Love absolves no beloved from loving, she explains, adding: Love brought us to one

death. The bottom of hell waits for him who extinguished our life referring to her
husband, the nasty Gianciotto or John the Lame, who murdered Paolo and her on th
e spot when he discovered them in flagrante after their fateful reading.
Dante requires what Nietzsche called slow reading attentive, profound, patient readi
ng because Francesca s sparse, seemingly innocent-sounding words speak volumes about
the kind of sinner she is. In the first place, she s not speaking to Dante in a nat
ural voice; she s alluding to poetry. And it s a very famous poem, Al cor gentil rem
paira sempre amore, Love always returns to the gentle heart, a gorgeous medieval l
yric by Guido Guinizelli, one of Dante s poetic mentors in the Sweet New Style, a
movement in the late 1200s that nurtured Dante s emerging artistic sensibilities.
Francesca, by citing the poem and the Sweet New Style, is saying: it wasn t my fau
lt, blame it on love. Despite her prettiness, her sweetness, and her eloquence,
she is like every other sinner in hell: it s never their fault, always someone els
e s. They never confess their guilt, the one thing necessary for redemption from s
in. With one deft allusion, one lyrical dance amid the ferocious winds in the Ci
rcle of the Lustful, Dante delivers a magnificent psychological portrait of Fran
cesca s path to damnation.
When he hears Francesca s words, Dante faints caddi come corpo morto cade, I fell as a
dead body falls. A friend of mine once said of Shakespeare that everything you ne
ed to read him is right there on the surface, in the language of his plays. You
don t need to know the background, backstory, allusions, sources. I agree but Dante
is the opposite. So much depends on what s outside his text: the mass of other boo
ks, other stories, other issues that lie submerged beneath the actual lines of T
he Divine Comedy. To understand why Dante faints in Inferno 5, you have to reali
ze just how surreal it was for him to hear Francesca cite the poetry of his yout
h, the words that helped make him poet and that hastened Francesca s demise.
It s not easy to break the code of The Divine Comedy, a work steeped in a medieval
Christian vision that can cause readers like Victor Hugo to avert their eyes fr
om its more celestial passages. But the miracle of literature is that its insigh
ts can somehow remain fresh and relevant centuries after they were written and f
ar from where they first appeared. And that s the miracle of Dante: somehow his wr
iting still makes sense seven centuries after it was conceived, so long as we ma
nage to read slowly, between, behind, and around what he called his versi strani
, strange verses.