Paradiso: Canto XXXIII
Dante AlighieriTranslated from the Italian by D. M. Black
Dante gazes into the depths of Eternal Light. He ventures beyond his power of imagining.
How weak are words! and how crude by comparison
with my thought, which, compared with what I saw,
is insufficiently described as “little.”
Eternal Light! throned in yourself alone,
who know yourself alone, known by yourself,
and in your knowing, love and greet yourself,
the circle that was so conceived as to
appear in you as a reflected light,
round which to some extent my eyes could move,
within itself, remaining its own colour,
seemed as if painted with our human image–
and therefore my whole sight became engaged with it!
Like the geometer who undertakes
to square the circle and, for all his thinking,
cannot produce the principle he needs,
so too was I at that miraculous sight:
I sought to make out how that image could
fit with the circle and could have a place there,
but for this task my wings were insufficient–
but that my mind was suddenly struck by
a flash of light which gave it what it longed for.
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was born into a noble family in Florence. His most famous works are The New Life (circa 1293); De Vulgari Eloquentia (circa 1304–7), a defense of the use of the vernacular in literature; and his epic vision of the afterlife, The Divine Comedy, which he began in 1307 and finished shortly before his death.
D. M. Black is a Scottish poet, psychoanalyst, and translator. He is the author of multiple poetry collections, including With Decorum, The Educators, The Happy Crow, and Gravitations. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso is forthcoming from NYRB Classics in July 2025. He lives in London.
