Dante's divine hype

Dante did not write the Divine Comedy. Not that anybody else - a nobleman called Pancetta who liked lads and frozen chickens, for instance - did either. There is no such poem. Dante never called his work

The Hesperus Life of Dante (again, not the author's title) refers throughout to the poem under this misnomer because it uncritically accepts a modern text of Boccaccio's words. A.N. Wilson in his introduction also clings to the tradition; it would be interesting to hear his response if the same process of foisting reviewerese into titles were applied to some of his many productions - Most Entertaining God's Funeral, Utterly Convincing Stray, Question-Begging Jesus. Hype remains hype, even when true.

A little detail like this can go a long way in putting readers off the poem. The preconception it creates prompts the translator of this volume to a bad mistake when he has Boccaccio describe Dante as "seized by the sweetness of knowing the truth about heavenly things" where the Italian means "the truth about things other than heavenly ones". Dante was a scientific speculator; he loved experiments with mirrors, the condensation of vapours.

As Wilson rightly says, the Commedia remains "for most non-Italians, the great unread masterpiece". For most Italians too, actually. He remarks in his best, brisk and oracular manner that "in a sense, our generation is over-educatedî and this is perhaps why he kindly refrains from burdening us with any insights into Dante such as might persuade us to get to know him.

Italianless readers who have a bit of room left in their crowded schedules and minds should read the poem in a prose translation (the old one by Sinclair available from Oxford University Press is the best).

Abbreviate Inferno, which still grossly distorts our view of the whole, by reading its first three cantos and then all the oddnumbered ones and get on quickly to Purgatorio where the air is clearer.

Think of the Commedia as a travelling chat-show with an astounding variety of guests in the course of interviewing whom the host learns to realise his own failings. Quite an eye-opener.

Dante's Italy was so torn by feuds it makes the present-day Balkans seem like a nicely-run creche. Centuries later this was still true and Dante had become the idol of desperate patriots like Ugo Foscolo, who spent his final decade as a refugee in London, lecturing on Dante and Boccaccio and dodging his creditors.

In his Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802), Dante is frequently appealed to and regularly deified, what with his "divine intellect" and "superhuman songs" and all. Foscolo was addicted to this Ab Fab lingo of "angel heavenly" and "I feel divine" he may have revered Dante but he learned nothing about how to write from the Florentine. Boccaccio's many allusions to the Commedia in his life of the poet (regrettably not signalled in the notes to this new translation) are pointed and subtle, like the observations of a close friend; Foscolo in contrast scatters bits of Dante like cake-decorations, jiggles the words about to fit his purposes so that the lines no longer rhyme, and generally provides an object-lesson in the difference between respect and lip-service.

On one occasion only, he alludes with a purpose, and that a base one. He steals the dying words of a starving child to his father from