Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Paradise

Dante Alighieri · en
His family, that had straight forward moved
    With feet upon his footprints, are turned round
    So that they set the point upon the heel.

And soon aware they will be of the harvest
    Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares
    Complain the granary is taken from them.

Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf
    Our volume through, would still some page discover
    Where he could read, ‘I am as I am wont.’

’Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta,
    From whence come such unto the written word
    That one avoids it, and the other narrows.

Bonaventura of Bagnoregio’s life
    Am I, who always in great offices
    Postponed considerations sinister.

Here are Illuminato and Agostino,
    Who of the first barefooted beggars were
    That with the cord the friends of God became.

Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here,
    And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain,
    Who down below in volumes twelve is shining;

Nathan the seer, and metropolitan
    Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus
    Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;

Here is Rabanus, and beside me here
    Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim,
    He with the spirit of prophecy endowed.

To celebrate so great a paladin
    Have moved me the impassioned courtesy
    And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,

And with me they have moved this company.”




Paradiso: Canto XIII


Let him imagine, who would well conceive
    What now I saw, and let him while I speak
    Retain the image as a steadfast rock,

The fifteen stars, that in their divers regions
    The sky enliven with a light so great
    That it transcends all clusters of the air;

Let him the Wain imagine unto which
    Our vault of heaven sufficeth night and day,
    So that in turning of its pole it fails not;

Let him the mouth imagine of the horn
    That in the point beginneth of the axis
    Round about which the primal wheel revolves,—

To have fashioned of themselves two signs in heaven,
    Like unto that which Minos’ daughter made,
    The moment when she felt the frost of death;

And one to have its rays within the other,
    And both to whirl themselves in such a manner
    That one should forward go, the other backward;

And he will have some shadowing forth of that
    True constellation and the double dance
    That circled round the point at which I was;

Because it is as much beyond our wont,
    As swifter than the motion of the Chiana
    Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.

There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo,
    But in the divine nature Persons three,
    And in one person the divine and human.

The singing and the dance fulfilled their measure,
    And unto us those holy lights gave need,
    Growing in happiness from care to care.

Then broke the silence of those saints concordant
    The light in which the admirable life
    Of God’s own mendicant was told to me,