Dante Reading Group (Session 11)

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 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 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 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.

Paradiso 1-9

We have completed our rehabilitation journey through Purgatory and are now ‘prepared to leap up to the stars’, as Sayers renders the final line of the canticle. In this session we shall touch briefly on Cantos 1 and 2 of Paradiso, heaven of the Moon, read in full Canto 3 – meet Piccarda, sister of Forese and Corso, and the Empress Constance, women prevented by male power from living their chosen life. In the second heaven, Mercury, we listen to the Emperor Justinian on sectarian violence caused by party allegiance (Canto 6); we are reminded of Inf. 33, Ugolino, as the sins of the fathers are visited on the children; alongside the Emperor is Romeo, a Dante-like figure, a loyal public servant wrongly exiled (envy). In the third Heaven, Venus, cantos 8 & 9, Charles Martel speaks on being deprived of citizenship; we meet Cunizza, who turned her capacity for loving to a good end after some very dodgy years; lastly, the troubadour poet and bishop Folco from Marseilles, and Rahab, the biblical harlot who saved the chosen people. In the heaven of the Sun, where wisdom is celebrated, Dante unites, in harmony and movement to measure, philosophers who had argued bitterly on opposite sides; all are now in agreement as there is only one truth, but we on earth grasp only a fraction of it.

A map will be supplied to help us remember where we are; we shall use the illustrations of Monika Beisner and Liam Ó Broin to help us to visualise each area.

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