Dante Reading Group (Session 14)

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.

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.

Paradiso 28-30

Primum mobile: Cantos 28 & 29 are centred on angels – the nine orders, their creation, those who rebelled and those who remained loyal. Condemnation of those who preach falsely. God’s greatness is mirrored in the number and variety of angels. In Canto 30, the heavenly rose, Beatrice is transfigured beyond Dante’s powers of description, she is ‘il sol de li occhi miei’, she makes her last speech, predictably against ‘la cieca cupidigia’, the root of all evil, and the simonist popes.

St Bernard will replace Beatrice as Dante’s last guide (theology yields to mysticism). The climax of the work is Dante’s ‘homecoming’, as he had said to Brunetto: Virgil is bringing me back home, ‘reducemi a ca’, we shall concentrate on the last canto, for the beginning is in the end, and the rest is silence. Dante has come ‘al divino da l’umano’ and in the final vision the divine is humanized; he needs no guide, he is able to see, to experience, alone, but he shares a glimmer with us.

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.