Dante Reading Group (Session 3)

**Please note that this session replaces the one originally scheduled for 21st October**

Our Dante Reading Group is now open for the 2026-27 academic year. At each meeting, we make our way through several cantos of the Commedia under the expert guidance of Dante scholar and Fellow Emerita, Corinna Salvadori Lonergan of Trinity College Dublin.

We welcome all, from beginners to enthusiasts, to our readings in English, interspersed with the sound of Dante's Florentine vernacular, and glances at issues in ‘translation’. You may not have a full two hours to give to the reading, so please come at what time you can, when you can. The Commedia is a gripping story, and how Dante can grip us still fascinates many of us.

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 including 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 will take place from October to April. Over the course of our journey we cover Inferno / Hell, 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.

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.

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 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 10-15

Heavenly intervention enables them to continue their journey; we will read Canto 10 slowly (more politics) and discuss Farinata and Cavalcante (heretics who believed in no life after death). Canto 11 gives the principles for Dante’s division of the sins in Hell (refer to your map) and Canto 12 has the violent against others, in their person or their possessions, suffering in the Phlegethon, a river of blood. Cantos 11 &12 are not problematical and, should we not get to comment on them, you will find them a straightforward read. In the 7^th Circle, where we encounter those who have been violent against their persons and their possessions, Dante speaks to the poet Pier della Vigna, and we also hear the anguished account of an anonymous Florentine. This leads to an opening at Canto 14 that is the strongest statement of Dante’s attachment to his own city, followed by the figure of the Greek King Capaneus, and an interesting allegory of the Vecchio di Creta (Old Man of Crete) linked to the rivers of Hell. Canto 15 has Dante’s encounter with his old mentor, the writer and translator Brunetto Latini, a very moving canto with an enigmatic final verse.

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