Commentary Inf XX 1-3

The uniquely self-conscious opening of this canto, featuring the only explicit numeration of a canto in the poem, has caused a certain puzzlement and even consternation. One discussant, H. D. Austin, has argued that its prosaic superfluity recommends that future editors either excise it from the poem, as an addition by an over-enthusiastic scribe, or at least print it in square brackets (Aust.1932.1, pp. 39-40). Its self-consciousness and difficulty, one might argue in rejoinder, are precisely signs of Dantean authorship.

The opening line (which a student, Simina Farcasiu [Princeton '83] some years ago suggested was a redoing of the first verse of Ovid's Metamorphoses: 'In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora' [My mind inclines to tell of bodies changed into new forms]) portrays a poet who only unwillingly commits himself to the difficult task he now must assume. Many of the words of this first tercet have received close critical attention. Nova has either the sense (or both senses, as our translation would indicate) of 'new' or 'strange' (see D'Ovidio [Dovi.1926.1], p. 318). Matera is, as Chiavacci Leonardi says (Chia.1991.1), p. 599, a 'technical term,' one used to denote the subject that a writer chooses to treat. Canto is here used for the first time (it will be used again only at [Inf XXXIII 90], [Par V 16], and [Par V 139]) to indicate a part of the poem; as Baranski (Bara.1995.3, pp. 3-4) has pointed out, the early commentators found this term strange, rendering it with Latin or Italian words for 'chapter' or 'book.' Canzone is a still more troubling choice of word (it is used twice more, [Purg XXXI 134], [Purg XXXII 90]); in De vulgari eloquentia (e.g., V.E.II.viii.2-9) it is the word (cantio in Dante's Latin) that describes the lofty vernacular ode that Dante presents (with himself as most successful practitioner of the form) as the height of poetic eloquence in the mother tongue, and thus 'tragic' in tone, because it is like the lofty style of the classical poets. Is Dante suggesting that Inferno is tragic? (For some thoughts along this line see Hollander [Holl.1980.1], pp. 137-40.) It is only in [Purg XXXIII 140] that he will finally give a part of the poem the name it now enjoys: cantica, with its religious (resonance of Solomon's Canticle of Canticles [see Pert.1991.1, pp. 107-08]) and 'comic' overtones. And finally there is the apparently strikingly inexact word sommersi, which has seemed to many commentators wrong, since the damned are not submerged in water but buried under earth. Marino Barchiesi (Barc.1973.2), p. 85, resolved this problem by finding a probable source in the Aeneid (VI.267), where Virgil asks the gods for permission 'pandere res alta terra et caligine mersas' (to reveal things immersed deep in earth and darkness).

If the opening tercet causes this much difficulty, what follows will often be at least as challenging. One of the most interesting and provocative studies of the canto remains Parodi's essay (Paro.1908.1). It is a canto that is still today renowned for its problematic nature.