Many readers of Dante get no further than the Inferno. The inscription over the gates of Hell, the demon-haunted circles, the howling winds that buffet the lovers Paolo and Francesca, even the poet’s grim profile and bonnet, are part of the world’s literary and artistic heritage. Several translators also stop at the point that the dazed poet and his guide Virgil emerge from the bowels of the Earth into the astonishing starlight.
It’s no surprise that Inferno seizes the imagination, but it’s only a third of the story; and possibly for Dante himself just the part you have to plunge through before you get to the good bits. Philip Terry’s witty, transgressive canto-by-canto Dante’s Inferno came out in 2014. The poet Ted Berrigan, assuming the role of Virgil, guides Terry on a tour of ‘the infernal campus’ of the University of Essex, castigating a host of contemporary monsters along the way. Now Terry arrives on the Essex coast, where a strange artificial mountain has appeared and, urged on by Berrigan, begins to climb.
The joy of the first book for those with some knowledge of the original was to discover, page by page, how ingeniously Terry fitted his modern references into a frame created some 700 years ago; to find out, for example, who would aptly compare with the mortal enemies Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggiero, discovered in the deepest pit still locked in rage and agony. Terry didn’t disappoint.
The pleasures are similar here. The mountain is a kind of art installation, patrolled by guides called ‘Alp Angels’, and Terry is provided with a card with a puffin logo to be stamped at each level. In the original, Dante’s brow is marked with seven Ps, standing for peccatum (sin), each one of which must be purged on the ascent. Terry frequently reduces sublimity to bathos in this way; the Latin canticles sprinkled throughout become pop songs (‘The only way is up’; ‘Another one bites the dust’). But he can also thrillingly match Dante’s most poignant moments. The tragic La Pia, canto V, becomes a victim of domestic violence.
Born in Belfast, Terry gives this entire canticle, as he did the last, a pronounced Irish flavour, indicting the Shankill Butchers and clerical abuse, and inventing stimulating encounters with Samuel Beckett and Ciaran Carson. The inclusion of Martin McGuinness as a penitent is a moving masterstroke. Like Dante, Terry prioritises and elevates friends and colleagues, such as the (living) poet Tim Atkins as the Roman Statius, encountered in canto XXI. Easier to do, of course, when you’re not condemning real people to eternal damnation.
The cover blurb seems to hint that the publisher has slightly less confidence in the Purgatorio, giving away many of the jokes. I will leave readers to discover Terry’s clever insertions for such brooding figures as Cato and Hugh Capet, or such merry ones as the poet Sordello (oh, go on then – he’s Allen Ginsberg). The style, still unrhymed three-line stanzas, is less free and fractured than in the previous book, but at moments inventive wordplay echoes the Tuscan original.
Previously, Terry placed the serene academic Marina Warner, his former Essex colleague, in the place of Beatrice, the emblem of perfect virtue. At the peak, where the Garden of Eden becomes the Eden Project (brilliant!), they meet again at a music festival (The Fall are playing). In the literary tent Terry is called to explain his professional ‘betrayal’ of Warner, just as Dante fell short of Beatrice’s high ideals, and the lines on the University of Essex that follow are as bitter as anything Dante heaped on his despised Florence. I could wish for some notes; Terry’s references can be as arcane as those of the original. But roll on Paradiso!
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