In a recent New Yorker review of a new translation, by Robert and Jean Hollander, of Dante's Paradiso, Joan Acocella undertakes to explain why some people might find the work--well, boring. It has to do with a certain "lack of shading" that is necessarily an aspect of Heaven. To make her point she quotes Benedetto Croce, author of The Poetry of Dante (1921), who observed that for us "it is only possible to imagine concrete joy, born of grief and destined to return to grief." What does one make of the Christian virtues--faith, hope and charity--when there is nothing to put them up against? It isn't easy making Heaven's monochrome interesting, but Dante, "an utterly convinced medieval Christian," charged ahead despite this obstacle. He had a realistic expectation of readers who would be interested in receiving information about not only "stinking Hell" but "saints in Paradise." Acocella wryly observes that she would not risk a vote on this proposition today.
As a sort of gloss on this aspect of her review, I present some lines from Wallace Stevens, who appears to confirm Acocella's hunch:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
But leave it to Huckleberry Finn to state the problem most memorably:
Then [the Widow Douglas's sister, Miss Watson] told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad, then, but I didn't mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn't particular. . . . Now she had got a start, and she went on and on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn't think much of it.
I don't think much of it, either.
Comments