Dante Reading Group (Session 8)

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. 

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.

Purgatorio 8-16

The first cantos of Purgatorio were a happy surprise: Dante met friends, people whom he admired – as he did some in hell, but now he can rejoice in their ‘having made it’. We discovered how much music meant to him and would that we could accompany our readings with the medieval Church music he hears, it punctuates the entire canticle. Virgil emerges as a fellow-traveller: all is new to him as well as to Dante.

With some flexibility for where exactly we end and start each reading, we shall pick up with Nino Visconti (8 – grandson of Ugolino, who has given us the greatest love story of the Commedia); Dante’s dream, Lucia; the guardian at Peter’s gate inscribes P seven times on Dante’s brow, representing the seven capital sins that have to be purged (9); he will admit guilt in the case of pride. In hell there is no specific area for the proud, as pride underlies all transgressions. With the Proud in C 10 we are in Purgatory proper, albeit at the lower level, to progress to Middle and Upper, finally to the Earthly Paradise. Here begins a new experience: illustrations carved on the rock, described as ‘visibile parlare’; these represent aspects of our character that are the opposite of what is being repented (pride/humility). C 11 offers reflections on painters and writers known to Dante, who is cleared of the first of the Ps (C 12). Cs 13 and 14 deal with the envious, recalling Inferno 13, identifying envy as the source of corruption everywhere along the Arno (another P is erased from Dante); C 15: the Angel of generosity helps the poets onwards to the Wrathful (C 16) with Marco Lombardo’s explanation of temporal and spiritual power.

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