In the translator’s note for his 1954 interpretation
of Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno, John
Ciardi specifically recognizes the complications of translating an artistic
work from one language to another. “When
the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same
sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, recognizably make the same
‘music,’ the same air. But it can do so
only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the
self-logic of the piano” (ix). Ciardi’s philosophy
is based on adhering as much to the original text as possible during
transposition to best convey its meanings both implicit and explicit. There remains the reality that each
instrument has its own abilities and shortcomings and to adapt to them when
transposing music from one to the other.
When adapting a work to a different media
altogether, though, taking artistic liberties and making loose interpretations
to better suit the target audience seems to make an essential survival
technique of this idea of adaptation and reinterpretation. So it was with very mixed ambitions of direct
interpretation and contemporary innovation that Visceral Games approached
Alighieri’s text for their 2010 video game Dante’s
Inferno.
The largest problem with Visceral’s liberties with
the original poem arises immediately upon booting up the game, and it is in the
development of the hero. Throughout much
of The Divine Comedy, particularly The Inferno, Dante’s character is a
transparent eye into the worlds he explores.
He is often a narrator simply bearing witness to the horrors of Hell and
the beauty of Heaven, and although he goes on a subtly redemptive journey for
his life’s follies, most of which are alluded to in Purgatorio, Dante’s primary function as a character throughout the
trilogy is that of a window. He is
recast in the game as a battle-hardened soldier of The Third Crusade who has fought
under the orders of King Richard I and with spiritual protection offered by an
unnamed bishop. During the Crusade,
Dante has slain countless enemies and philandered in secret with a female
prisoner – he has even sewn a red Holy Cross, often seen adorned by Crusaders
and The Knights of the Templar, onto the flesh of his torso. These extreme acts of sexual gratification,
self-mutilation and violence by Dante entirely remove him from the possibility
of being a softly-treading observer of atrocity like his fictional literary
namesake and place him in totally different characterized territory.
Compared to the drastic reimagining of Dante, the
following story elements in the first act pale in comparison – and only seem a
bit out of place, stylistically, in their narratives. During the Crusade, the player is told that Dante
is asked by a beautiful female prisoner to spare the life of her brother – also
a prisoner – for which she offers herself to Dante; he agrees and this exchange
results in the aforementioned philandering he commits. It is later revealed that Dante’s love
Beatrice and his father were slain by this same man Dante has loosed, who was
in fact the prisoner’s husband, and Beatrice is now being dragged down through
all nine circles of Hell by Lucifer and being turned into a succubus. The treachery played upon Dante by the
incarcerated couple feels utterly Shakespearian. Seeing Beatrice’s soul corrupted and soiled
gives Dante the motive to travel through Hell to save her, armed with a scythe
he has won in battle from Death himself.
Dante’s journey to save Beatrice from Lucifer and his winning of Death’s
scythe come across as more mythological Greek than anything, reminding one of
the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Even
Dante sewing the Holy Cross to his own chest sounds out of place for the
Florentine hero, and is written like an extreme example of Arthur Dimmesdale of
the 19th-century American classic The Scarlet Letter – the punishment of oneself in masochism and
shame.
The end result, in fewer words, is that an
essentially passive narrator realizing and rejecting the sin of the everyman in
the late Middle Ages is warped into a bloodthirsty, self-mutilating adulterer
only motivated to save a woman who we are told wouldn’t be in danger in the
first place had he not wallowed in the pleasures of wrath and lust
himself. The narrative tone has also
changed in nature from singularly early Renaissance-era Italy to include
pockets of Greek, English and American symbols spanning from 900 B.C. to the
1850s.
The intent behind disregarding the essence of the
narrator and the foil in Dante’s original text is complicated, but is likely
rooted in pressure to make his character more appealing to a desensitized
gaming audience largely interested in existentialist experiences. In interactive media such as video games, the
experience of the single-player adventure generally conforms to a story
involving one character making a difference in the world almost completely by
himself or herself. Game developers aim
to break down the “fourth wall” and immerse the player in the experience, which
is more successful with one continuous narrative voice, especially with the
incessant complication of command input involved via a controller. In addition, the style of gameplay and
cinematic cutscenes in Dante’s Inferno as
well as its graphic brutality and nudity are very similar to the astronomically
successful God of War series,
developed by Sony Computer Entertainment’s Santa Monica Studio, which launched
five years prior. The God of War series depicts a violent and
hyper-sexualized Ancient Greece and
tells a similar story - one relentless soldier’s journey to avenge the
accidental death of his family by his own hand, under the influence of Ares and
other mythological beings. While Visceral’s
iteration of Dante’s epic poem is undoubtedly an original idea, the pressure to
emulate or expand upon a successful formula is as prevalent in gaming as it is
in film and business. Between the dual
influences of a public sick of subtlety and an industry eager to profit from
marketable trends, it’s little wonder gamers didn’t find themselves slowly traversing
a harrowing and despondent underworld.
However, despite those alterations to the poem
doing little to nothing in the game’s favor, there are many instances of genius
artistic interpretation of the text of which even Dante scholars would likely
approve. Early in the game, Charon makes
his appearance as the souls’ ferryman – and, here, the ferry. Here, he takes on the form of an ark crafted
of wood and bone, his head and skeleton neck making up the ship’s bow. This illustrates to the player the extent
that Charon is, has been and always will be inseparable from his duty ferrying
the souls of the damned. This striking
image is precisely the kind of dramatic example necessary for the medium of
video gaming.
Shortly following Charon’s appearance, the player
encounters Minos between the first and second circles. Minos is only superficially changed in
comparison to his literary counterpart.
In Canto V of The Inferno, Dante
writes:
“There Minos sits, grinning, grotesque and
hale.
He examines each lost soul as it arrives
and delivers his verdict with his coiling
tail.
That is to say, when the ill-fated soul
appears before him it confesses all,
and that grim sorter of the dark and foul
decides which place in Hell shall be its
end,
then wraps his twitching tail about himself
one coil for each degree it must descend.”
(Dante
57-58; Canto V, lines 4-12)
Those stanzas, specifically saying Minos “delivers
a verdict” and that he is a “grim sorter,” lead the reader to conjure in his or
her mind an image of Minos as a judge and a clerk, perhaps behind a desk, scrutinizing,
sentencing and filing away the countless souls that seek him for their
punishment. In the game, he is depicted
as a 30-foot giant who does exactly this.
He grabs a soul, represented by a corporeal body, and smells it, and can
subsequently determine its sins. The
skin has grown over his eyes, likely a literal interpretation of the term
“blind justice,” and he places each soul on a spinning wheel akin to a table
saw. The wheel spins rapidly and the
souls descend to their places. In the
text, Virgil silences Minos and the two move on; in the game, a large-scale
battle follows, in which Dante must conquer Minos by force in order to continue
down through Hell.
Later, the player sojourns through the fourth circle
of Hell – Greed. In Dante’s poem, The
Hoarders and The Wasters are depicted brilliantly as two warring armies
eternally rolling enormous boulders into each other’s – what they valued so
highly in life now weighs them down and forces them to convict to their
perspectives. The corresponding area of Dante’s Inferno is a circle of Hell
formed entirely of cast-iron vats of molten gold, in which the souls of avarice
forever boil and are tormented by their obsession, the rock formations glowing
with golden veins.
Visceral Games’ interpretations of Charon and The
Fourth Circle are as different from the source material as they are clever, and
they show the potential in transposing a creative work to a young and
controversial media.
Many faithful adaptations of the book remain
throughout the game – the tornado of lustful souls and the bridge leading to it
are represented literally as Dante finds himself at the second circle. Cerberus appears more wormlike in the game,
though he remains the three-headed beast slavering over the gluttonous. In the eight circle of Hell, Violence, all
elements of the original environment are represented fairly. The lake of blood, the wood of suicides and
the burning plains (or sands, depending on the translation) all arrive intact. Virgil’s appearances throughout the game
contain many quotes directly from the poem as he gives comfort and reassurance
to Dante. He also explains the many
parts of Hell and their functions, offering justification for the many torments
awaiting the dead.
Even some of the specific mythological and
historical figures Dante mentions in his text appear, such as Attila and
Francesca di Paola, and players are given the option to absolve their sins or
punish them for them. Punishing the
sinners causes Dante to attack them, and the sinners then turn to smoldering
ash. Absolution leads to a mini-game
involving capturing sins, after which the sinner begins to float skyward, is
enveloped by a pillar of divine light and then disappears. Though there are far fewer high-profile
figures in the game than the poem, all that are present come directly from it
and even have an accurate one- to two-sentence summary of the person and
his/her sins.
Before the player has his or her final showdown
with Lucifer, Ciardi’s “self-logic of the instrument” has undoubtedly revealed
itself. The constant bloodshed and
action sequences involved with slaying demons in Hell is part of an experience
that is almost expected or demanded in most games, and therein lays the root of
the problem. What separates Dante’s Inferno from being perceived as
a work of art like its 700-year-old predecessor isn’t the medium of video
gaming itself, nor is it the transposition from the literary to the interactive
and electronic. The dilemma is, largely,
the per capita amount of gamers who are still playing games like Dante’s Inferno and God of War to achieve some immediate gratification in violence and
sex rather than be a part of a living history lesson. Developers like Visceral Games make a choice
to either risk that audience and almost all profitability by making a truly
direct adaptation of an inactive hero and literary work, or sacrifice the
masterful storytelling of a classic work by making a game that strays from its
slower pacing and narrative to appease that audience and assure big sales. This same audience’s id-driven bloodlust is
likely the reason Dante becomes such an active character.
The artists’ visions of Charon, Minos and Greed are
the clearest proof that there is true intelligent and imaginative
interpretation involved in Dante’s
Inferno, and the circles of Lust and Violence do the same for faithful
adaptation – or transposition, as Ciardi would likely call it – of the
poem. Where the game stumbles is only in
its satiation of a less-than-mature audience; had they grown more austere with
their tastes in recent years, gamers would likely have had a more relaxed and
haunting tour through Hell.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Chicago, Mentor. 1954; 1982.
Print.
Ciardi, John.
“Translator’s Note.” The Inferno. Chicago, Mentor. 1954; 1982.
Print.
Dante’s Inferno. Developer Visceral Games. 2010.
PlayStation 3 Disc. Pub. EA
Games.
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