Dante Reading Group (Session 13)

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 take 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 Prue Shaw,'s 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.

Paradiso 21-27

Before considering Canto 21, we may comment additionally on the last cantos of our preceding session, then resume our reading of Paradiso with Canto 21: the important encounter with Peter Damian, a writer, a contemplative, in the 7^th heaven, that of Saturn; he bids Dante to report what he sees. It will be important to link this canto to cantos 21 in the two previous canticles. We shall touch on the excessus mentis in Canto 23, on the figure of Mary, the prime mover in Dante’s salvation (maternal similes have punctuated the text from early times). Dante had written in Convivio that he wanted to convey doctrine from the masters to those with lesser education: in Cantos 24, 25, 26 he is given his ‘credentials’ to carry out his mission; he is examined in the three theological virtues (faith, hope, love) by the greater apostles, Peter, James, John. He is inaugurated in his office as prophet who has learnt truths in the aldilà. The opening of Canto 25 is poignant: Dante wants to be crowned with the laurel crown in his ‘bel San Giovanni’, but he really knows he will never see Florence again. Canto 27 has two strong invectives, one from Peter on the corruption in the Vatican, one from Beatrice against greed.

We shall supply a map as a reminder of 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.