Purgatorio
Foreword
If a poem is not forgotten as soon as the circumstances of its origin, it begins
at once to evolve an existence of its own, in minds and lives, and then even in
words, that its singular maker could never have imagined. The poem that survives
the receding particulars of a given age and place soon becomes a shifting
kaleidoscope of perceptions, each of them in turn provisional and subject to
time and change, and increasingly foreign to those horizons of human history
that fostered the original images and references.
Over the years of trying to approach Dante through the words he left and some of
those written about him, I have come to wonder what his very name means now, and
to whom. Toward the end of the Purgatorio, in which the journey
repeatedly brings the pilgrim to reunions with poets, memories and projections
of poets, the recurring names of poets, Beatrice, at a moment of unfathomable
loss and exposure, calls the poem's narrator and protagonist by name, "Dante,"
and the utterance of it is unaccountably startling and humbling. Even though it
is spoken by that Beatrice who has been ... read full excerpt from Purgatorio ebook
