I’ve been a walking zombie for nine months, but the translation is finally here! The book’s available for pre-order on Angelico’s website. And if you’d like a signed copy, you can find that here.

Although Dante locates his Mount Purgatory at the antipodes, where we now find Antarctica, don’t be confused: it’s not cold and grey and a little sad, like the bleak images of melting glaciers that haunt our imaginations. (I have Ludovico Einaudi’s

“Elegy for the Arctic” running through my head as I write this…) Rather, Dante’s South Pole is much more like some place you’d find in the Mediterranean in May: think Sardinia or Ischia or the Ligurian Coast, with its famous azure sky and gem-green water.

Purgatory, in Dante’s imagination, is a place of joy and brightness and color, but that green of the landscape is starting to get into the hearts of the penitent in the form of hope. Again and again, Dante portrays for us souls who broke free from inherited ancestral patterns, inclinations, and moral genetic defects. Were your parents divorced? Was your grandfather an alcoholic? Did you inherit anger problems? Such things do affect us, but they do not deter us from repentance. Purgatorio is a sinner’s delight.

Consider this “unlikely candidate” for salvation: Manfred, the illegitimate son of the heretical and excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who had spent his life in war against the papacy in the effort to reclaim Italy as part of the imperial crown. Frederick II has already been mentioned, in Inferno 11, as a resident among the heretics. Manfred might have been even worse than his father. He followed in his father’s ways of war; he was rumored to have killed his brother Conrad, the rightful heir to the throne; and he strong-armed the nobles into crowning him King of Sicily, thus usurping his nephew’s lawful throne. He was not a likely candidate for salvation. But Dante’s Manfred, as he tells the pilgrim in Purgatorio 3, repented while he was bleeding out from wounds he received at the Battle of Benevento. In a way, Dante runs a literary experiment, wondering what would happen if, even if only for a moment, that celebrity or detested politician could find his or her way back before death. What if, for a brief moment, they could say: “Enough”? Dante the pilgrim, then, has the reaction to Manfred that we would have if we were traveling through the afterlife and came upon that lifelong enemy of our personal cause:

“After my body was doubly broken

by mortal wounds, in tears, I gave

myself to him who pardons generously.

“They were horrible, those sins of mine,

but infinite goodness has such encompassing arms,

it will embrace whoever comes back to it!

…

Even under a curse like mine, no one’s ever

so lost that eternal love cannot come back,

as long as hope has any sprouts of green. (3:118–23, 133–35)

Forgiven a lifetime of sin for sixty seconds of heartfelt repentance? Yes. Dante gives us a vision of conversion which is shockingly easy: it starts with a groan, a pained realization of having chosen superficial goods, and a recognition that I have failed to embrace and dwell with real, lasting, and difficult goods. I’ve wasted my time. I’ve wasted my life. I’ve loved the superficial. And now, I want to change.

In Dante’s depiction of Mount Purgatory, the mercy of God is almost scandalous. The demons are almost put off by God’s embarrassing condescension. Take, for instance, Buonconte da Montefeltro, a professional mercenary and son of a mercenary (Guido da Montefeltro). Think of him as the son who became the CEO of a private security company, inheriting the craft of war from his father. Dante stuck Guido in hell. Indeed, Dad told his story to the pilgrim in Inferno 27: as he grew old, he wanted to get out of the profession of war; so he repented, became a Franciscan, and would have ended his life well, but he went back to the trade just one last time, even after he had taken the Franciscan cord. At Guido’s death, a dark angel came to fetch his soul, claiming what was rightfully his. Thus, Dante has set us up: such a thing—given the son’s moral “genetic predisposition”—is what should have happened to the son. And yet, in the final seconds, bleeding out from wounds he received on the battlefield, Buonconte uttered, in a raspy whisper, “Maria.” Here’s Buonconte’s own narration of his dramatic end:

“But I arrived at where [that river] has no name,

with gashes in my throat, while fleeing

on foot and bleeding over the plain.

“I lost my sight there, and then my speech;

but finished on the name Maria, and there

I fell and there my flesh remained, alone.

“I’ll tell the truth; you tell it to the living!

The angel of God took hold of me, but one from hell

was shouting: ‘O you from heaven, why deprive me?

“‘You take from us his everlasting part?

He’s carried off because he shed a tiny tear (lagrimetta)?’” (5:97–107)

Yes. That’s right. For one lagrimetta. One authentic whisper of “I’m sorry, Lord.”