For Allen Mandelbaum’s three-volume
translation of the Divine Comedy,
acclaimed artist Barry Moser executed 81 ink-and-wash illustrations. The 35 for Inferno were largely executed in July 1979 and first published in
1980; the 33 for Purgatorio were
begun in June 1981, completed August 4 of that year, and first published in
1982; and the 18 (13 of which are double-folio) for Paradiso were begun in December 1983, completed the month after
that, and first published in 1984. The
interview below was conducted by e-mail with Karl Fugelso in mid-May 2013.
BM: I have seen a couple of things of a more recent
vintage - Sandow Birk, Heinrich Drescher’s anachronistic images, for instance - that are
interesting, but the major sources of influence are indeed limited to the ones
I state.
KF:
Do you think of the Commedia
as a “medieval” text? Why or why not?
BM:
I am not a medievalist, so any opinion I have is
automatically suspect. But as with all great literature it belongs to the ages,
no matter when it was written. Mandelbaum’s translation put it in very modern
terms as far as I was concerned, but I suspect that might have been because of
his use of contemporary language and usage. I am not a linguist either, so any
opinion I have in these matters is also highly suspect.
KF:
What (else) do you associate with the terms “medieval” and “Middle
Ages”?
BM: Music, altar piececs and architecture. Inquisitions and hypocrisy.
KF:
Do you perceive your Commedia
illustrations as medievalism, which is often defined as post-medieval responses
to the Middle Ages? If so, in what ways, and if not, why?
BM: No. Definitely
not. As I said, I am NOT a medievalist,
so I could not possibly have an opinion about such an issue. I think of it as a twentieth-century
response…or a twentieth-century artist’s response to the text as evidenced by
the overall plan, which has Paradise as dark and Hell as light, a result of my
meditation on the Holocaust…when the Zyklon B pellets dropped into the Sachsenhausen showers, got wet, and released hydrogen cyanide into the
crowded air, the lights were on and the walls were (in my mind at least) white.
And to take that thought a step further: if Paradise is indeed the polar
opposite of Hell, then it only stands to reason that Paradise would be dark.
The sweet dark of sleep. That is absolutely a twentieth-century response, is it
not?
KF:
If you do see your Commedia
illustrations as medievalist, how do you perceive your medievalism relating, if
at all, to your interaction with earlier intermediaries, such as Mandelbaum and
Doré? If their responses to the Commedia
could be considered medievalism, how does their influence on you compare to
your direct responses to the Commedia?
BM: I hope that I
understand your question. As I say, I do not see, any more than I did 28 or so
years ago, any medievalist influence in my response to the Commedia. Mandelbaum walked me through Inferno like I was a child. I listened to him. Took notes on our
conversations that were sometimes - often - over my head and I had to ask him to
explain it to me again. He was always gentle, understanding, and would come at
my questions from another point of view using language that I could
comprehend—you have to understand that Allen spoke something like seventeen
languages and if something were better said in Italian or French, then, by God,
he said it in Italian or French. I became less awed, and more and more
independent of him as we progressed through the Commedia.
As far as Doré is concerned, there is
precious little, if any, influence that came from him…unless there was some unconscious relationship. I have never
been a great admirer of Doré’s illustrations with their tableau formats and
homogenous faces. He was a fine draftsman and an even finer sculptor and that
part of his work I do admire. It may have something to do with the distance
between Doré’s own hand (drawing on the blocks) and the engraved blocks
themselves, which were engraved by several other hands, notably the brothers
Dalziel.
KF:
What, if anything, do you think your illustrations tell us about the
world you inhabited when you were making them?
BM: I am a child of the American south. My
family numbered among them Ku Klux Klansmen and other arrant bigots and
hypocrites. I was an eyewitness to the god-awful plight of African-Americans
under Jim Crow. Though I was too young to remember the Holocaust as it was
happening, I became interested almost to the point of obsession with that
heinous part of human history because it did happen during my lifetime.
For a while I was a licensed Methodist preacher
and was eyewitness to certain ecclesiastical malfeasances: not only hypocrisy
and bigotry, but also schismaticism, pride, envy, and so forth - which is not to
say that there were no good folks around. They just kept their mouths shut, as
did I. It all seemed to dovetail with several of the rings and malebolgia of
Hell.
KF:
What part, if any, do you think that world played in what your article
refers to as the Commedia’s
“continual revelation” to you?
BM: I think the answer to
this question is at least partially answered in the responses above. I’m afraid
that far too much time has passed since I wrote that phrase to recall exactly
what I meant when I wrote it. Beyond that I think that all good art, be it
literature, poetry, music, architecture, painting, or sculpture, continues to
reveal itself as we, not the art, age and mature. What I see today in the work,
say of Rembrandt or hear in the music of Bach, are not the same things I saw
and heard when I was a younger man. Art itself is a continual revelation - as is
humankind’s (and my) - search for “God” (whatever that means).
KF:
What sort of response have you received to your illustrations,
particularly their relationship to Dante’s and Mandelbaum’s texts?
BM: I am sure that someone, somewhere made disparaging
comments about my illustrations, but for the life of me I can’t recall any.
Perhaps that’s a function of time. Perhaps it’s selective memory. I really
don’t know. The fact is that I cannot remember any critic truly bad-mouthing
the images. I mean, hey, Mandelbaum was my personal shepherd. He tamped down my
innate stupidity.
KF:
With the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would do
differently in your approach to either one of those texts?
BM: Both texts? Do you mean the three texts? I will assume
the latter.
I have never done a
book that, given a chance, I would not do again, and quite differently from the
way I did it the first time. I never know where I am going with the imaging of
a text until I set about the process of making the illustrations. Like Flannery
O’Connor famously said, “I write in order to find out what I think.” (Or words
to that effect.) I do know for sure that if I were to choose to do wash-and-ink
drawings again, I would use a different approach because neither the ink nor
the paper I used is any longer manufactured and no other inks and papers work
together as those two did back then. Alas.
There was a period of
time in the late 80s when I was quite serious about issuing Inferno as a Pennyroyal Press title.
Pennyroyal Press is my private press which, as with all private presses (not to
be confused with a “vanity press”) publishes books at the pleasure of its
proprietor. In such a book the illustrations should not be, and rarely are
reproductions, so I interpreted a few of the drawings as wood engravings. But
it was, if you will allow a Dantesque simile, like a dog returning to its
vomit. The project never went anywhere. The printed sheets of the entire Inferno , lacking its illustrations, are
in storage and have been for thirty years or so.
But every now and again I do get an itch to do it again. Maybe in another lifetime.
Karl Fugelso
Towson University
