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Wednesday, 5 March 2003

With all that's happening in the world at the moment I felt desperate for a little humorous reading last night, so I resorted to my Penguin Classics copy of Dante's Inferno, translated by Dorothy L Sayers, noted medievalist and author of several books of detective fiction including "The Nine Tailors, a fascinating novel about campanology."

Dotty's translation of Dante's immortal work is notable for two things: her truly appalling terza rima and her equally appalling explanatory notes, which make up the bulk of the text. I've been told by friends that the subsequent volumes of The Divine Comedy are also worth reading (if only to get the whole of Dante's allegory rather than just the sordid first third) but the idea of ploughing through another two volumes of questionable rhymes and didactic endnotes that belabour the patently bleeding obvious doesn't appeal. Except for one thing - quite unintentionally, Dotty gives us fascinating glimpses into the psychology of a Cultural Conservative with two Ps and a silent Q. Here for example, is the conclusion of her description of Dante's Universe (which is basically your standard medieval geocentric, or Ptolemaic universe, with the planets mounted on transparent spheres revolving around a fixed Earth):

The Ptolemaic universe is the universe we recognise, as we recognise a photograph or picture of the house in which we live. It is inferior to the Copernican in that its mathematics, even when corrected by modern knowledge, would be too complicated for ready calculation; but it is superior as a description of what the heavens have to show us, because it is a direct transcript of the observed phenomena.

Reading this passage, with its nostalgia for a simpler world where eternity was only a few thousand miles away, beyond the sphere of the Fixed Stars, you can understand why CP Snow got grumpy about the "two cultures". It's not merely that Sayers is woefully ignorant of the science, or even the history which resulted in the Ptolemaic view being replaced by the Copernican view. It's that she prefers to be ignorant and seems, at some level, to prefer that the rest of us were ignorant too, happily living in a glittering snow-dome cosmos with God on the outside peering in through the Primum Mobile. It reminds me of certain contemporary cultural conservatives who wring their hands over what we have lost in the inevitable cultural decline that followed the disbanding of the Doobie Brothers. There's something seriously weird about people who are nostalgic for times and places outside their own experience.