Dante Reading Group (Session 5)

Our Dante Reading Group is free and open to anybody to attend as many or as few sessions as they like. Each session, we make our way through several cantos of Dante's Commedia with the expert guidance of Dante scholar and Fellow Emeritus, Corinna Salvadori Lonergan of Trinity College Dublin.

You may have already read, or tried to read, Dante's Divine 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 reading 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 will take place over several sessions. 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, 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 26-30

Cantos 26 and 27 have two of the most memorable characters in the entire Commedia: Ulysses and Guido da Montefeltro. Both are fraudulent counsellors, the first is Virgil’s fandi fictor Ulyxes, creator of deceit, whose perfect rhetoric urges his men forward to destruction, as the devil can cite Scripture to his own purpose. Guido, an astute victorious condottiere, fox rather than lion, deceives himself with his own logic. St Francis and a fallen cherubim dispute for the future of his soul; something similar will happen in Purgatorio but Buonconte, son of Guido, will be saved. Canto 28 is the canto of bloodshed: various categories of sowers of discord in religious groups, political groups, societies, families. It has a dramatic end in Bertrand de Born carrying his own head as if it were a lantern, and here Dante gives us the term contrapasso – the punishment fits the crime. In Canto 29, Dante fails to see his relative Geri del Bello whose death the family had failed to avenge; we move to meet alchemists, falsifiers of metals, later (30) impersonators (Gianni Schicchi, yes, the opera) and we stop at Maestro Adamo, counterfeiter of the gold florin, Florence’s internationally used currency, and his moving evocation of the brooks in the Casentino; he gets into an argument with Sinon of Troy, counterfeiter of words, who persuaded the Trojans to bring in the Wooden horse. Their exchange is ‘lively’, the vulgarity captures fully Dante’s attention, whereby he earns a very severe reprimand from Virgil.

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