, in his imagination, we'll have to spend time on every single story, depending on to what extent our proclivity was to that particular vice. Dante says he's only going to have to spend a couple of days on the terrace of the envious. But because he was so awesome, you know, he's going to have to spend a little time with the envious because he has to spend a lot of time with the prideful. So there's sort of like a tailor made spiritual plan that teaches you how to pry, get your fingers off, you know, unpry your fingers from gripping life to try to rip out of it all the pleasure you can possibly get to heal your spiritual wounds. And the answer for all of them is love. And following the example of the Virgin Mary. But it's a quest for purity. And that's why the souls, although they're enduring as much pain as any soul in hell did. It's not dark. Purgatorio is green and it's bright and it's sunshiny. And even though Dante's Mount Purgatory is located at the Antipodes, where we put Antarctica, it's not cold and bleak and depressing like our versions of Antarctica. It's warm and happy like a volcanic island in the Mediterranean, right? So think Ischia, think Sardinia, right? Except it happens to be at the. In Dante's. In Dante's world, it happens to be in Antarctica. But it's a place of hope, it's a place of mercy. It's a place where souls learn how to pray again, learn how to love again, and learn how to enter into communion with each other again. All that by way of preparation of. And I know we're getting beyond ourselves for the love of paradise, which is falling, as one medieval mystic puts it, into an infinite abyss of divine light. But we don't really want that yet right after we die, most of us don't, right? We love our life and our goods, to measure it out with coffee spoons, as Elliot puts it in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. So this is the place where you learn how to pray and you learn how to love by Means of spiritual exercises, examples from the past, and bits and pieces of liturgical prayer.
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A
Yeah, very well said. I think one thing too, to keep in mind, at least in my own journey, is that Dante the pilgrim, as distinct from Dante the poet, Dante the pilgrim, in a lot of ways, is an analog of humanity. It's an analog of us. Right. We are invited to come on this journey with him.
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B
Yeah.
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A
It's interesting that. I think the Purgatory, in a lot of ways, is one that kind of mirrors your own maturation back to you. So, like, everyone knows the Inferno because it's just interesting to read, like, all of these tortures. And we also were very familiar with sin. We understand sin. We understand this kind of, like, depraved desire and wanting to satiate what we need. And it's interesting because as a young man reading the Comedy, I read the Inferno, and of course, it captured my imagination. It's really hard for it not to. I read Purgatory, and I remember the first time reading it, not really being that impressed. It's much more structured. You work through it. There wasn't as much chaotic, you know, it's just, you understand what's going to happen. Next terrace, next terrace, next terrace. Like, until you get up to the top with the garden, there's not a lot of that kind of chaotic movement that you see inside of the Inferno. And then I read paradise, and I was, like, bored out of my mind. And I was telling one of my professors this. I was like, you know, I just, you know, I like the Inferno a lot. Purgatory is okay. Paradise, not so much. He's like, well, you know, we. We like what we're familiar with. Oh, okay, great. I'm not gonna be asking you any more questions because. But it showed to me, Right? Like, what's he saying there? Well, I understand sin, and it's captured my imagination, but the Purgatory is about this Purgation. It's about this actually ascending to God and this kind of shedding of who I am. And I think in a lot of ways, and I like the comparison, the parallel that you did, because in both the Inferno and the Purgatory, we have souls being punished, but things are very different. And why do the people in the Inferno are fighting against their punishments, and the people in the Purgatory are embrac. Them. And I think in my own spiritual life, you know, I've actually now come to where the Purgatory is my favorite one. That's where I am in my own spiritual walk. Right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Particularly Particularly now, being a cleric like the Purgatory is such a beautiful mapping of the human soul. And also then how to overcome this sin. What is the sin and how to overcome it? What are the virtues that we need? And as we'll kind of make this journey, we'll see that every terrace has, like, this entire chorus of resources of how the sin can be purged from us. And whether I'm giving a homily or I'm, like, looking at my own interior life, the Purgatory is a priceless mapping. Right. We've talked about on the podcast before that the Divine Comedy, in a lot of ways, is Thomas's summa, but in poetic form. He's bringing everything together. And I just have come to love the Purgatory over the years in a way that I just really could not appreciate as a younger man.
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B
Yeah, well, I mean, one of the practical features, when I'm preparing to make a confession, I will just imaginatively close my eyes and walk up the levels of the mountain, right, and go through pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. And so, yeah, it is. I think it's. I think it's very human. I think just that simple Vehicle of the Seven Deadly Sins is about as brief an encyclopedic image of the human psyche as you can get, right? We could get more complicated, we could get less complicated. But in terms of the most bang for your buck, right? Thinking about those seven deadly Sins, the ways we're structured, the types of things we're attracted to, the ways that we can go wrong, I think, yeah, I think it's very powerful. But the other thing, as we have already said, because this is a place of hope, because it's a place of transformation and change, right? It's a place where I can make mistakes, and this happens. There's a little bit of comedy in the comedy. Not a lot, not as much as you would be led to believe to find, given the title, but there's a little bit of comedy in the comedy, especially in Purgatorium. And some of the souls are still making the mistakes that they always made in life. And they go, you know, sort of. Oh, shoot, right? Slap themselves in the face, correct themselves. But this is a place of mistakes. Still some mistakes. Still some change. Well, still a lot of change as the transformation takes place. And I think that's why. I think that's why when you come to realize what's happening like you described, you go, right, okay, this is the most human of all the Canticles okay.
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A
So there are many translations of the Divine Comedy. There's Musa, there's Esalen, there's all kinds of good translations. I'm very interested, again, kind of holding up yours here. What led you to add another translation of the Divine Comedy? Like, I'm interested in two ways. One is just academically, like, what did you see that was missing there that you could step into? And then secondly, I'm actually just really interested in the spirituality of translating this. I just imagine as you're kind of mowing over all of these lessons of Dante and coming to understand his lessons, I think probably on a very intimate kind of grammatical level, I'm really interested in, like, the spirituality of translating the Comedy as well.
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B
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I think I'll begin to sort of talk about that second bit there first, because that's actually what drove me to begin the translation project. Um, I think I began this because I wanted to have. Because I'd been teaching. I taught the Comedy a dozen times and I loved it. And I knew in some sense it was very, you know, kind of close to my vocation as a teacher to try to teach this. This text well, to students, right? Um, everyone knows they, you know, they want to read it, they want to like it, and. But you've just described, right, the inevitable difficulties that come, right. And there's kind of a. Some. There's been disappointment in my students. So I thought, like, great. That's my, you know, that's part of my vocation as a teacher to make this book accessible to a contemporary audience. And I thought, well, you know what, in order to do that, I need to be like, you know, like, when I was a kid playing piano and I would get my intermediate level Bach piece, right? But then I would be preparing for a recital and I would play it so often that I could close the book and then I could even close my eyes and I could play it from. From muscle memory. And anyone who has that experience of playing a piece of music from memory, right, you know, it feels differently. It's not in the head, it's not in the brain, it's in the nervous system. It's in the body, it's in the arms, it's in the chest, it's in the heart, right? Your whole sort of relationship to. To that piece of music changes. It's one of embodiment and not one of just sort of intellectual, you know, mastery. And I wanted to have that with Dante. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to go word by Word. I'm going to try to find the best word for all of his best words, word by word. And in this way I'm going to be like that kid learning a piano composition. And if other people think that it's a cool translation and they like it, so much the better, right? But this is mainly for me a sort of project of personal mastery. But as I got into it and was made to go word by word, there's some little puzzles that kept throwing me off. And for instance, in Inferno, I thought that Dante was overusing. You can say this with a master, right? He was overusing conjunctions. He kept saying, and then, and then, and then, and then. And at first I thought, you know what? I think I'll help Dante out a little bit, you know, I'll kind of smooth out his translation, right? But then I thought, no, I, you know, I have a debt of justice not just to my reader, but to. But to the master, right? To Dante himself. I'm going to not only do that, but I'm going to try to figure out what was he thinking. And that's when the story started to get really interesting. Because earlier, earlier in his life, he'd written a work called On Vernacular Eloquence. Weird little book. Don't recommend it to anyone. Very strange little book in Latin about how to be eloquent and articulate in the vernacular language and in this case, Italian. And he had given himself all kinds of rules. And one of his rules was create a spacious sense of gliding, what he calls what the Latin term prolixitas. And in Dante's early poetry, you'll have a single sentence that will go multiple lines, sometimes a whole stanza before it will sort of grammatically wrap up, right? It's what the rhetoricians call a hypotactic syntax, right? Think it's more Dickens than Hemingway. Now all of a sudden in Inferno, Dante was going, and then, and then, and then, and then. And it dawned on me that he was actually using his conjunctions. He was violating his own rules in order to create a soundtrack. You could almost say like. Like in a horror film almost. Because it is pretty horrible, right? He was sort of building in a heartbeat into the soundtrack for his own film. This is how in a pre cinema world, you build in an atmosphere if you don't have access to, you know, a soundtrack. And that opened up everything for me and I created an inferno which, as I like to put it, is as much in the body as it is in the head. Now, there's another little thing that Dante does. He'd also given himself rules for what kinds of words you can use when you're trying to write the most perfect poem in the world. That's what he said he wanted to write about Beatrice. At the end of Vita Nuova, his autobiography, he said, I'm now going to say something that no man has ever said about a woman before. It's going to be that good. It's going to be such a perfect poem. It's going to be like Sam's file of light that it's going to glow in the darkness, and as it gets darker around me, it's going to glow all the brighter. My poem is going to be so good, it's going to convert people, right? That was his youthful goal in his 20s. And in order to do that, you not only need that spacious sense of gliding prolixitas, but you also have to use only the best words. I like to call these $10 words, right? He gives a list. He says you have to use amore, donna dizio, vertute se cortate de feza. These types of words which everyone always hears and always thinks, oh, man, to speak Italian, right? To have a dinner party with wine, just to pronounce those words would be valuable. So that was Dante's early goals. Now, of course, when you get to Inferno, what you hear are these. These broken, jagged, fragmented words. Words which use consonant combinations like double Z's and double X's, which he said you had to avoid. So it became my mission to create an Inferno which wasn't just one for the brain, but was one for the body, was one for the heartbeat, was. Was one for the nervous system, in which, in some sense, I said, hey, guys, this is not Mozart. This is Janicek, right? This is Bartok, right? This is Stravinsky. There's as much sort of atonality built into the very acoustic and linguistic soundscape as there is these sort of elevating moments of classical syntax. Okay, that's Inferno. But all of a sudden, my own personal project, I think, became a philosophy of translation, which I thought, okay, this is. This is important independently of what it does for me as a teacher and a scholar. But now we come to the Purgatorio. In Purgatorio 9, Dante says quite directly, it couldn't get more obvious than this. He even addresses the reader. He says, hey, reader. O letor. Right? Hey, reader, I want you to observe that as my subject matter begins to elevate, we can use the term, right? As my subject matter begins to ascend, so Too will my style keep an eye out for it? I mean, it's that obvious. In Purgatorio 9 he's just entering the gates, right? He's entering into Purgatory proper. He's literally climbing a mountain. And thus he points out to us that his, his syntax is going to get a little bit more of that prolixitas, right? His syntax is going to sound a little bit more like Statius the classical poet, a little bit more like Virgil the classical poet, a little bit more like his beloved Boethius, right? A kind of, you know, late antique, but kind of classicizing poet. And so what we're surprised is to find that Dante also keeps the humble words, not obscenities anymore, but humble words, which I think probably caused Dante almost a blush to write. Now in my read in Purgatorio 10 and 12 in the prideful, we see both a sort of ascending syntax, almost like Bach's playing sort of ascending chords in the right hand and a descending syntax or descending style, as if Bach sort of has descending chords in the left hand simultaneously mapped onto each other. And that's what I call in the introduction, Dante's fugue. And no one would have. I say it like this to my students sometimes. Hey, you've read some Boethius, right? You've read those poems. You know how cosmological and ethereal and floating they are. And maybe you've read some Wendell Berry too, right? You've read some of his Sabbath poems. You've read how to Be a Poet, right? Find a place to sit down. Sit down, right? Be still. And this sort of Windleberry's Kentucky drawl, right? If you could map wendellberry's poetry on top of Boethius poetry such that they were double exposed, you'd have something like the linguistic fabric of Dante's Purgatorio. And that's why I'm so excited about this. You know, what actually turned out in this translation is that's what I'm trying to do. Simultaneously trying to create a lay in layers of a style which is ascending. It's getting more poetical, more $10 words are coming back the higher you go. The syntax is getting floating more like you would want from the Virgil loving poet of the Middle Ages. And yet he's still anchored with these little itty bitty words which are humble and lowly and maybe even cause a great poet just a tint of blush to come up when he uses them because he thinks, oh, I shouldn't do that. And then he think Know, I should you mentioned earlier that, you know, the Thomistic element of the comedy, which is really important. This is the Franciscan element of the comedy, right, in which Francis doesn't just praise, you know, the syntax of God's world, but he uses intentionally humble and small words in a backwater Umbrian dialect to do it. So I think this. This is an extraordinary moment in which. Well, what's happening? Well, this is a Christian poet who's invented a Christian way of not just producing Christian, you know, producing Christian content, but doing it in a Christian style. This is how a Christian poet writes, not just what. And it's a huge breakthrough for Dante because no one had really thought of it before. You have Franciscans going low, you have classicizing poets going high, but no one had brought it together in the same passage. I don't know if it's okay with you, but I can just give one quick example, because this is all theoretical stuff. How does it actually translate into sound?
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A
I would love to have some practical examples. I think one thing I just want to state before you move on is how much I appreciate your approach to Dante, because when I read Dante in a small group a few years ago, we read the Inferno for Lent in a small group that actually kind of was an antecedent to this podcast. Me, myself, and a few others that had read Dante before were trying to explain all of these, like, meanings at the beginning of the Inferno. I remember one guy in the group was like, no, you guys are reading way too deep into this. There's no way he actually intends all this, etc. And then, you know, halfway through the Inferno, that guy had been sold and was like, no, Dante's brilliant. Like, this is amazing genius.
- [31:02]
B
The block of words.
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A
Yeah, yeah. All these little things matter. And I think one of the things that I find very challenging, in a very positive way, of your translation, the way that you approach the Divine Comedy for my own formation. And so what you're doing is to put it in. In my terms, because you're showing that Dante, the master, has a certain pedagogy, not just in what he says, but in how he says it, in his syntax and his grammar and this kind of, like, rich rhetoric that in a lot of ways, is completely lost on us today. And that's one thing I really do appreciate about the way that you've approached this. And, like, yeah, I read again the introduction to your copy of the Purgatorio this morning, actually. And that's one thing that I. I find myself actually there being somewhat Lost and realizing, like, this is a whole new appreciation for Dante that I really don't have a good foothold on. So, yeah, some I just want to say thank you for that. And two, like, yeah, any examples you have of, okay, here's Dante's, like, mastery. And this is then how I try to capture it by translation would be, like, really welcome.
- [32:01]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well. And, yeah, I mean, isn't it beautiful? It's an incarnational poetics. You know, we read in the. In The Epistles of St. Paul, right, how Christ didn't consider it an indignity to descend and take on our flesh, right? Then we read about in Augustine's Confessions, right, Of Augustine went above himself, hiding above himself to find himself, only to be told by the highest things that God was hidden inside of himself. So, I mean, there's loads and loads of layers of beautiful sort of Christian spirituality. I mean, we even do it during the Creed, of course, right? We bow in the imitation of Christ, who descended so that we may ascend. And so there's these sort of loads and loads of, like, cool Christian symbolism. But I think Dante figured out how to do it on the very level of his. Of his style, right. Of his words. And by the way, I want to just thank you for reading the introduction. Clearly, you're the ideal reader, I think. You know, I think when you. When you're doing a translation and you put an introduction, you just have to, like, you know, tearfully assume that everyone's going to skip the introduction to get to the good stuff. So I know I sort of, like, lean over my laptop and say to my wife, like, honey, I think this is the best thing I've ever written. And everyone's going to skip it, so I'll be able to go home and tell her that I found someone and maybe she'll forgive me for all those mornings I was lying in my bed comatose like a zombie, trying to pour my little heart into the intro. But this is, I think, in one passage, maybe in purgatorial 12, appropriately, when describing how the humble are exalted and the prideful have been cast down, I think that's one of the best possible places to feel, not just to see and to think, but to feel. Dante's Christian Poetics. Another favorite passage of mine is Purgatorio 27. In my translation, it's 156 and 157, the parts that I want to read, but they've just gone through being purified of the fires, the fires that purify the Lustful. And they're done. And now they're. They're doing one last ascent before there's. Then they're gonna have to sleep for a night. And Dante describes their ascent like this. And just like goats in tranquil rumination, who had been rowdy, capricious among the hills before they'd found repast, but now in shade are quiet while the sun is hot, and guarded by the shepherd who leans upon his staff and stands to watch their rest. Can I just point out that we've gone on six lines and we're still in the dependent clause. That's prolixitas, friends. Or like the watchman who sleeps outdoors and spends the night beside a somnolent herd and watches lest a beast should scatter them just so were we all three together? And I was like the goat and they the shepherds, flanked by walls of lofty rock on either side. There little of the outside world could be seen except a tiny patch where I could see the stars, much brighter and larger than is their usual habit. While ruminating on them and marveling at them, I was overcome by sleep, the sleep that often knows the news before it even happens in the hour. I think that in the Orient Cytherea first shone upon the mountain in whom the fire of love has always burned. So what do we hear there? Well, like I said, we hear these super long sentences which glide and float with prolixitas, just like you would expect a classicizing poet to do. You hear learned allusions. We don't say the morning star. We don't even say Venus. We use her fancy classical adjectival name, Cytherea, to refer to the morning star. But at the same time, Dante's talking about, like the dirtiest and humblest creatures of the Middle Ages and antiquity, goats. And he compares himself to a goat. But then he flips back to the classicizing registar and talks about the beauty of the stars. And he says that they're so beautiful that he marvels at them. But the other bit he ruminates upon them. Dante the goat, like poet, is chewing on what he calls the focal d', amore, the fire of love. Doesn't that sound like a $10 word? The focal d'. Amore. He is ruminando on the foco d', amori, like a goat. In other words, Dante's chewing on beauty, eating on beauty, trying to take it as sort of nourishment into his being. And thus, in this incredibly beautiful, complicated poetry, you have some of the loftiest phrases of the whole poem. And Then you have some of the most humble. You have rock, shepherds, dirt goats and munching on grass juxtaposed into the same passage. This is what I mean by Dante's fugue, right. Of the ascending in the right hand, the descending in the left hand, simultaneously creating this Christian poetics. And that's what I sold out on, all in. To try to create that. That sort of, you know, rich textured soundscape of the. Of this translation.
- [37:13]
A
I appreciate that. You know, we read Sir Gawain in the Green Knight for our Christmas and New Year's read. And one of the things that we discussed on there was that the Gawain poet also does this to a certain degree. Right. So his register changes, Right. His collection changes of vocabulary, his jargon shifts. So if he is talking about courtesy in a castle, then there's a lot of French words that come out.
- [37:38]
B
Yeah.
- [37:38]
A
If it goes back to talking about armor and fighting and these types of things, then it becomes very Germanic. And I think that's really fascinating to me because I think that that subtlety is something that's lost on a lot of readers. The reason it's lost is because a lot of times the translators just kind of mow right through that, and that subtlety isn't translated then into the English to the degree that it can. So I think that's really fascinating that you have not only noted that register, but then tried to incorporate that and knead it into your own translation. So then those of us who need to read the English can appreciate it.
- [38:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the hope, right? To have this kind of startling experience, like, wait a minute, how can these things be in the same line? But that's what Dante did. There's one other kind of cool passage I'll just mention because it also comes with a funny story, which is in the introduction, when Statius figures out who Virgil is, right? Here's the world's third greatest poet. You know, in Dante's imagination, Statius talking to the world's second greatest poet, Virgil. The greatest being Homer. Well, probably Dante, actually. But Dante's being unusually modest. He's already passed through the prideful. Right? And Statius figures out who this is. And in Dante's kind of, you know, you know, fan fiction, Virgil was responsible not only for teaching Statius how to become a good poet, but also the fact that he became a Christian.
- [39:03]
A
Right?
- [39:04]
B
And so Statius is, you know, trying to use. Search every single vocabulary word in his heart to give Virgil a big enough compliment, and he starts to Say, you know, he starts to talk about how the aeneid was like this flame and a single spark came out and fell into his heart and set his own heart on fire. And then when his heart was on fire, he would be able to write poetry properly. So far, so good, right? But then in this sort of moment of searching for words, he says, the urania for me was a mamma. That's what he literally says in Italian. Una mamma. Not a madre, not a mother, not a maternal unit of succor and aid. He says, a mama. So I translate that in my translation as mommy. I just go full on low register. But that's sort of like all the warmth and affection of the word. Now, my editor, my well meaning British editor, took me to task for saying mommy and mocked me for it and said that I shouldn't do it. But in the end I thought, no, I'm keeping it. Because I think that sort of those, those violent sort of levels of texture, right, in which we go from the heights of the celestial fire of Virgil's aeneid, which is beautiful, to the warmth and lowliness and humility of the embrace of the woman who knows you better than yourself. Right. In the same. In the same stanza. I think that's Dante at his best. And. And that's what I wanted. That's what I wanted the soundscape to feel like.
- [40:41]
A
Yeah, And I deeply appreciate that you did that, because I think in my own kind of walk through the great books, what I've realized is that there's this default. Maybe it's just in me, but what I've seen in others too, is that, yeah, if you read like an epic poem, it just needs to sound epic throughout the entire thing. And I think that it's. In learning about these registers, I think is very important because it shows that a master poet and how they can kind of suck you into that atmosphere. That was something you said in your introduction that I thought was really interesting is what. And what I believe you've been describing this entire time is you talk about the atmosphere of the text, right? The words that he chooses, the high, the lows, everything that he builds to kind of suck in this reader into this world Again, I think it's something that I. I'm really coming to try to appreciate. You also have another interesting phrase that you use here at the beginning of your introduction in which you talk about that the Purgatorio is like spiritual surgery. What did you mean by that?
- [41:41]
B
I meant that the Christian life is not like Downloading the correct 17 opinions that Christianity is not a philosophy, it is philosophical, and it does have true statements. But ultimately, the being that we worship and the being that we want to be united to is beyond philosophy and is beyond our rational principles. And thus, the experience of Christianity is this extraordinary thing in which I become like it by imitating it. The more simple I become in the sort of purest sense of that in term, and the holier I become, the more my heart burns with charity and generosity, the more like the divine being I become. But all of this is sort of above philosophy or below philosophy. It doesn't negate philosophy. It's just the sort of upper regions, say, at the top of the ladder. And the philosophy is in, I guess, in the way that you climb the ladder, but you get into these regions which are above the ladder. Thus, Purgatorio is this incredible thing. We can switch the image now, I guess, to surgery. But, you know, a surgery is a long process. It's a process of removal. It's a process which can sometimes be painful, especially in the Middle Ages, right? It's a process in which I have wounds which are, first of all made worse, right, which are opened up in order that they can be healed and diseased elements can be removed and then sutured so that then it can heal. And so I think Dante gives us this vision of the spiritual life which is surgical in this way, in which the carcinogenic in my soul, the cancerous, is little by little removed. In the meantime, the sort of light of hope and the fire of charity and the swiftness of love are what sort of begin to take their place. Now, the metaphor, at some point is going to completely crash and burn. Because in this surgery, we help the surgeon or we collaborate with the surgeon. You can't do surgery without the sort of inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who plants within your very heart the fire of love. In your freedom, you respond to the fire of love. But the only reason you can even respond is because your freedom itself is a gift. Your freedom is graced, right? Grace is grace. And. But nevertheless, there's this kind of gorgeous operation of freedom as a form of response. So in this particular weird surgery, right, we're collaborating with the surgeon. So at some point. But this is just good, Dante, right? At some point, you ride the metaphor as far as it can go and then realize, yep, language has. Has led us down here as well, and we use a new metaphor to complement and supplement. But anyway, that's what I meant by spiritual surgery. A long process which is A little bit painful, but is ultimately for our healing.
- [44:49]
A
Yeah, I mean, all analogies fail at some point. That's why they're analogies and not the same thing. But I thought it was a very apt metaphor that you presented. The undercurrent that I took from that and from that larger section in your introduction, which I found to be very prudent. And something that we typically misunderstand is that the goal of the Christian life is not to avoid sin. That's not the goal. The goal is actually to configure ourselves to Christ in so much of, like, how we view Christianity. You see this with Catholicism a lot, too, where we reduce Christianity to a series of rules of things not to do. And that's how we become Christian. We just avoid sinning. And that makes us holy. When reality, like avoiding sin is a necessary part. Right. But it's not sufficient. We actually have to ascend. We actually have to configure ourselves to Christ to become more beautiful as he is beautiful. And there's this journey of holiness. How do we go up the mountain? And the thing is about the purgatory, I think in a lot of ways is you see that purgation, but it's simply not. It's very deep. It's not simply like, oh, you did these sins, therefore you have to do that. There's these dispositions, these kind of. These contours of the soul that were molded into us during this life have to be reshaped into the image of Jesus Christ, which is unfortunately, at times, a very painful process. And I like to borrow something from Cardinal Ratzinger. You know, at one point he talked about. I mean, it was a. It's a metaphorical picture, but he said, you know, the difference is that the. That the fire basically in Hell and in purgatory are the same. The difference is that the ones in Hell fight against it, and the ones in purgatory embrace it. And as this kind of purgative element that they understand like gold, that they'll be purified and made something closer, more configured to our Lord Jesus Christ. I think it's something with Dante, too. This is why I think appreciation for the purgatory kind of mirrors or parallels one's own maturation. Their spiritual life is. You start to crave this type of purgation in your life. You start to crave wanting to configure yourself, but not really knowing how. How do I do this? And this is where I think you go back to Dante, the poet, just being such a tremendous master of the soul, of giving us Dante the poet, or, excuse me, Dante the pilgrim, in a very kind of humble way, at times going through this journey that we can, like, latch onto him and go up these terraces of Mount Purgatory with him. And the thing is, like, every time you read Dante, it can't be reduced to some type of, like, sterile academic exercise. And that's one reason here, on a sin that I was. I'm coupling reading it with Lent, is because it has to be seen as a spiritual read. It has to be seen as a map of the soul. It has to be seen as an invitation that you, too, can climb this spiritual mountain with Dante and become something more beautiful.
- [47:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. I love that you were saying earlier that the goal of the spiritual life is not to avoid sin. I think that's absolutely right. Right. The goal of the spiritual life is not to be a double negative, to not be bad just because you're not bad, just because you're not committing sin. Mortal sins, venial sins, whatever, doesn't yet get you to the level of goodness. You've just re entered mediocrity, right? Which is a good place to get to. You're in neutral, you're not in drive. At least you're not in reverse anymore, Right? But I think in Dante's imagination, the goal of the Christian life is to see the fire of divine love, the focal d', amore, and then to consume it, not just to see beauty, but to eat beauty such that your own heart becomes a furnace of charity. And then, in some sense, the morality flows forth from that, right? The desire for purity, the desire not to be on an endless treadmill of consumption, that flows from the acquisition of that heart of fire. And this, I think, is where Dante thinks. Some people in Dante's age thought he was a little presumptuous to present himself as a theological authority, right? Like, wait a minute, you're a love poet, right? You write about beautiful women and use beautiful language. What gives you the authority to sort of create these theological maps? And I think that this is what he thought was his secret, that as a love poet who has known the fire of love, he knows the transcendent version of that which sort of sleeps within the soul. I have woken that up before, and I know what it feels like. I can do it again, even if the beloved object is bigger than merely Beatrice at this point. But I think that's what Dante thought was his secret weapon, which allowed him to enter into the whole domain of theology.
- [49:45]
A
Yeah. One of my favorite passages out of Dante is actually in Purgatory, in which they go to the terrorist that purges the soul of Acadia, of slothfulness. And that's where he talks about the fire in the soul, right? This natural love that we have that desires beauty but isn't really satiated until that infinite desire can satiate on infinite beauty, which is God. I love reading that as part of, like, the larger. I realize he's writing in Italian, but the larger kind of eros tradition that we have, this natural love that craves these things. If you even go back to, say, Plato's Symposium or Diotima, presents that the body of the beloved can actually be an icon, something that actually spurs the soul towards the divine beauty itself. It can actually be something that spurs the soul not into lust and lower appetites, but actually into. Well, there's a beauty of the beloved that I see on the outside. They have a beautiful soul. How is my soul beautiful? How do I fall in love with the beauty of virtue? How do I fall in love with the beauty of wisdom? How's my soul ascend the ladder of love into divine beauty itself? You see that same very deep erotic theme of ascent in Dante as well. And it's interesting that Dante then has what you see in that tradition, both movements. So you see the Symposium movement, which is the fact that the female figure, right, can serve as an icon, and you ascend, which is what we see in Beatrice, right, being this kind of icon of the beauty of God. And how that calls Dante to ascend, an invitation to move upward. We see this in many other texts, spiritual texts, in the Christian tradition as well. But then you also get in Dante, what Aristotle talks about. So when Aristotle has to talk about, well, how does the unmoved mover move all things? If the unmoved mover does not move? Well, it's because everything has an erotic appetite to go back to the one, because everything is actually moving back towards God. There's this eros, it's love that moves the entire cosmos. That's where the motion of the universe comes from. And we see this in Dante as well. Maybe not to the very end, but it's. I think it's kind of hidden throughout the text. So it's just fascinating to me that I love that pushback. Like, you're a love poet. Why are you giving lessons in theology? But in reality, there's actually a very intimate tethering which might not make sense to us today, because when we think of erotics, we think of either, like puritanism or pornography. It's hard for us, I think, to think of something that what Dante is presenting us and what we see in the larger tradition in the West. But that type of like. No, a love poet actually has a lot to offer you, and you've already mentioned it, but when he writes his love poetry, one of the things I noticed, just as a neophyte reading it, was when he talks about these things of seeing Dante, or, excuse me, seeing Beatrice, he talks about her beauty and xyz. And that led me to him. He shifts the pronoun to the masculine, which is God. It really then shows you what I think he's trying to do in the Comedy and how that eros, that amor plays into it deeply.
- [52:52]
B
Yeah, that's right. I found your passage that you were referring to those recovering from Acedia. It's in Purgatorio 18. And it's this incredible moment that Dante has one of his many kind of. Page 103, many kind of moments of rapture. And then he snaps out of it. And the slothful are, of course, here. And made to go at this mad sprint, which Dante likens to a Bacchic revelry from antiquity. Except this is. And this is very CS Lewis right here. Right. I think Lewis actually gets some of his. Remember when Bacchus shows up and liberates all the poor children from school?
- [53:33]
A
Right.
- [53:34]
B
I think he's getting it from this. But Dante says on page 103, the drowsiness was ripped away from me all of a sudden by a group of people who, from behind our backs came running around the circle. At one time, Ismenus and Esopus witnessed along their banks at night such massive herds whenever Thebans needed Bacchus like those. This crowd was coming at a gallop, and I could see them racing toward us, spurred on by righteous will and ordered love. And next they're on us, since everyone within that massive crowd was coming at a run, and two in front in tears were shouting. Mary ran with haste into the mountains and Caesar to subjugate Alerida first sung Marseille. And then he raced to Spain. And here's my favorite, Tarzina. Quickly, quickly, lest time be lost in lacking love. Some shouted from behind. May grace Regreen our zeal for good. But that line right there. Quickly, quickly, lest time be lost. And lacking love, that sense of the alacrity, the wingedness of love, right. Which expresses itself not only in luminosity, not only in burning, but also in a sense of speed. And here, alacrity, the regreening of the heart.
- [54:57]
A
Yeah, that's a wonderful phrase. Yeah. There's so many good lessons in the Purgatory. And again, it is just simply. It's not just a text, it is really a map of the soul, but a map of how to actually ascend towards something that is really more beautiful. Right. To make your soul more beautiful as Christ is beautiful. Any kind of thoughts for like, you know, first time readers? So they're, they maybe they read the Inferno with us last Lent. They've been very patient. Now they're reading Purgatorio with us this Lent. Like any kind of recommendations for first time readers?
- [55:30]
B
Yeah, cool question. I have made an audiobook of my translation with me reading it. And I know you're going to link to that. And so I think my sound engineer, I won't praise myself, I'll just repeat what he said. Said that my non. Overly dramatic, non melodramatic voice acting was quite good. So that's what he says. So thank you, Dan, for saying that. But I think, I think a little bit to get some of the. To get into character helps for me sometimes hearing the quality of a thing, you know, if you listen to, if you listen to performers, reading Shakespeare sometimes helps you get into Shakespeare in a way that just with eyeballs. It doesn't, of course, Shakespeare's drama and theater, so that's obvious. So I do have an audiobook which I think could help. You've mentioned my Beginner's guide.
- [56:23]
A
Yeah. But.
- [56:27]
B
I think the trick of doing this is to read. Yeah. To read with a sense of. Not just alertness but a sense of attentiveness to unusual images in which you can. You yourself can be the literary critic for a little while and say, wait a minute, I've never thought about, you know, I'd never thought about hope. Or maybe you have, right. But I never thought about hope as a process of regreening or just even to sort of pause on the very level the word, like, huh, Reed Green. That's kind of a coinage. Why would Dante use a word that you'd never even heard before, which didn't even exist in Italian? I made it strange in English because it's strange in Italian.
- [57:16]
A
Right.
- [57:18]
B
When you want to talk about hope and then I think you can just ask a sort of fun question. You can ask it of yourself. You can ask it of your spouse, of your kids over the dinner table. Right. Of your buddies. And then I think that's, I would say just read until you come to those little moments of little puzzles Little curiosities or images that you don't think you'll be able to forget and ask, why would Dante do that here? And so maybe in the case of the sort of regreening, why use a. Why use a word you've never even. That's never even existed before to talk about hope. Well, I mean, maybe because hope, when it comes, it always comes. And moments in which the good is unexpected. Right. Hope comes in the moments of darkness in which it looks like, by any type of human logic, we're just going to move into a disaster. And then all of a sudden, something opens up I hadn't even seen before, a fresh path which is brand new. So I think those are kind of fun ways in which we can let the master guide us in the very types of questions we get to ask. And that's just good.
- [58:21]
A
C.S.
- [58:22]
B
Lewis, right there. C.S. lewis, in experiment and criticism says, the reader is the violin. He hands himself over to the master, and the master is the musician. And so if this translation is B. Plushes Good, you know, that or better, let's hope, you know, fingers crossed. Right. And if it's a real master, then in some sense you can kind of trust your instincts, you can trust your emotions. And I think the great good of having, say, a college professor of literature who cares about his students and cares about the authors, sometimes he gives knowledge, you know, that's helpful. But a lot of times what he does or what she does is just confirm our own intuitions. And that professor of literature goes, exactly, exactly. You're onto something. Your intuition is right. Keep thinking about that. So I think maybe what your listeners could do would be read a little bit in preparation for the latest podcast, kind of come with your own hot takes, your own kind of literary critical theses, and then you'll be able to test those against some of Deacon Garlic's special guests who have thought about this multiple times. Right. And have. But I suspect that a lot of your readers will feel empowered. They're like, wait a minute, I didn't know I could do this. I don't even have a degree and I can do this. Right? Well, because, yeah, literature is meant in some sense to resonate something which is written in the heart. And if you got a heart, literature can sort of retune you to reality. So I think that could be a fun way to go about this, which is empowering. But you can also kind of test and check yourself against the professors who will come on the show as guests.
- [60:01]
A
Yeah, very well said. Okay, so you have obviously like we mentioned, you have a new translation of the Purgatorio out. This is what I'm going to be reading overlent. So this is the translation I'm going to be reading. For every episode, I invite people to go check it out. I think it's fantastic. I think you've invited me to understand a whole new strata of Dante that I did not have an appreciation for. And so now, not only understanding what that is, but then trying to hear it in that translation, I think is very, very good. You also have a beginner's guide, right, to Dante's Divine Comedy, which has a lot of your commentary and things like this. And you have the audiobook coming out, so as we kind of come to a close. Anything else, though, on, like, your translation, your efforts on Dante, et cetera, I think you've given us many tools to approach the master.
- [60:46]
B
Yeah, I think. Yeah. The audiobook, which will be linked. But I think your listeners might be edified and amused by a little article I wrote on my substack called what Taylor Swift Taught Dante About Poetry. It was a really fun thing to do, and it's more serious than the title might lead you to suspect, but I think it's a quick way of sort of encapsulating some of the, you know, some of the history that led up to the comedy. Now, there's a really boring way to put all that, that literary history. Trust me, I've read the book. I've read all of them.
- [61:21]
A
Right.
- [61:22]
B
And there's a really boring kind of, you know, factual way to put it. I try to put it in an amusing way, which is great for high school students, great for college students, also great for people who are a little nervous about Dante. But that's on my subst. And I'm sure you can create a link for that, too.
- [61:40]
A
All right, Dr. Baxter, we really appreciate it. We appreciate everything you've done, not just here on the podcast, but also kind of just offering us all these wonderful resources to. Thanks, Dante again. Where can people find more about you and your work?
- [61:54]
B
Yeah, that's right. And, yeah, and the Angelico Fellows as well. I have a website, jasonmbaxter.com jasonmbaxter.com in which I have a little bookstore, sell signed copies of my books, why Literature Still Matters, the Dante things, and people can keep up to date there. There's some information about the film the Way of Cuthbert. I also have a substack called Beauty Matters, which I update every, you know, have a little post once a week. Once every other week. Or so and also keep people informed on that. Those are the two best places other than Atchison, Kansas. Although this year it will be Florence, Italy, which is wonderful because I'll be teaching Benedictine College students Dante and Francis and Giotto in Dante's Hometown. So no PowerPoints required. I'll just point out the window and say there.
- [62:44]
A
That's amazing. What a fantastic opportunity for those students. That's something that I'd very much like to do as well. Okay, well, thank you so much. We deeply appreciate it. And everyone, next week we'll be starting the Purgatorio proper. So we'll have Dr. Donald Prudlow, who returned to the podcast. He came and helped us with Dante last year. And we'll be reading Cantos 1 through 5. So join us next week and again, go check us out on X, YouTube and Facebook and Patreon. And we will see you next week. Thank you.