Dante's Inferno

Any translation. I recommend the Sinclair translation, which has Italian facing the English. If you have any Spanish at all, you'll discover you can follow quite a bit of the great Italian verse, with the English as a guide for you! You'll hear the full beauty of it. And the Sinclair is even cheap. BTW, if you have any Spanish, think about doing a Junior year semester abroad in Italy (you'll learn the language in three days-- I did) using our great Study Abroad program. Doesn't cost any more than going to SFSU and living here.

There will be a quiz, which will simply involve recognizing a reference to Dante’s Inferno. As you read, be sure you can answer these:

Complete phrases or supply answer:

  1. Inferno starts, “In the middle of . . .”
  2. His guide, personifying his Reason, is. . .
  3. Dante’s muse, who sent him, is. . .
  4. The inscription over the Gate to Hell is famous. Give me the first three lines of Canto 3 as number 4, 5, and 6. MEMORIZE. HUM 302 Students: Memorize in Italian too.
  5. Line 2 of Canto 3
  6. Line 3 of Canto 3
  7. Famous last line: Abandon all hope. . .
  8. The punishments reflect the way sin punishes people in real life. People who are blown about by their passions appear how, in Canto 5, lines 37-43? Summarize. HUM 302 Students: Know this part well!
  9. In this Canto 5, Dante interviews which romantic woman sinner? One of his most famous character sketches.
  10. In Canto 32-3 Ugolino describes how Ruggieri ordered him and his sons starved to death. What awful event happened as a result?
  11. How does Ugolino punish Ruggieri through eternity?
  12. The bottom of Hell is frozen. How is Satan positioned?
  13. Treachery makes every crime worse. Who is so evil he must spend Eternity being chewed inside Satan’s mouth?
  14. What do Dante and Virgil have to do with Satan to exit Hell?
  15. Dante, escaping, sees, in the last line, what?

Canto One

Just skim over the first chapter. Unlike the other chapters it's so heavily symbolic, it's daunting. Don't worry. Once Dante gets into Hell it has all the reality of a horror movie, and to tell the truth, has always been enjoyed that way. Nobody reads the later two books where he goes through boring Purgatory and Heaven. Readers like monsters.

Suffice to say that, in the first chapter, Dante, in the middle of the journey of his life, loses his way, tempted by ambition, lust, all the worldly things. His conscience, his Reason, personified by the Roman poet Vergil, gives him some bad news. To get to Heaven he can't just go up; he is going to have to go down: experience Hell and come out the other side.

You'll notice a great many Italians appear in Dante's Hell. Dante wrote in exile from his beloved Florence. Like Confucius, he did not live in a Golden Age, but in the ruins of an empire that he looked back to, yearning. Once the whole world was at peace under Roman rule. Now, even in a space the size of the Bay area, three little cities could all be at war with each other, and torn apart by factions and traitors. Dante needs a passport from some petty Duke if he wants to travel sixty miles from Florence to Siena. It's a waste of life. He dreams of another Rome rising, and backs any candidate who wants to unify and bring peace to Italy. Into Hell go his contemporaries who oppose this, right next to famous names from literature and Christian history. It often makes for an odd, unbalanced mix.

Canto Two
Verse 31--

Dante modestly asks why he deserved to be chosen for this task-- and is promptly called a coward! He is a fierce old guy. There's no false modesty here. Dante's great and it's his job. But Virgil also goes on to explain that Beatrice in Heaven requested this. She's Dante's muse. He saw her only once. She died at 24. A poetic convention, really.

Canto Three
1-13***

The famous first lines over the gates to hell, which everyone knows.
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
The paradox: "highest love" created such a place.

Verses 22-67
The Cowards

Jack Kennedy always quoted this, though he claimed they were in the lowest circle of hell. Actually, they're not even admitted. These are the "nice people" who didn't want to get involved. You can't sit out the battle of good and evil, Dante thinks. "Disgusting worms" eat their cowardly tears. They follow a meaningless flag that shifts endlessly around. Nobodies. To Dante, being a harmless nobody is a sin against the life and intelligence God gave you. Great Italians cultivated their "terribilita"! He is typically fierce and contemptuous.

Does Dante believe that the Hell he describes really exists? Probably. In that sense it's religious science fiction, faithfully based on texts and scripture.

But far more importantly, as in this Canto, he wrote the Inferno in such a way that it was not only about the next world. It's about this one. Simultaneously. The cowards are punished in this life, too. Sin is its own punishment, its own misery. They've made this life a hell on earth for themselves, so Dante shows it to you.

His standard procedure, imagining Hell, is the "fitting punishment." There was a long tradition of this, back to Fathers of the Church, like Tertullian, in the first centuries AD. But nobody does it as well as Dante, or as realistically.

To do it, he often makes metaphors literal. If you spend this life with upside down values, metaphorically eating shit, you'll appear in the Inferno literally upside down in a whole lake of shit, eating it.

Canto Four
70-82

But also, if you were a good man who, because you were an ancient Greek, lived without knowledge of Christ, you aren't punished. You're in a pleasant limbo, living without the thrill of knowing about salvation, but happy enough. Dante dramatizes that.

The Inferno isn't always that smooth, but close. It's very subtle, and constantly yields new meanings. My first mentor's father, Antonio Calitri, read a page each night before bed, and read his way through the entire Inferno every year. That's how to read it. Not all in one night! I did that too, for about ten years, inspired by Calitri. I learned a lot, and the Inferno never got old, either.

Canto Five
Francesca da Rimini***

Famous. Redone as plays, operas, etc. Dante puts people he knows in hell. The scenes can be read as metaphors. His distant kinswoman Francesca, one of the carnal sinners, gets her moment here. She and her lover live in Hell as in life, blown in a whirlwind of passions-- but together.

Canto Seven
1-64

"All the gold in the world can't give rest to those weary souls," so here we see the greedy in their endless pursuit of the dollar.

Canto Twelve
37-end

The violent against others live in a river of blood. Dante's picture of Chiron, the centaur, who parts his beard with an arrow before speaking, is celebrated for its intensely realistic quality. These aren't generic medieval symbols.

Canto Thirteen
22-109**

Suicide is a violence against oneself. The eerie scene here with the branches that talk when broken is taken from a similar scene Vergil's Aeneid. Could be Dante's hat tip to Vergil, a sign that this was his inspiration for the epic.

Canto Fourteen
Brunetto Latini***

In Hell, as in life, Dante has a terrible time talking to a man he still reverences, Brunetto Latini. Latini is gay, and so-- Dante's religion forces him to believe-- is morally beneath him. In hell he walks on a lower track.

But Dante still admires Latini so much, despite his religion, he tries to incline his head respectfully, walking with his teacher; but the guy is down there below him, and it's hard to do. Notice Dante's moment of shock finding him naked and scorched in gay hell: "Are YOU here, Ser Brunetto?" I think it repeats the terrible moment when he realized for the first time that his honored teacher was what Dante could only think of as a sodomite, a pervert, and damned. Plainly Dante hates that fact; but the Bible tells him it must be.

Now a number of Cantos follow which describe civil and religious crimes that afficted Florence and the Papacy. Some are rather technical. It is pointed out that only one prostitute appears in Hell, and a particularly notorious one; but lots and lots of pimps are in hell, and their customers.

Canto Twenty One
Verse 109-end

The famous lines in which a comical but disgusting devil "makes of his ass a trumpet" for his pack to follow. Dante allows the devils no dignity or majesty.

Canto Twenty Six
Ulysses*

That is, Odysseus. It's a work of literary criticism. Dante appropriates Homer's great character, and turns him into a symbol of human aspiration-- "You were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge." That's the spirit of the Renaissance, which will need two hundred years more to come to its climax in Michelangelo's time.

Canto Twenty Eight
Mohammed and the Sowers of Discord

Gory. Intensely seen.

Canto Thirty Two

To our surprise, the bottom of Hell is ice. Dante explains. Ugolino is introduced.

Canto Thirty Three ***

Count Ugolino is, with Francesca and Ulysses, Dante's most famous portrait. He is imprisoned to starve to death with his family, and finally, starving, he loses his mind and eats the bodies of his children. He's allowed to gnaw on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, who did it to him, through eternity.

Canto Thirty Four, the final Canto

Unforgettable and unexpected. The frozen Hell at bottom. The image of the damned lying like straws frozen in ice. Satan himself, punished while he punishes the traitors Judas, and to our surprise, Brutus and Cassius (who, in Dante's eyes, betrayed Rome as Judas betrayed Jesus.) Climbing down Satan's filthy fur, they emerge upside down, then turn and once again see, famously, "le stelle," the stars.