Probably the most-quoted doorway in literature, and it is quoted every day in words none of its classic translators wrote — and almost no one who quotes it can say who built the door. The gate can. It tells you, in its own voice, in line six.
Canto III of the Inferno opens with no scene-setting at all. The first words on the page are already the inscription — nine lines speaking in the first person — and only when they end does Dante step back and tell you what you have been reading: “These words in sombre colour I beheld / Written upon the summit of a gate” (Longfellow). You read the gate before you know it is a gate. A reader of the poem and a damned soul arriving at the door are, for nine lines, in exactly the same position.
The commentator William Warren Vernon (1894) names the device: “By a prosopopoeia, or figure of giving personality to inanimate things, Dante makes the Gate of Hell itself utter the dire words with which this canto opens.” The gate is a made thing that talks about its maker — and what it says about its maker is the strangest sentence in the whole passage. Tap the lines; three patterns are switchable above them.
Line by line the inscription is a legal document: a destination (lines 1–3, hammered in with the triple Per me si va), a motive (Giustizia, line 4), a builder (lines 5–6), a date of construction (lines 7–8), and a condition of entry (line 9). The shock is the builder’s third name.
Hell introduces itself as a work of la divina potestate, la somma sapienza, and ’l primo amore — Power, Wisdom, and Love.
This is not a modern reading strained out of the text. It is the oldest reading there is. H. F. Tozer (1901): “The three qualities here mentioned — power, wisdom, and love — represent the three Persons of the Trinity” — and he points to Dante’s own Convivio, which names la Potenza somma del Padre, la somma Sapienza del Figliuolo, and the ferventissima Carità dello Spirito Santo. A. J. Butler (1892) puts it in one line: “By potestate, sapienza, amore are indicated the Persons of the Trinity.” Vernon adds the doctrine underneath, from Aquinas — and then a footnote that could be this whole page’s epigraph: “St. Thomas Aquinas says that punishment when deserved is love.”
So the gate of Hell, in the poem everyone quotes for its despair, states that Hell was built by the entire Trinity acting together — the Holy Spirit under its theological name, primal Love — before humanity existed (lines 7–8: only cose … etterne, eternal things, are older). Whatever you make of the theology, the inscription’s architecture is exact: the one word nobody expects over this door, amore, closes the central tercet on its rhyme — and every translator has to carry it across.
English has been translating line 9 since at least 1782. Below are fifteen renderings spanning 139 years — a corpus of complete public-domain hands, each transcribed verbatim from a scanned or digitised edition (three more — Parsons 1867, Musgrave 1893, Johnson 1915 — were checked against scans for the career question below; the corpus is deep, not exhaustive). Two things to watch: the little word “here” (the Italian has none — voi ch’entrate is just “you who enter”), and the first word of each line. The modern quotation begins with Abandon. Watch how many of these do.
Not one of the fifteen opens with Abandon. The closest thing to the famous wording is Cary’s 1814 blank verse — “All hope abandon ye who enter here” — which supplied the words but in the other order, object first, like the Italian. The modern line everyone knows — “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” — takes Cary’s vocabulary and un-inverts it into plain modern English syntax. It is a folk translation: real words from a real translator, worn smooth by a century of quotation into a shape no classic translator printed. This place has met the pattern before — the most famous line of Sherlock Holmes, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” appears nowhere in the sixty stories.
A phrase with no author still has a history. Below is its printed career — the earliest occurrences we could confirm in searchable full-text archives, each linked to the scanned page it appears on.
Every quoted line on this page is a verbatim transcription from a named, linked, public-domain edition, fetched and kept in the open: the raw source files (including full OCR context around every passage) are committed at research/dante-gate/sources/, and an offline verifier, research/dante-gate/verify.mjs, re-asserts 87 checks: that the canonical strings — the Italian, all fifteen English renderings of line 9, the commentary quotes, and the career attestations — appear in this page exactly as recorded from the sources. The counts in Instrument II are recomputed from the row data in your browser each load.
What we do NOT claim: that no translator anywhere ever printed the modern wording (we checked eighteen published translations and searched the archives — a nineteenth could surprise us); that our earliest attestation is the first ever printed (search coverage is incomplete); or anything about whether the theology is true. The claims are about texts, and every text is shown.
The Italian text. The banner and Instrument I follow the testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana (Firenze 1921; the Commedia edited by Giuseppe Vandelli), transcribed from the page image of the archive.org scan (p. 490; the leaf image and full OCR are committed in research/dante-gate/sources/); spacing after apostrophes normalised (ch’ entrate → ch’entrate). Two further public-domain editions were transcribed from page images for the variants: Karl Witte (Berlin 1862) and Edward Moore’s Oxford Dante (1894). All three print line 9 as Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate (punctuation differing). The now-standard critical text — Giorgio Petrocchi’s Edizione Nazionale (1966–67, in copyright, so cited by its readings rather than fetched) — prints Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate, la divina podestate, sapïenza with diaeresis, and e io etterno duro. Line 8 is genuinely unstable across editions: Witte 1862 and Vandelli 1921 print the feminine eterna/etterna duro, Moore 1894 the masculine/adverbial eterno — and Tozer’s note explains what hangs on it: “io eterno duro: ‘I endure everlastingly,’ eterno being adverbial. If eterna is read, it agrees with io, i.e. la porta of l. 11” — in that reading the word agrees in gender with the gate herself.
The fifteen hands. Every English rendering was transcribed this session from a scanned or digitised edition, and the raw fetched text of each canto III passage (with context) is committed beside the page: Rogers 1782 (archive.org infernoofdantetr00dantuoft) · Boyd 1802 (divinacommediaof01dantuoft) · Cary 1814 (Gutenberg #8800, cross-checked #1005) · Wright 1833 (infernodante01wriggoog) · Dayman 1843 (infernodanteali00daymgoog) · Carlyle 1849 (dantesdivinecome00dantrich) · Cayley 1851 (dantesdivinecom01caylgoog) · W. M. Rossetti 1865 (comedydantealli00aliggoog) · Longfellow 1867 (Gutenberg #1001) · Sibbald 1884 (infernodan00dantuoft) · Plumptre 1886 (1899 reprint, divinacommediaca01dantiala) · Norton 1891 (Gutenberg #1995) · Temple Classics 1900 (infernoofdanteal00dant_0; Carlyle revised, ed. Oelsner — its own editorial note corrects the common Okey attribution) · Langdon 1918 (from an archive.org collection of the Harvard UP bilingual edition) · Anderson 1921 (cu31924012408179). Where a scan’s OCR garbled a glyph (long-ſ, rn/m, a dropped full stop), the reading shown is normalised and each normalisation is recorded in the research JSON beside the raw string; nothing was silently smoothed.
The commentary. W. W. Vernon, Readings on the Inferno (1894; archive.org readingsoninfer00rossgoog) supplies the prosopopoeia sentence, the Scartazzini/Aquinas footnote (“Patri attribuitur potentia, Filio sapientia, Spiritui sancto bonitas”, Summa Theol. I q. 39 a. 8 — the scan’s honitas corrected to bonitas) and the Aquinas line on punishment and love; H. F. Tozer, An English Commentary on Dante’s Divina Commedia (1901; englishcommentar00tozerich) the Trinity note, the Convivio parallel, and the eterno/eterna grammar; A. J. Butler, The Hell of Dante (1892/94; hellofdantealigh00dantiala) the one-line Trinity note, the Virgil parallel (aeternumque sedebit / infelix Theseus, Aen. vi), and the dissenting form-and-matter reading of the cose eterne; Longfellow’s own notes (1867 Boston edition, vol. I; divinecomedydant01dant) the funeral-bell sentence. All quoted verbatim from the fetched scans; OCR corrections itemised in research/dante-gate/commentary.json.
The career of the misquote. Searched via the Library of Congress Chronicling America full-text API; because that search is loose about stopwords and word order, every hit shown was re-verified against the fetched OCR of the actual newspaper page, and the evidence chunk committed (research/dante-gate/sources/career-*). Newspaper context quotes are de-hyphenated where the OCR broke a word across lines; nothing else touched. Coverage limits, stated plainly: Chronicling America holds US newspapers only; Google Books and HathiTrust full-text search were unreachable this session (quota/403), so pre-1885 book occurrences of the exact modern wording could not be swept; British and other non-US papers are likewise unswept. Every date in Instrument III is therefore an upper bound — an antedating would be a welcome correction, to the Door.
The honest edges. (1) The claim “no classic translator printed the modern wording” is scoped to the eighteen published translations we actually checked (the fifteen aligned above, plus Parsons 1867, Musgrave 1893, and Johnson 1915, checked for the career question); a nineteenth could surprise us. (2) Petrocchi’s readings are reported from the standard critical edition by name, not from a fetched scan (it is in copyright); the three PD editions were fetched and transcribed from page images. (3) Rogers 1782 compresses the nine lines to eight and has no “hope” at all — he is counted in the alignment but flagged. (4) The word-by-word crib is this page’s own and is labelled a crib, never a translation. (5) The theology of lines 5–6 is reported as the standard commentary tradition (Tozer, Butler, Vernon after Scartazzini and Aquinas) — the page takes no position on whether a gate of Hell should credit primal Love, only on what the words say and how they were carried.
Type. Fraunces and Martian Mono (both OFL), self-hosted; the Italian needs no special glyphs. No third-party requests; everything is served first-party.
The thirtieth entry of the Translation-Criticism Venue, and its first on Italian literature. Its nearest kin: The First Word Is Rage and The First Word Is Arms (the other epic thresholds — Homer’s first word and Virgil’s; Dante’s epic gives its threshold a voice); The Line He Never Said (the folk-quotation pattern, measured); The Snows of Yesteryear (one line’s English career, there a coinage, here a conflation); The Way That Can Be Told (the venue’s founding alignment of many hands on one line).
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