DANTE’s DIVINE COMEDY translated in Bengali by Prof.

Aloke Kumar

The Divine Comedy of Dante has been translated into Bengali by poet
Shyamalkumar Gangopadhyay .The Divine Comedy written in Italian original title,
Divina Commedia is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between c. 1308 and his
death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and
is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative and
allegorical vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it
had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the
Tuscan dialect, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is
divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.On the surface, the poem
describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; but at a deeper level,
it represents, allegorically, the soul's journey towards God.

According to Dante, India, and in particular the mouth of the river Ganges, was the
extreme eastern limit of known lands, a fact that resulted besides, albeit
approximately, from the planispheres of his time ,in particular, from the Vesconte
Planisphere of 1320.  Indeed, in the 13th and 14th centuries European astronomers
and geographers and those of the Near East had no doubts about the Earth being a
sphere, but they distinguished between the hemisphere of the known lands, with
their centre at Jerusalem, and the opposite hemisphere which was believed to be
entirely covered by the oceans.  And the limits of the inhabited lands were identified
to the West as the last edges of the Iberian coastline between Cadiz and Portugal
close to the Pillars of Hercules, and, to the East, as the East coast of India where
indeed the Ganges reaches the sea.

It is towards the middle of the 19th century that the first Indian scholars approached
Dante’s work.  The first was the Bengali poet and playwright, Michael Madhusudan
Datta (1824-1873), who knew Italian well and was the author of the epic
poem Meghnad Badh Kavya (Ballad of the death of Meghnad) published in 1861 in
which the deeds of a warrior cited in the Ramayana are sung about. In
this Ballad one can detect the influence of Western poets amongst which Dante and
Milton appear to be those from whom the author has drawn most of his inspiration. 
Madhusudan Datta also wrote various sonnets inspired by Petrarch and dedicated
one of them – with the title Dante, the poet of poets – to the author of the Divine
Comedy himself.

Some years later the major Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941),
familiarises himself at a very young age with Dante and Petrarch to the extent that
he publishes an article on both in 1877, at the age of 16, in the periodical “Bharati”. 
Later he is to insert into one of his poems – which comes across as a prayer – the
verse “Give me the strength to surrender my strength to your will with love”, clearly
inspired by verse 85 of the third canto in Paradise:  “E ‘n la sua volontade è nostra
pace”.

Tagore is not the only Indian intellectual who shows a great appreciation of that
famous verse from Paradise.  Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), the well known poet,
philosopher and Indian mystic, perhaps the principal student of the Divine Comedy,
deals extensively with Dante’s poetry in the third volume of his Letters on yoga and
says that that verse “is one of the greatest in all poetic literature”.

Finally, the Bengali scholar and poet Dinseh Chandra Datta deserves to be
mentioned, not only because he himself is the author of a sonnet dedicated to
Dante, but also because his profound admiration for the great poet has induced him
to translate the Bhagavad Gita  from Sanscrit into Bengali using Dante’s metre of
the third rhyme.

Despite the interest in Indian culture for Dante Alighieri, it took some time for the
work to be translated into Bengali. The translation into Bengali was done by
Shyamalkumar Gangopadhyay and was published by Sahiytya Acedemy in 2011 at
New Delhi.

Besides the mention of the river Ganges in the Divine Comedy there is two other
references of India and the Indians in such terms as to make one realise that the
great poet, albeit with only a slight knowledge of India, had two firm convictions
about its physical and climatic characteristics: in India the trees were of an
astonishing height; and in India one literally exploded with the heat.

On the first point Dante pauses in canto XXXII of Purgatory (verses 40-42) when the
poet, by now arrived in earthly paradise, finds himself before the tree of knowledge
of good and evil, towering and majestic to the extent that its lofty foliage – Dante
writes – would be looked on with surprise even by the Indians who have extremely
tall trees in their own woods: “fora da l’Indi / ne’ boschi lor per altezza ammirata “.

Coming to the second point, in Purgatory , verses 19-21 of canto XXVI –– Dante 
tells of his meeting with one of the penitents of the circle of the lascivious who poses
a question and adds, also in the name of the souls around him, that he and the
others are thirsting to know his answer more than Indians and Ethiopians (precisely
because of the great heat of their countries) thirst for fresh water:  “Né solo a me la
tua risposta è uopo; / ché tutti questi n’hanno maggior sete / che d’acqua fredda
Indo o Etïopo”.

But the point at which Dante alludes most decisively to the exceptional heat which
was to characterise the climate of India is in canto XIV of Hell ,Verses 28-39, where
the poet describes the burning sand (third ring of the seventh circle) in which those
who offer violence towards God are punished by being subjected to a continuous
rain of fire.  Dante compares this awful scene with what happened once to
Alexander the Macedonian and his troops – but it is clearly an implausible legend –
in the hot regions of India: they saw unseparated sheets of flame pour down on
them which came to earth to ignite the sand like tinder which catches fire when the
flint is struck.  At which Alexander the Great had ordered his men to stamp on the
sheets of flame as soon as they came to earth in order to put them out before they
spread.

The verses of Dante about the burning sand and the legendary adventure in India of
Alexander the Macedonian:

-
Sovra tutto ‘l sabbion, d’un cader lento,
piovean di foco dilatate falde,
come di neve in alpe sanza vento.
Quali Alessandro in quelle parti calde
d’Indïa vide sopra ‘l süo stuol
fiamme cadere infino a terra salde,
per ch’ei provide a scalpitar lo suolo
con le sue schiere, acciò che lo vapore
mei si stingueva mentre ch’era solo:
tale scendeva l’etternale ardore;
onde la rena s’accendea, com’ esca
sotto focile, a doppiar lo dolore.

The translation in Bengali by Shyamalkumar Gangopadhyay:

-
সকল সিকতারাশির উপরে মন্থর ধারাপাত
ঝরে আগুনের, স্ফারিত ফলকবর্ষী,
নামে যে ধারায় তু ষারতবক আল্প্‌‍সের নির্বাত।
উষ্ণবলয়ে সিকান্দর যে ছিল সাক্ষাৎদর্শী,
শিখা ঝরে তার ব্যূহের উপরে, সেই হিন্দুস্থানে,
আভাঙা আকারে, যে পর্যন্ত না হয় ভূ মিস্পর্শী।
 পায়ের তলায় মাটি দলে যেতে সদলে যত্ন মানে
তাই সে, কারণ ছড়িয়ে না গিয়ে, ওই আগুনের ভাপ
আলাদা থাকলে, সহজ উপায় ধরে তার নির্বাণে।
এখানে বালিকে জ্বালিয়ে নামছে অনন্ত উত্তাপ,
শুকনো কু টোয় আগুন ধরায় চকমকি তার তলাতে
যেভাবে; তাইতে দু’গুণ করেছে বেদনার পরিমাপ II

If you have heard of Dante and of his Divine Comedy but could not read the book
due to you constraint with the Italian language, buy the book from Sahitya Academy
New Delhi.