Dante Reading Group (Session 7)

Our Dante Reading Group is free and open to all. We will be guided through a number of cantos from The Commedia by Dante scholar and Fellow Emeritus, Corinna Salvadori Lonergan of Trinity College Dublin. 

Our readings are taking place over several months and will 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 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 shall refer to the published illustrations of Monika Beisner and Liam Ó Broin, in addition to the illustrations of one of our readers, John Kubiak, to help us to visualise each area.

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.

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.

Purgatorio 1-7

We gladly left hell and are excited to see 'le stelle'. We had a glimpse of what is ahead: Purgatorio, an area where we can feel comfortable, ‘at home’, because time, so basic to our living, returns after the static foreverness of hell. Not only do we have dawn and dusk but there is an atmosphere of contentment: no matter how tough the conditions, the rehab will work, and there will be a last flight, destination eternal happiness. Some ask for prayers from their loved ones still on earth, so that the time in purgatory will be shortened. Indeed, as in both other canticles, we and our behaviour, on our earth, are constantly present.

We shall start our reading of the first six cantos, in Ante-Purgatory, looking mainly at encounters that give a sense of the greater experience. Virgil will continue to accompany Dante, until Beatrice takes over (C 30), but now he is a fellow pilgrim, he has never been to purgatory. The illustrations from our three artists will enable us to get a rich impression of the text.

We shall start with Cato, then Casella (Dante’s musician friend, and share Bernard O’Donoghue’s rendering of the episode); Manfred (3), Belacqua (4 – Beckett’s alter ego), Buonconte, Pia (5), Sordello (6 – Dante’s diatribe against the political state of Italy). If there is time, we shall cover the Virgil / Sordello agnition (7).

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.

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