Dante Reading Group

Our Dante Reading Group is free and open to anybody to attend as many or as few sessions as they like. Each week, we make our way through several cantos of Dante's Commedia with the expert guidance of Dante scholar and Fellow Emeritus, Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, with John Walsh, an IRC Government of Ireland Scholar in Germanic Studies, both of Trinity College Dublin.

You may have heard of Dante, you may even have tried to read his Comedy and want to know more about it, so now is your opportunity. We welcome all, from beginners to enthusiasts, to our readings in English, interspersed with the sound of his Florentine vernacular, and glances at issues in ‘translation’. You may not have a full two hours to give to the reading, but come at what time you can, when you can. The Comedy is a gripping story, how Dante can grip us still fascinates many of us, and whatever session you can attend will enrich you.

Dante is both poet and traveller, and we join him in his journey which starts in anguish, in a dark wood, but there is a glimmer of sunlight, and he assures us at once that only good will he find at journey’s end. After many encounters and adventures, physical struggle, strange modes of transport like a medieval helicopter, even movement without motion, addressing us, his readers, periodically, to keep us alert and with him, he ends in dazzling sunlight, having moved from darkness to enlightenment – he called it ‘comedy’, a rather miserable start but a happy ending. Dante is a powerful story-teller, with a gift for creating drama in many of his encounters, and it is on these aspects of the work that we shall concentrate as those he meets are so very like us.

Our readings are stretched out over several sessions, beginning on 3rd October and stretching into the new year. Over the course of our journey we cover Inferno / Hell, Purgatorio, and finally Paradiso. Please be sure to sign up for each session you would like to attend. You can find all the sessions, here.

No prior knowledge of Dante or Italian is required, and will read the poem in English translation, paying close attention to Dante's cultural and historical context as well as to his poetic strategies. Readers of all backgrounds and disciplines are welcome and are encouraged to find and reflect on the poem’s enduring relevance for themselves and for readers in the 21st century.

We are not recommending any particular translation but an accessible and very good book on Dante and his works is by Prue Shaw, Reading Dante from Here to Eternity. A bilingual edition of the text will be presented at each session, and attendees are welcome to bring their own editions.

We have completed our rehabilitation journey through Purgatory and are now ‘prepared to leap up to the stars’, as Sayers renders the final line of the canticle. In this session we shall touch briefly on Cantos 1 and 2 of Paradiso, heaven of the Moon, read in full Canto 3 – meet Piccarda, sister of Forese and Corso, and the Empress Costance, women prevented from living their chosen life by male power. In the second heaven, Mercury, we listen to the Emperor Justinian on sectarian violence caused by party allegiance (Canto 6); we are reminded of Inf. 33, Ugolino, as the sins of the fathers are visited on the children; alongside the Emperor is Romeo, a Dante-like figure, a loyal public servant wrongly exiled (envy). In the third Heaven, Venus, cantos 8 &9, we have Charles Martel on being deprived of citizensbip; we meet Cunizza, who turned her capacity for loving to a good end after some very dodgy years; lastly, the troubadour poet and bishop Folco from Marseilles, and Rahab, the biblical harlot who saved the chosen people. In the heaven of the Sun, where wisdom is celebrated, Dante unites, in harmony and movement to measure, philosophers who had argued bitterly on opposite sides, all now in agreement as there is only one truth, we grasp only a fraction of it.

We shall supply a map as a reminder of where we are; we shall use the illustrations of Monika Beisner and Liam Ó Broin to help us to visualize each area.

This is a relaxed lunchtime session, so you are welcome to bring a sandwich and a drink.

If you enjoy events about literary translation, take a look at what else we have planned at the Centre, here.