March 13, 2010
Italy agrees to digitize a bunch of books
via Cronaca.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:37 AM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI begins with an apostrophe to decadent Florence and ends with the punishment of evil counsellors - so Florence's woes are place between the thieves and those who give bad advice, which seems fitting. The first tercet is splendidly horrible, with a reversal in the last line from fame to infamy:
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande
che per mare e per terra batti l'ali
e per lo 'nferno tuo nome si spande!
Florence, rejoice! You fame's so great to tell you beat your wings over the land and seas
and spread your name throughout the deeps of Hell! (26.1-3)
Poor Florence! Poor Dante! For me, who am no Florentiaphile,* the Tuscan politics gets tiresome sometimes. Who cares what stereotype Dante had (or assigns) to Pistoia, and whether it was fair or not? But the man's love of his place, his city, is clear - and I can respect a particularist even if I find his particular love annoying.
The pilgrims move on to the 8th pouch, where evil counselors are tormented in flame. Dante sees them first from the hill above, and compares the moment to a peasant seeing fireflies filling a valley below in summertime.
When they draw closer Dante communicates with only one soul - Ulysses. Virgil speaks for him - telling Dante that Ulysses might scorn his (Tuscan) tongue, because he is a Greek (yet another annoying particularity). Virgil asks Ulysses where he died - and why he is here.
Ulysses tells a tale of searching for knowledge and experience unbounded by God's will. After returning home to Ithaca, he took a boat-load of men and sailed out of the Mediterranean and south in search of the Antipodes, where finally his ship wrecked and all were lost.
The sin? Trying to reach Mount Purgatory without dying - this, from a man who went to the Underworld and back in the Odyssey and narrated by a man who will visit Heaven itself. The difference is that Dante is doing his journeying at God's will, and Ulysses wanted to find out for himself.
What is really amazing, though, is that this story is Dante's - it does not depend on the body of mythology. Dante made it up. That is poetic boldness, the poet's mastery of his subject, when he can rival Homer and make up a new end for Odysseus!
*One of the many things that makes me happy about these Colleges is that our Italian program is based in Rome rather than Florence. Here's this year's program.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:37 AM | Comments (0)
November 9, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXV
Canto XXV
In Canto XXV Dante stretches his powers of surreal description to rival Lucan and Ovid - and he challenges the two classical poets quite specifically. We are still in the Malebolgia of the Thieves, where snakes torment sinners. Dante sees three souls transformed, transmuted, metamorphosized from their human - if naked and degraded - appearance - into something other.
Be silent, Lucan, where you touch upon
wretched Sabellus and Nasidius,
and listen to the arrow I shoot now.
Be silent, Ovid, with your Arethusa
and Cadmus, where your poem turns
this to a serpent, that one to a spring;
I hold no grudge, for never front to front
did you transmute two natures so their forms
were ready to change matter with each other. (25.94-102)
Dante's damned souls are bitten, and through the bite merge and transform into something other in a terrifying way. Esolen speculates that this transmutation is appropriate "for sinners who never respected what is proper to (what is the property of) the indivdiual or family. Now their own boundaries blur in a hideous defacing of the body: a false union, an "improperty," so to speak" (468).
The direct challenge to the auctoritates Lucan and Ovid strikes me as Dante here, three-quarters of his way through Hell, feeling his mastery over his tools. He can deploy language, description, and allusion with the best of them now. Well, with the best save Virgil. Is the anxiety of influence is full-blown, though, when he names them? I'm not certain about that.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXIV
Canto XXIV
Again, this canto starts with contrast - the last pocket was full of the deadly tired hypocrites, laboring under their lead cloaks. Dante himself is tired, and Virgil tells him:
..."You must
shake off your sluggisness," the Teacher said,
"for no one comes to fame who sits in soft
pillows of down, or lies easily in bed,
And when his life is wasted utterly
he leaves such traces of himself behind
as smoke in air or foam upon the sea. (24.46-51)
Virgil is preparing Dante not only to get through the Malebolge, but also "to climb a longer stair" (24.56), the mountain of Purgatory.
Dante gets busy and they climb out of the region of the hypocrites into the region of the thieves - a giant clutch of snakes. Ugh. Snakes. It really does sound like a moment in an Indiana Jones movie - snakes knotted around sinners in horrific detail. Certainly one of the punishments I'd rather not picture.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:56 AM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXIII
Canto XXIII
After all the noise of squabbling devils in Canti XXI and XXII, XXIII begins with silence.
Taciti, soli, sanza compagnia
n'andavam l'un dinanzi e l'altro dopo
come frati minor vanno per via.
Silent, alone, no escort at our side,
we set out, one before and one behind
as Friars Minor walk in single file. (23.1-3)
The silence doesn't last long, and the pilgrims end up fleeing devils coming back for more. Virgil grabs Dante and runs with him - and they tumble into the 6th ditch. There they find the hypocrites, walking slowly, wearing beautiful golden cloaks whose inside is all lead.
Dante runs into two Bolognese friars who recognize his Tuscan dialect. Tedious Guelphage and Ghibellinage passes. Esolen seems more tolerant - "Note how severely Dante condemns those who meddled in political affairs, even when the meddling benefited Dante's own party" (464). Maybe it's because my coffee hasn't set in yet, but I figure Dante's faction inside the Guelphs didn't come out so well in the 1266 settlement of the 36 Good Men. Nevertheless, as Esolen points out in another note, all the named occupants of the Ditch of the Hypocrites are clergy in one way or another.
Just as Dante is about to abuse the friars he catches sight of a man crucified to the path where all the lead-weighed souls pass over him - and one of the two friars reveal that his father-in-law and the whole council of which they were a part suffer the same punishment.
"That soul you wonder at, who lies transfixed,
advised the Pharisees that it was fit
to martyr one man for the people's sake. (23.115-117)
This is Caiphas, who Esolen points out did not call directly for the death of Jesus, since that is not how hypocrites operate. "Yet thought hypocrites usually intend more than they will say, in this case Caiphas spoke more than he intended, and was the victim of his own irony. For Jesus was slain for the people, but not as the priest supposed..." (464).
Dante, as a medieval Christian, has no doubt about Jewish blood guilt for the crucifixion. He identifies that guilt as sown by these men - but he does not pardon it. One of the sad truths of the world is that great art does not heal. It can help, but Dante, the poet of individual responsibility, who finds people in Hell who no one else thought might be there and will find folks in Purgatory who repented great wickedness still believes in inherited group guilt for the Jews.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:45 AM | Comments (1)
October 15, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXII
Canto XXII
Dante continues his devil-farce in Canto XXII. I'll certainly have to come back to this and compare it to some of the devil-play in French farces, which I've spent some time thinking about in public. Certainly, Dante is closer in these two canti, with their sinners bobbing in boiling pitch, poked by demons, to modern popular conceptions of Hell.
The humor here is pretty broad - but the conclusion is actually funny - the devils begin fighting among themselves and fall in - and get stuck together with the tar. We could take this as a serious lesson about how there is no honor among thieves or mutual respect among devils, and that's true, but it misses the point, I think.
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(oh - sorry for the gap - it's midterm and I've been grading)
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM | Comments (0)
October 9, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXI
Canto XXI
Dante begins this Canto with a lovely set of sound effects - read it out loud and see!
Così di ponte in ponte, altro parlando
che la mia comedìa cantar non cura,
venimmo; e tenavamo 'l colmo, quando
restammo per veder laltra fessura
di Malebolge e li altri pianti vani; e vidila mirabilimente oscura
And so from one bridge to the next we came,
talking of things I do not care to sing
within my Comedy, and reached the top,
And rested there to see the other crack of Evil Pouches, and their useless cries; and what we looked upon was wondrous black. (21.1-6)
Those first four lines with their P, C, and O are really something - and he's using them to describe things he will not sing to us.
The Canto ends with the opposite - a vulgar sound all done with T, C, and D.
Per l'argine sinistro volta dienno;
ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta
coi denti, verso lor duca, per cenno;
ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta. (21.136-139)
Then the platoon turned sharp left on the bank,
but first they'd stuck their tongues between their teeth
and blown it at their sergeant for a sign,
and he had made a bugle of his arse.
As Esolen points out, "one musical note in Hell, as it were" (461). The sergeant generating the note is a devil - one of Dante's first band of dedicated demon tormenters. This ditch is full of boiling pitch and bribe-takers; the demons circle the bubbling goo poking any grafter who sticks a body part above the surface. Their names are, as Esolen points out, very Screwtapey: Calcabrina works out to Tramplefrost, Cagnazzo becomes Larddog, Rubicante becomes Redfroth (460). I'd never thought, though, that these crazy compounds should remind us of the brigands and politicians of Dante's time. Remember that one of his great patrons (though perhaps not this early?) was Bigdog of the della Scala family, Cangrande.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM
October 5, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XX
Canto XX
The next pocket of the Malebolge contains those who predicted the future. Their punishment fits their crime very visibly - as Vergil says about one of them:
See how he's made a breast out of his back.
because he wished to see too far ahead,
now he looks back and walks a backward path.
(20.37-39)
That is, their heads are screwed around to face their backs, and they back through hell at a slow walk, weeping down their backs.
Vergil seems a little more hostile to these than even to the average damned souls. Esolen suggests that his extremely hostile narration of the founding of his own city of Mantua by Manto, the daughter of Tiresias, may be an implicit self-defense against charges of magic (458). In the Middle Ages the Aeneid, like the Bible, was used for fortune telling - in the sortes Virgilianae one picked up a copy of Vergil's poem, flipped to a random page, stabbed a line with your finger, and found your fortune. The sortes Biblicae was the same thing, but with a Bible.
The only memorable medieval person in this circle is Michael Scot, court alchemist and astrologer to Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Astrology is one of those pagan practices the Church was never able to stamp out. Yes, pagan - though there may be Christian's who have a very high mark for predestination, we have to leave room for the free will. If stars control things, there's no free will. And there astrology columns still are in newspapers.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:46 AM
October 2, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIX
Canto XIX
Dante begins with an epic apostrophe - but not of the muses:
O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci
che le cose di Dio, che di bontate
deon essere spose, e voi rapaci
per oro e per argento avolterate
or convien che per voi suoni la tromba,
però che ne la terza bolgia* state.
Simon Magus, O you wretched crew
of his disciples! The things of God should be
espoused to righteiousness and love, and you
Rapacious wolves, you pander them for gold,
foul them for silver! Sound the trumpet now
for you -- for this third pocket is your place.
The simonists, those who like Simon Magus want to reduce sacred authority to a cash transaction, are planted upside down in holes, with fire burning the souls of their feet. The red-hottests pair of feet turn out to be those of a recent pope, Nicholas V. Esolen cleverly points out that Nicholas had inverted the purpose of the hierarchy of which he was head, so this makes an example of Hell fitting the sin.
Nicholas mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII - he wonders if the prediction was off by a few years and Boniface is already dead and waiting to be plunge Nicholas deeper into the hot hole. Dante then leaps forward to Boniface's even worse successor, Clement V.
It is clear from all this that Dante is generally troubled by the temporal power of the Church - he takes it all the way back to the Donation of Constatine. Dante's problem is that the sources of temporal authority he wanted to like were the Empire and the Kingdom of France - neither of them very likeable, either.
Still a problem today, and no more liable to a solution other than the individual holiness of clerics and just uprightness of rulers. It could happen.
*When I was proofreading I noticed this little moment of structural orientation I had slid past before. Handy!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:14 AM | Comments (1)
September 25, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVIII
Canto XVIII
Here we are right in the middle of Hell - or at least in the middle of the Inferno - the jump from XVII to XVIII is the mid-point of the 34 canti - and Dante kicks off with structure again. The first word in the canto is Luogo, "place." We can't quite capture that in English - for Luogo è in inferno we can't say "Place there is in Hell," but that's our problem. Dante is reminding us to check the chart, mental or posted on the wall. Once again, I'm a little amazed that the Esolen's translation in the Modern Library doesn't have one!
Here's a nice one, in case you're getting lost.
Dante explains the region they're starting to cross, the Malebolge, "Pouches of Evil," Esolen gives us as ringing the deep pit in the center of Hell (18.2). They will cross the trenches on little stone bridges that run like spokes.
Here we get an image of Hell right out of the popular imagination - horned devils with whips driving naked sinners. Dante compares the streams - some going in one direction, some the other - to pilgrims during the Jubilee crossing the Ponte San Angelo in Rome, half headed to St Peter's on the south bank of the Tiber and half leaving.
Dante, of course, disapproved of the great Jubilee of 1300 because he hated the pope who called it, Boniface VIII. If you want to get a really good idea of what Boniface was up to without half the sarcasm of Dante, you ought to read Kessler and Zacharias'
Dante loathed Boniface, and is going to prepare a place for him in the next Pouch.
This Pouch, though, is for pimps, seducers, and flatterers - with a whore as the archetypical flatterer. I'm amused that his example of a serial seducer is Jason, as in the Argonauts. No offense to any Jasons out there, but I always wonder what parents are thinking who name their child after such an unpleasant classical figure as that one.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:14 AM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVII
Canto XVII
Virgil threw Dante's belt over the edge in Canto XVI to summon a beast to ride down the cliffs. When Geryon arrives he is horrifying - a "likeness of deceit" (17.7). He is, after all, their ride from the circles of the violent to the circles of the fraudulent.
The mythological Geryon that Hercules killed had 3 bodies. Dante's version is a composite - kindly old man's face on a serpent's body with a lion's legs and a scorpion's sting - and he smells. But that's who they are going to ride.
Virgil sends Dante to look at the last of the 3 categories of the Violent against God, the Usurers, while he explains to Geryon that one of the passengers will have human weight. Dante wanders over to where the usurers squat, brushing fire-flakes off their skin. Dante can make nothing of their features, but they each wear a money bag around their necks with their coats of arms (Esolen points out they were not driven to usury by poverty, but by greed).
Though Dante recognizes two Florentine coats of arms, the damned soul that speaks is a Scrovegni of Padua. Esolen doesn't tell us, but every art historian can, that this is Reginaldo degli Scrovegni, whose son Enrico commissioned Giotto to paint the Arena or Scrovegni Chapel, partly in expiation for his father's sins and partly for his own.
The picture here is the Last Judgement from the chapel's west wall. Giotto may have heralded the Renaissance, but there's nothing not right out of Medieval Last Judgements here - Christ is enthroned above, surrounded by a rainbow. He is flanked by the 12 Apostles and choirs of angels. Below to His right are the saved, queuing up in orderly fashion to approach the Throne. Fire pours out of the left side of Christ's mandorla and streams down to Hell, where sinners are tormented.
At the foot of the cross a kneeling man presents a model of the chapel, carried by a kneeling Dominican friar, to a group of saints who will convey it to Christ. That's Enrico Scrovegni.
Dante could perhaps have seen the chapel, even - it was completed around 1305 in Padua, a city he seems to have visited. Think I'll be showing it in class? You bet!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:08 AM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVI
Canto XVI
Dante shows the same reticence in Canto XVI about the sin and the same courteous interest in the sinners - three Florentines run up and find a different way to evade the 'no stopping' rule - they form a circle around the 2 pilgrims and keep moving - "as naked champions, muscles slicked with oil" (16.22). Again, I think we should remember the crowd at this level and wonder about the simile.
The four Florentines leave Virgil out of the conversation as they discuss the decline of their city. Ser Brunetto had blamed it on rustics moving in from Fiesole. Here, Dante blames the new-rich.
There is some odd by-play with Dante's belt - Virgil takes it and throws it over the edge of a cliff to summon the monster Geryon, on whom they will ride down to the 8th Circle. Esolen reminds us that though the belt is ambiguous, Dante won't have another one until Virgil makes him a new belt from a rush at the foot of Mount Purgatory. Belts obviously have something to do with restraint or constraint, but it's not clear quite what.
Most noticeable in the canto is Dante's naming the work! We're almost halfway through the 34 canti of Hell, and here Dante addresses the reader:
ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note
di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro,
s'elle non sien di lunga grazia vòte
. . . but I cannot
keep silent here, and, Reader, by the notes
of this my Comedy, I swear - and may
They keep in favor long(16.127-130)
So - a comedy. Remember, comedy is what ends happily and is probably low and vulgar (or so Aristotle). Dante is certainly going to end happily, and he's writing in the volgare. That's enough for the name. The attribute divina shows up quite soon after his death - and the favor has lasted more than 700 years.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:52 AM | Comments (1)
September 15, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XV
Canto XV
Canto XV begins on the same structural note with which XIV ended - Dante observes the diking system of Hell - ingeniously made, like those which the Flemings make. It interests me that he uses such a foreign example first, then mentions the Paduans. He certainly would have been to Padua sometime - it would have been easy to get to Ravenna that way - but he never traveled in the North. I suppose Dutch dikes were already a byword. Lots of Florentines would have been to Bruges, of course.
The dike system provides a setting - Dante and Virgil are walking along the top at a higher level than the sinners racing below (remember, the blasphemers lie supine, the usurers squat, and the sodomites run).
When following the dike we met a band
of spirits coming toward us, and each one
stared at us hard as one is wont to stare
As someone in the dark of the new moon,
knitting their brows to keep us keen in sight
as an old tailor threads the needle's eye. (15.16-21)
Esolen notes this simile a little oddly: "The images in this tercet derive from common experience in town life and thus prepare us to meet one of Dante's townsmen and to hear from him a harsh appraisal of that town" (445). I certainly get the everyday life aspect, but why would that make us think of Florence rather than everyday life?
Oh well - more pertinently, I think these two tercets are doing something else - and stand in contrast to Dante's action just below, when "even the charred features could not keep / My intellect from recognizing them" (27-8). Dante's use of vision corresponds to something we've seen over and over again - the reference to Aristotelian science and the Thomist appreciation of what goes wrong in sin - that sinners have failed in their intellect as well as in their flesh.
Contrariwise, the hard stare of the sinners is not the intellect-laden gaze, but cruising. Remember, the sinners in Dante's Hell have never given up their sin - that's why they're there. People who gave up their sins are elsewhere - Purgatory and Heaven. Sinners who chose lust first and then chose God show up in Purgatory XXVI - sodomites explicitly among them.*
So it should be no surprise that a band of souls suffering for having spent time cruising under the new moon are still at it.
Dante greets the soul whose charred features he sees through with the polite pronoun and a title - only the second time in Hell Dante uses voi. Dante makes clear his respect for ser Brunetto as a mentor, "la cara e buona imagine paterna" (15.83).
The actual sin doesn't get discussed in this canto - and Brunetto doesn't even want to name many of his fellow sinners, and only describes the sin as "the same fall."
Know, in a word, that they were scholars all,
great men of letters, clerks of wide renown,
made filthy in the world by the same fall.
In somma sappi che tutti fur cherci
e litterati grandi e di gran fama
d'n peccato medesmo al mondo lerci.
Listen to those sharp, bright clicks in the Italian! -pi, -ti, -ci, -di
So, without ever going into detail, ser Brunetto runs away - and Dante favors him with a last simile. He runs like someone in a race, "and of those he seemed / The one who wins, and not the one who loses" (15.123-4).
*Yes, yes, I know that some modern commentators on Scripture suggest, for good reasons involving things like references to Sodom in other parts of the Old Testament, other sins for the condemnation of Sodom, like violating host/guest relations or uncharitableness - but Dante had no question what counted as sodomy, and its his poem.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:07 AM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIV
Canto XIV
Canto XIV brings us to the 3rd round of the 7th circle, the worst of the violent, the Violent against God. Dante divides them into three groups. This Canto concentrates on blasphemers, while the other two groups, sodomites and usurers, take up the next 3 canti.
Nevertheless, the schema for punishment across all 4 canti occurs here:
Some lay flat on their backs upon the ground,
and some were sitting huddled at the knees,
and others roved about continually
The greatest number were of those who ran;
the least, who took their tortures lying down--
but their tongues were the freest in their cries.
Esolen points out that the ones who are the worst are treated first - the blasphemers against God (and the gods?). Their punishment is to lie flat on their backs, where all they can do is writhe under the falling fire. The usurers squat, able at least to brush off new-fallen embers. The sodomites are able to run around, dodging the fire - which falls in an especially lovely metaphor.
Sovra tutto 'l sabbion, d'un cader lento,
piovean di foco dilatate falde,
come di neve in alpe sanza vento.
Over the desert, in a gentle fall,
there rained broad flakes of fire, as in the Alps
the snow comes falling on a windless day.
(14.28-30)
Gorgeous - but painful - and the damned spend all their time brushing the "fresh flakes from their skin" (14.42).
Dante meets here one of the few classical souls tormented for sin instead of serving as a trusty under the demonic administration. (Rather few demons, per se, seem to show up in Hell.) The interlocutor in Canto XIV is Capaneus, one of the Seven Against Thebes, struck dead by Zeus with a thunderbolt forged by Vulcan, Dante parading what he's learned from Statius, not Aeschylus (thanks, Prof. Esolen! I wondered briefly if it was Ovid and then looked in the back). Statius has got to be one of the lesser-read classics; I have an undergraduate degree in the field and never picked him up. He's going to come up again later - he's a lot more important to Dante (both the poet and the narrator) than anyone but Beatrice and Virgil.
Capaneus is a good example of the impenitent - the roaring sinner who doesn't even pretend he doesn't deserve his hellfire. He is still damning Zeus - though it is God's Justice doing the punishing. His blasphemy seems to be declaring his own manhood to be his god as much of his specific denunciation of the Olympian, though.
The Canto ends with one of those odd structural moments where I wonder what Dante is up to - and realize that I have more reading to do. Dante is wondering about the source for the four rivers of Hell (Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus - analogues of the four rivers of Eden). Virgil's explanation goes off to the tears of the Old Man of Ida, a giant statue on the island of Crete who seems analogous to the giant idol in the Book of Daniel - in Nebuchadnezzar's dream. I see the parallel but I don't know that I understand why it shows up here - and I wonder where it comes from. Did Dante make this up? Esolen doesn't help with the last question.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:04 PM | Comments (0)
September 4, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIII
I just noticed something odd about the Esolen Inferno from the Modern Library - no map! I don't think I've ever had a translation of Dante that didn't have a diagram of each place in each volume (the rings of Hell for the Inferno, the Mountain for Purgatorio, etc).
This sprang to mind because of this bit:
"Before you enter farther, you should know
that you are now within the second round,"
said my good Teacher..."
E 'l buon maestro "Prima che più entre,
sappi che se' nel secondo girone",
mi cominciò a dire...
I find it impossible to believe that Dante himself didn't have a sheet of something pinned to the wall with a diagram on it. What wouldn't we give for that! I'll have to look into the tradition of mapping Hell and figure out who did the earliest known version after Dante.
There's also a fine touch in the first two lines quoted that doesn't really come through in the translation -- the word Esolen renders as "Before," which is going to go with an "until" further down, is prima. In the next line comes secondo. Even though one of these is a time marker and the other is an ordinal, they're still "first" and "second," "before" and "after."
So in answer to a question my father asked last weekend, I'm trying to get through this once well in English, but I am looking at the Italian when something catches my eye.
Canto XIII is about the most self-absorbed of all the damned, the Suicides. Let's not indulge them by talking about them any more.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM | Comments (0)
September 2, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XII
Canto XII
A few quick notes about thoughts Canto XII threw up -
Dante and Virgil have to climb down a rock-slide to get to the next ring. I wonder where Dante got the idea that the Harrowing of Hell - Christ's Descent into Hell Virgil described in Limbo was so violently ruinous to the physical structure of Hell? Is it an ancient topos, or something new to Dante? I really should ask my acquaintance Georgia Frank over at Colgate, who has studied early descent into Hell and purgatory. Maybe we can get her to come do a guest turn in the spring of '11 when we teach this!
Remember that fraud is something that beasts can't do? The Minotaur, of course, is the offspring of a fraudulent cow - Daedalus made a cow for Pasiphaë to crawl into so she could be impregnated by Poseidon's bull (oh, those Greeks!). The Minotaur, though, is guarding the violent, along with the centaurs. Hmm.
About the Centaurs, who are racing around the river of fire, shooting arrows at any violent man (mainly famous rulers) who rises too far out of the stream, again, half-beasts to guard the bestially violent - specifically those who were violent against others. Also on my coffee table is Machiavelli's The Prince, which will come up in November in European Studies 101, and Machiavelli makes a rather different use of centaurs in his chapter 18 - "In What Mode Faith Should be Kept by Princes."
Thus, you must know that there are two kinds of combat: one with laws, the other with force. The first is proper to man, the second to beasts; but because the first is often not enough, one must have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the man. This role was taught covertly to princes by ancient writers, who wrote that Achilles, and many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised, so that he would look after them with his discipline. To have as teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting. (The Prince, Mansfield translation, p 69)
Machiavelli and Dante both link the centaurs with rulers, one for training and one for punishment. Hm. Since one of the ways I amuse myself when I read Machiavelli is thinking of him as writing a manual for getting Lorenzo de Medici to Hell even faster than the average member of that family, noticing this helps.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:47 AM | Comments (0)
September 1, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XI
Canto XI
Is it worth talking about Dante as a fair judge?
Dante is even-handed only in the sense that he damns a certain number of Guelphs - otherwise he's not to be trusted. I was thinking about this because I had a talk this weekend with a friend of a scene in Purgatory where someone Dante thinks was pretty bad in life scraped in because of a moment-of-death conversion (I can't find it now - it'll wait). Some of the folks in Hell don't seem to have been given a chance for repentance, even when they had the leisure for it - like Pope Celestine in Canto III - who, after all, lived for 10 months in imprisonment after making what Dante calls "il gran rifiuto." Think he might have repented?
Similarly, Dante sometimes works with poor historical information, like here in Canto XI, when he damns Pope Anastasius as a Monophysite (one of the last of the Christological heresies of early Christianity). But then Dante was no historian - there's a reason most of his characters are, more or less, current events. By the way, I'm not at all offended by the idea of a pope in hell (I like John Chrysostom's quip, that hell is paved with priest's skulls), but given the rules Dante sets up it seems unlikely - they have too many chances for sacramental confession. I have no particular doubt that Teddy Kennedy made a good end, for instance. He had a lot to confess, but so do I.
Dante's got a job, though - he has to populate the rings of Hell.
Oh - a quick aside - I wonder why the Modern Library and Anthony Esolen titled the three books Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. He may well have explained that in some front matter I missed, but it seems a little odd to stick to the Italian in one but not the other two. Maybe a pure marketing decision - name recognition for the first may really be that high?
OK - back to the rings of Hell. Now is a time to draw on the board again - Hell has order inside which chaos is confined. Look at the bottom right (Christ's left) of the mosaic from the west wall of the cathedral at Torcello (one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon). Those boxes each contain a variety of the damned - I'd click to enlarge. Similarly, Virgil offers in Canto XI a quick explanation of the layout of the rings of Hell.
All the remaining sins have some element of force or fraud - we're past the traditional Seven Deadly Sins and into something more offensive to God. The violent are neatly divided into those who have committed violence against their neighbors, against themselves, or against God. The lowest rings, though, are crimes of fraud. Or,
Since fraud's a sin peculiar to mankind
God hates it more; and so the fraudulent
sink farther down, assailed by greater pain.
(11.25-27)
The Torcello mosaic and Dante go a long way to reminding us that the Middle Ages exulted in order. Whether they achieved it or not is another question - but any explanation of the history of ideas or the history of culture that presents some kind of change from disorder and darkness to balance and brightness because of some self-styled Renaissance is up against it - what can be more neurotically balanced than Aquinas? What vision of the Cosmos is more orderly than Ptolemy's as elaborated by Muslims and medieval Christians? The philosophical movement that goes along with imitation natural landscapes is the Enlightenment, not the Scholastics - who preferred their horti to be conclusi.
Oh well - professors are always fighting yesterday's battles. In fact, most of my students don't seem to have a lot of cultural baggage about the Middle Ages. They haven't really ingested any periodization at all. I should probably shut up and move on.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM | Comments (0)
August 30, 2009
Thinking of people in big, hot containers in the ground
You know, like in Canto X.
While thousands have fled, two people who tried to ride out the firestorm in a backyard hot tub were critically burned. The pair in Big Tujunga Canyon, on the southwestern edge of the fire, "completely underestimated the fire" and the hot tub provided "no protection whatsoever," Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said Sunday.The two individuals made their way to firefighters and were airlifted out by a sheriff's rescue helicopter. They received adequate notification to evacuate from deputies but decided to stay, Whitmore said.
One of the two was treated and released and the other remained hospitalized in stable condition. A third person was burned Saturday in an evacuation area along Highway 2 near Mount Wilson, officials said. Details of that injury were not immediately known.
"There were people that did not listen, and there were three people that got burned and got critically injured because they did not listen," Schwarzenegger said at a news conference at the fire command post.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:41 PM | Comments (1)
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto X
Canto X
Canto IX was a Canto of waiting - Canto X gives Dante more to think about than he likes. He see great figures from both sides of the Florentine political schism damned in the tomb of the Epicureans - and this leads him to some thinking about poets. Dante is, perhaps, always about poets and poetry.
Remember the photo of les Alyscamps from my contact Nick? Look at this Gustave Doré version (the resolution is too poor to bother taking it from Wikipedia and reloading it here). Dore has a great picture, but he has the historical phenomenon wrong. Oh, well - what can you do with the Romantics? Still, the Modern Library Esolen translation is printing them, so they're going to come up.
As Dante says, "The lids have all been raised" (10.8), but you can see that in Nick's picture as well. Indeed, Roman sarcophagi seldom have their original lids; they were usually taken and recycled into later buildings or art works. In fact, lots of the Alyscamps might have ended up in the facade of St. Gilles du Gard and the cathedral of St Trophime in Arles - Romanesque carvers were never ones to overlook a good supply of pre-quarried marble. And Arles had nothing particularly good local. We call that Green Architecture nowadays.
Of course, the Epicureans in the red-hot tomb wouldn't have objected in life, because then they believed that death meant the extinction of the soul. Now that they have found out otherwise they might appreciate more permanent monuments on Earth.
Dante first talks with Farinata degli Uberti, an unpleasant Ghibelline; he thinks Dante a bounder, which he probably was. Then Dante talks to another resident of the tomb, Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, a Guelph and father of one of Dante's poet friends. Cavalcante is worried about his son, who died only months after the action is set. Indeed, the foresight of the dead is confusing - though Dante tries to clear it up. How did Ciacco prophesy? How is it that Cavalcante doesn't know about his son?
Farinata rather graciously explains that the closer the event the less clear it is.
"As a man with bad vision," he replied
"we dimly see things far away. So much
splendor the sovereign Lord still shines on us.
When things draw near, or happen, emptiness
is all we see. If no one brings us news,
we can know nothing of your human state. (10.100-105)
I'll have to think about the optics of that. What are the implications for vision if the splendor (splende) is descending from God?
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:59 PM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2009
I'm thinking these dog-groomers belong in the circle of the sodomites
Really. Go look. Are these cuts sins against nature, or what?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:25 PM | Comments (1)
Was the model who undressed in the Met naked, or nude?
Hyman asked, "Why is this wrong? There were thousands of people in the Met today looking at nudes as art, but as soon as there is a real nude, it's a big problem."Neill had the same question, which she posed to the security guard who detained her.
"She told me there were naked statues everywhere," the guard said. "I said, 'Those statues are 400 years old. You're from the 21st century.'
I vote, with Robert Graves, for nude. This is sly. It's rhetorical.
The Naked and the Nude
Robert Graves
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.
The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.
The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!
Sorry - Canto X is taking me longer than usual - but take the Gorgons pursuing the nude as a reminder of IX.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:15 AM
August 27, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto IX
Canto IX
Canto IX is a Canto of anticipation - Virgil and Dante wait outside the gate of the City of Dis for someone to open the door. I noticed three things - two of them go together and the third bewildered me for a bit - Esolen's note helped a lot, though I'm going to have to see what the Lectura Dantis commentary* makes of it, too.
First the bewildering bit:
O voi ch'avete li'ntelletti sani,
mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
sotto 'l velame de li versi strani. (9.61-63)
O you whose intellects see clear and whole,
gaze on the doctrine that is hidden here
beneath the unfamiliar verses' veil
The literal sense is easy enough - Dante is addressing (ideal) living readers, asking them to interpret - to read verses for doctrine hidden behind the veil. But what? This occurs as Virgil turns Dante away from Medusa and covers his eyes to save him from petrification. Is it to tell us to look when Dante can't? But then what are we to see?
Actually I think that's pretty close - we, readers who Dante kindly addresses as persons whose intellects see clear and whole, are to look at Medusa. He can't.
Esolen helps here. "Dante, we must understand, is in real danger. When Virgil covers his charge's faace with his hands lest he see the Gorgon and be turned to stone, we must not think it idle....Whatever the danger is (despair?), we are to remember that its approach to Dante might well cause the loss of his eternal soul" (428). Esolen also refers to Dante's explanation of the 4 ways of interpreting (from the Letter to Can Grande). Since we can read this literally as turning to stone or (the moral sense) the loss of his soul by staying stuck in Hell we are reading beyond the veil. How does that sound? It satisfied me over coffee, at least.
The picture on the right, from the photo stream of my Flickr friend Nick in Exsilio, brings us to the 2 related points. There are two great moments of classical recall and reuse in Canto IX - one of which Dante may have gotten in the folkloric sense.
First, Dante asks Virgil for some reassurance - Dante is once again on the verge of the despair Esolen mentions. Dante asks "has anyone from Limbo ever been this far in Hell?" (tercet 6). Virgil replies that he himself has been all the way to the circle of Judas, when sent by the witch Erichtho to drag a soul up to the land of the living to speak a prophesy. That's a reference to Lucan's Pharasalia, book 6, where just like in Virgil's Aeneid, book 6, we read about the Underworld. We last saw Lucan in the Castle of Limbo in the company of Homer, Horace, and Ovid. Ah, intertextuality!
So, yes, Virgil has walked this path before - yet another reason for Dante to stop whining.
But once the angel from Heaven opens the gates of Dis and our pilgrims walk through, they see a vast field of jumbled tombs, which Dante compares to the Alyscamps at Arles (thanks, Nick!) and a sarcophagus field at Pola - across the Adriatic from Ravenna. You may also remember the Alyscamps from some very orange and yellow van Gogh paintings, which show a rather prettified park version. In Dante's day it was more of a mess, probably - an area outside the city walls filled with tombs. Alyscamps is the Occitan for what northern French calls "Champs Elysees." In medieval legend, which may have some relevance for Dante, these were the tombs of the army of Roland, slain by Saracens. Vivid visual image for a field of tombs, though.
*So far only the first two volumes are out. Each Canto gets a good essay in commentary, but each essay's author is free to focus very narrowly. So far it's always been interesting but never immediately useful. I'm sure the 2nd time through I will mine lots more to talk about with students.
---
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM | Comments (1)
August 26, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VIII
Canto VIII
It occurred to me that I ought to dig up some creative commons licensed art occasionally - so here is Delacroix's "The Bark of Dante" - Dante in red and grey; Virgil in brown; and Phlegyas, a damned son of Mars, nude and wrapped in blue. Delacrois really does capture the energy of Phlegyas, who rows the fasting moving transport in Hell. The city of Dis glows red-hot in the background. Esolen compares it to the New Jerusalem (428), but it's also a counterpart to the quiet castle of the virtuous pagans in Limbo.
Dante recognizes the soul gnawing on the boat - one of his rivals in Florence, a man who profited from Dante's exile. Dante lets go of his anger, and wishes to see him suffer.
"Teacher, I've got a hankering," said I,
to see them dunk that spirit in this swill
before we leave the lake and disembark."
And he replied, "You will enjoy your fill
before the farther beach comes into sight.
Such a desire is good to satisfy." (8.52-57)
None of this namby pamby nil nisi bonum de mortuis here, which is, after all, a sentiment based more on a pagan fear of the restless dead than on theology. Dante's anger is just - and Justice is the key to Hell. Mercy is the key to Purgatory, but we're not there yet. Somewhere Thomas Aquinas teaches that contemplating the smoke rising from Hell will be one of the just delights of Heaven (I don't know, I'm half remembering it and have no chance of finding the citation while sitting at the kitchen table - anyone have an idea?). We'll see. Certainly the damned soul of Filippo Argenti does nothing to ask for mercy from Dante's. The damned do not apologize. That's why they're damned.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM | Comments (1)
August 25, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VII
Canto VII
After the punishment of the gluttonous we next see the shared punishment of the avaricious and the spendthrift - mirror images of each others' sins. Dante sets them up as the extremes from the Aristotelian golden mean of possession - and then asks Virgil to explain Fortune. This will be another good opportunity to talk about cosmology, because Virgil explains Fortune as the angel of our earthly sphere, who shares out power and wealth between peoples, taking from one and giving to another.
Fortune's Wheel is one of the major images of the later Middle Ages - and until this reading I'd never noticed how Dante shifts the familiar Wheel to a Sphere - Fortune rotates our sphere, not a wheel for him (7.95). Interesting! I wonder if that ever made it into the illustrations?
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 AM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VI
Canto VI
The damned of the third circle are the gluttons, wallowing in a mire and beaten by a hard winter rain:
...de la piova
etterna, maladetta, fredda e greve;
regola e qualità mai no l'è nova. 6.7-9
...where the rain falls
eernally, accursed, ponderous, cold --
changeless in rhythm, changeless in quality.
Even with little or no Italian you ought to be able to read that out loud and hear the sound effect Dante wants. Brrr.
Canto VI also brings us our first Florentine (Paolo and Francesca were from the Adriatic coast - Ravenna and Rimini), and provides us with a good example of Dante's topicality. The soul identifies himself only by his nickname, Hog, and we don't know any more about him. Dante asks him what will happen in Florence in the next few years (there's no speculation in this canto on how the damned know the future - we'll get that later) and the Hog predicts.
Esolen valiantly notes:
Naturally, few readers now will care deeply about the fortunes of Blacks or Whites, Guelphs or Ghibellines. We should remember, however, that Dante's visition -- the incarnational vision of Christianity -- was never, and could never be, a vision that ignored the goodness of this very world that Christ entered to save. Florence is part of that world; then even Florence plays a part in the divine plan.
I think that sounds like a man bored by years of having to explain the Blacks and Whites, Guelphs and Ghibellines (Dante was a White Guelph, by the way, which was why he was exiled in 1302). Esolen is right, but Florence in 1300 still isn't very interesting.
I think we can use the tedious topical references to remind ourselves what a great poem this is - the Comedia overcomes its topicality. Otherwise we would have stopped reading it long ago.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 AM | Comments (1)
August 23, 2009
Ok - I'm a bad medievalist
But I want to start the day for Canto V with this on the big screen.
And isn't the "Ladies -- all the ladies..." part MUCH better here than in the Salt'n'Peppa version? And there's Glockenspiel! Too hell with more cowbell! More glockenspiel!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:43 PM
August 22, 2009
Given my current blogging hobby . . .
. . . I'm wondering to which circle Dante would send this man:
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:36 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto V
Canto V
Canto IV ended with the pair of pilgrims heading "out of the quiet, into the trembling air--/Into a place where nothing ever shines" (4.150-151). In Canto V we are assaulted by the shouting and grunting of Minos -- who is very rude for a king and judge. I suppose that Minos also presents the first horrible body of Hell, as he whips his tail around his torso, with the number of loops representing the circle of Hell to which the soul is sent. I've never quite understood the monstrous conflation of Minos and the Minotaur - I wonder where Dante would have learned Greek myths other than Ovid? He certainly knew the Metamorphoses, but would he have known the Heroides? I'm not at all sure. It's been so long since i've read the Ariadne and Theseus section of the Heroides that I don't remember how much topical detail about Minos it carries. I've always wondered if Dante was running together Minos and Midas - specifically the Midas-judging-Apollo-and-Pan story.
Canto V begins with a quick explanation of the structural principle of Hell, narrowing from the top as one descends:
So I descended from the outer ring down to the next, which belts less space about but stings the souls to greater agony. (5.1-3)
and Minos's body provides a weird echo:
Discerns what place in Hell is fit for him: belts himself with his tail as many times as there are grades the sinner must descend. (5.10-12)
The hardest Canto for big-R and little-r Romantics to deal with is probably Canto V, where Courtly Love comes in for some hard knocks. I'm not in the mood to blog about Paolo and Francesca except to say that luckily I will be team teaching with a friend who regularly teaches troubador material and has no illusions about chaste ladies and ideal knights, even if she does want to believe that Arthur existed.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:58 AM | Comments (1)
August 20, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto IV
Canto IV
Canto III ends with Dante falling into unconsciousness, and IV begins with a boom that shakes him awake. Not every pair of Cantos carries action across the break so smoothly (or jarringly, as in this case), but the transitions are always worth checking. Dante was a thorough craftsman. There is certainly lots of debate about the making of the poem - he started it in exile, probably in 1304, he seems to have published Inferno in 1314. That gives a lot of time for polishing.
I think the urge to see Dante as a poet who begins uncertainly is an example of the (Romantic?) failure to separate maker from creation - to assume that Dante (in this example) is speaking authentically as Dante, that he is afraid, that he does not know where he is, that he is learning from Virgil as he goes along. I'm calling the Pilgrim "Dante" out of laziness and convention more than anything. I don't believe this is Dante Alighieri speaking to us from the heart - this is a finely constructed object of art. It certainly has stress fractures and may even have some bad lines (I'm not enough of a judge of the Italian to say - though this effort will surely help that), but the Commedia makes much more sense as a unity. If there's ever a poem that repays formalist analysis it's this one.
In Canto IV we enter Limbo - and Dante asks Virgil one of those hard questions - did no one leave here before the Resurrection? What about those unbaptized infants?Is this fair??
Well, if 'fair' means playing by the rules, this is fair. It's also hard lines on the virtuous pagans. Dante suggests, though he lists only big name Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs, that virtuous Jews from before the Incarnation were saved at the Harrowing of Hell, when Christ descended. What happens to later Jews we will consider later.
Dante is more interested at this point in showing us that there is a hierarchy in Limbo, a hierarchy not of happiness or contentment but honor. There is honor in limbo for the greatest souls.
I've always thought that the appearance of the first epic list of names here is hardly an accident. Dante is not only giving us a long list of virtuous unbelievers - among whom he includes 2 or 3 Muslims - because he's in a castle full of them but also because, in Virgil's company, he has just met Homer, Ovid, and Lucan. I think because he is accepted into their circle as a poet, he demonstrates his mastery of the genre. If we don't believe that we have to take refuge in believing the narrative and think that a person, Dante, is walking all around the only castle in Hell with decent lighting looking at nametags.
The Canto ends with the pair leaving this Castle with clear light, headed into darkness. Dante does it with a LOT of words ending in -a.
La sesta compagnia in due si scema:
per altra via mi mena il savio duca
fuor de la queta, ne l'aura che trema.
E vegno in parte ove non è che luca.
Esolen gives us:
The company of six is cut by two,
and my wise guide leads me another way,
out of the quiet, into the trembling air --
Into a place where nothing ever shines
"Trembling air" sounds lovely, but when we turn the page we will find out what makes it tremble.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:27 AM | Comments (0)
August 19, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto III
Canto III
The inscription over the Gate of Hell:
I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE,
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL PAIN,
I AM THE WAY TO GO AMONG THE LOST.JUSTICE CAUSED MY HIGH ARCHITECT TO MOVE
DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.BEFORE ME THERE WERE NO CREATED THINGS
BUT THOSE THAT LAST FOREVER -- AS DO I.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE.
The hard thing is not to show students that Hell is hopeless, but that Love created it. Virgil gives us a help in the 6th tercet:
We have come to the place I spoke about,
where you would see the souls who dwell in pain,
for they have lost the good of intellect. (16-19)
Esolen's Appendix C will also be a help - a big dose of Aquinas. The people in Hell have gotten what they sought - separation from God, the Trinity described as Omnipotence, Wisdom and Love. If Love is to give someone, finally, what he wants then Love has to create a place like Hell. Hard lines, but it makes an intellectual sense. It won't satisfy them - I know I was one of two people out of about 18 who got it the first time when I took Dante as an undergraduate - but there we go. Maybe one of the course outcomes should be "Students will realize the way they want the world to be has consequences."
I, too, prefer the idea that Hell is not eternal - that it's really just a harder version of Purgatory, but so far as I've heard the only major 20th Century Catholic theologian to think about that possibility seriously was Hans Urs von Balthasar (Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?), but I'm not really interested in reading theology much. I'll wager with Aquinas and try to scrape in to Heaven.*
By the way, the line immediately before "We have come to the place I spoke about" reminds us of Canto II. Virgil tells Dante, "here you must put all cowardice to death" (15). Dante is going to have trouble doing that. Like us his feelings are going to get in the way of understanding again and again.
Indeed, the first time he hears the wails of damned souls he weeps - and these are the souls who, like Dante in Canto II, unwilled what they willed, changed every plan with every thought. Angels who were neither rebels nor faithful, people who never lived well or badly. Dante, and Justice, respect more those who sin boldly. This is also the first example of a punishment to fit the crime: these souls are damned to follow a banner moving fast - to finally follow, not hang back and consider what they might or might not do.
In this Canto, too, we get the first example of Dante putting people in Hell because he doesn't like their politics. Most of those are tedious factional problems of Florence, but one soul Dante recognizes "che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto," "the craven one, who made the great denial" (61). He almost certainly means Pope Celestine V, who abdicated the papacy in 1294 and left the way open for Dante's least favorite pope, Boniface VIII. Dante's hatred of Celestine is based on hearsay, and much of his hatred of Boniface is based on narrow Florentine patriotism (though Benedetto Caetani was hardly a pleasant man). Remember, Dante is not dogma!
*That is, I will be leaving money for Masses for my miserable soul in Purgatory.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:18 AM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto II
Canto II
Dante is one self-absorbed poet who has to learn to be a little less so. Canto II - and the whole of The Inferno - is about* fear, one of Dante's besetting faults, and getting past fear. Dante starts the Canto well, invoking the Muses, genius, and memory - and I'm wondering to what extent ingegno has connotations of "skill" as well as "genius" or "ingenuity" here. He addresses Virgil at great length about previous trips to Hell and Heaven, but by the end of his address he is afraid he is not up to it. "I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Saint Paul!" Dante sums up his own problem in 6 lines:
And as a man who unwills what he wills,
changing his plan for every little thought,
till he withdraws from any kind of start,
So did I turn my mind on that dark verge,
for thinking ate away the enterprise
so prompt in the beginning to set forth. (2.37-42)
Ah - cowardice. Virgil names the vice and explains how he himself came here, his call by Beatrice. Virgil himself had wondered that Beatrice came to him from Heaven with no fear or worry; Beatrice gave him the answer, which he offers as one reason for Dante not to fear:
The only things that justly cause us fear
are those that have the power to do us harm; (2.88-89)
That's going to come up again.
More important though is this - Virgil puts it for Dante in the terms of courtly love and the Court of Heaven - why are you afraid:
Seeing that three such ladies blessed in Heave
care for your healing from their court above,
and what I tell you holds forth so much good? (2.124-126)
Esolen says about another moment in the Canto "He is saved not because he loves but because he is loved" (413).
Dante's response is a lovely piece of courtly contrast - his courage is like little flowers, fioretti and virtude -
As little flowers shut small and bowed beneath
the frost of night, when the sun brightens them,
rise open-petaled on their stems upright,
So did my weary courage surge again (2.127-130)
Talk about plenty to discuss - and that's even without delving into the placement of the invocation of the Muses (yes, we started in medias res as well as nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita) or one of my own little hobbyhorses, Dante's avoidance of names. In Canto II we get a good example of his refusal in the Inferno to name the Virgin Mary, and the first time Aeneas is called something other than the father of Silvius is in a negation - "I'm not Aeneas!" Typical - and worth talking about.
*disclaimer - when I say something "Is about" or "is all about" I am engaging in the exaggeration of the spoken voice or the written blog post - everything in the Middle Ages is about lots of things. Univocality may be a sign that something is not medieval.
Further: It occurred to me when rereading - while I was getting the HTML to format the tercet indentations correctly - that I hadn't said that virtude has its root in Latin vir, "man." Then I realized that this is not a commentary on the Commedia but only a first pass at teaching notes. When I do this sort of thing for books I'm preparing to teach I just circle word parts that are going to go up on the blackboard - I know what vir means, what virtù means in Renaissance Italian, and I'm going to go on about it in class.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto I
Dante Blogging
My dear friend and colleague Laurence Erussard and I are planning to teach Dante together as one of our Medieval Art and Literature courses. She was up for next fall - Fall 2010 - but I insisted that starting Dante in August and ending in December was wrongheaded, especially in the Frozen North. So we will teach Dante in Spring '11 - starting in Hell in January and ending in Paradise in May - which is closer to right. June would be better.
To prepare for this, since I've only ever taught Dante in a casual, half-credit style, I decided to read my way through again. My resolution is to blog a Canto a day. The new(ish) Anthony Esolen translation comes highly recommended by Prof. Bob Benson at Sewanee, who has taught Dante every year for a long time. I bought a set. I got through 3 canti before I realized that I ought to be blogging my progress. Here we go.
Canto I
Dante's hard for us. Long poetry is hard for everyone. The Medieval World View makes life more difficult.
We're going to have to do a good job setting the students up in how to read allegory - not to slave at it, but to let themselves dance with the polysemy. Is the Wolf Greed? Malice? The World? A wolf? Why not all four? You might think, in this age of irony, that ambiguity would be something students get instinctively; my experience is that my students want certainty -- they'd like an answer. Unsettling that desire will be one of Dante's contributions to their education.
The first astronomical moment shows up in line 17. raggi del pianeta/che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle, which Esolen translates: "the rays of that wandering light of Heaven/that leads all men aright on every road." That's handy - we get to start with the idea the Sun is a Planet in the Ptolemaic Cosmos, and that planets are wanderers. What a good start!
Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:48 AM | Comments (2)