Dante Reading Group (Session 1)

Our Dante Reading Group is open to anybody to attend as many or as few readings as they wish. At each reading, we will make our way through several cantos of Dante's Commedia under the expert guidance of Dante scholar and Fellow Emeritus, Corinna Salvadori Lonergan of Trinity College Dublin.

You may have tried to read Dante's Commedia and want to know more about it, so now is your opportunity. No prior knowledge of Dante or Italian is required, and we 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.

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 he will find only good at his journey’s end. After many encounters and adventures, physical struggle, strange modes of transport including a medieval helicopter, even movement without motion, and 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.

Over the course of our journey, we will go through Inferno, Purgatorio, and finally Paradiso. Please be sure to sign up for each reading you would like to attend. You can find all the dates here.

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

We shall refer to a map with the ORGANIZATION OF PURGATORY from Dorothy Sayers; it will help you to keep grounded, and we shall use the illustrations of Monika Beisner and Liam Ó Broin to help you to visualise each area.

Inferno 1-4

This first reading focuses on the beginning of the text, where Dante is anguished and fearful, this is externalised as a dark threatening wood where three beasts appear and one, the she-wolf, is most threatening; it symbolizes greed, what destroys society. Dante sees sunlight, he has hope and he will be reassured by the figure of a fellow poet, Virgil, who offers to lead him on a difficult journey of self awareness, and more. In Canto 2 Dante dithers, unsure that he wants to carry on, but Virgil gives him the background and we get a glimpse of paradise, of women working on Dante’s behalf, the Virgin Mary and Beatrice. Canto 3 has a frightening start, reminds us that there is no hope of exiting, ever, and the first lost people (Dante’s definition of the damned) are those who did not have the courage of their convictions, and their punishment fits the crime (as will be the case frequently in the work). At Canto 4 we enter Limbo, Virgil’s permanent abode, where there is no physical punishment, but psychological: they have no hope of happiness, yet keep yearning for it. Dante is recognised as a poet and welcomed to a group of the most eminent poets of antiquity.

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