Walking With Dante

Brunetto Latini has offered a history lesson on Florence and a prophecy for the pilgrim Dante's future. It's Dante's turn to respond in their back-and-forth conversation. But the pilgrim doesn't just respond! He recasts their conversation, not in terms of the teacherly voice, but rather one that's more central to the task of COMEDY: he responds as a writer to the emotional demands of the situation...

Brunetto Latini's got questions. Too bad the pilgrim, Dante, doesn't seem to want to answer them. Or better, Dante only seems to want to confess to this teacher. (Anybody who has ever been a teacher knows this gambit: ask a question, get the truth, not the facts you were after.) This is indeed the game that teachers and students play/ Especially when their roles are reversed. And must they descend...

Walking down the levy along the stream with his guide, Dante the pilgrim faces his former teacher, scorched on the burning sands. Or the guy the poet wants us to think was his teacher: Brunetto Latini. (Poor Virgil. He's forgotten--momentarily.) So begins one of the most fraught and difficult conversations in INFERNO. There are hidden agendas everywhere. Strange twists in logic. And a lot about th...

We're walking with our pilgrim, Dante, along the embankment to a stream, heading down into the depths of the seventh circle of hell where the sins of violence are punished. This levy is the feature Virgil has plumped as the most amazing yet in hell. More amazing still is our pilgrim's response to it: doubt. What's more, the poet behind the pilgrim seems to be at a different game altogether: poetic...

In this interpolated episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE, I interview the poet and translator J. Simon Harris about his work on INFERNO, his thinking about Dante, and his passion for this medieval poet. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the passion of someone who has made Dante's poetry his life's work.

We've come to the end of this strange and wonderful canto. We've passed Capaneus. We've heard about the Old Man of Crete. We've seen the weird snowfall of fire. We've even begun to explore the natural landscape of hell with a long talk about its hydraulics. But Dante is not done. He wants to clarify those hydraulics. So our pilgrim is going to ask two questions about how exactly the waters of hell...

Canto XIV of Dante's INFERNO is often seen as a misstep. Or at least an uneasy two-parter. First, there's Capaneus on the burning sands. Then there's this strange statue in a mountain in Crete--and an exploration of the hydraulics of hell. But maybe Canto XIV isn't the twofer we imagine. Maybe this is an intentional bit of artistic brilliance that shows us two sides of the same coin. Or better yet...

We come to one of the strangest moments in INFERNO. While Virgil may have claimed that stream burbling out of the wood of the suicides was the most astonishing thing seen so far, we've never encountered anything like Virgil's explanation for the hydraulics of hell. First off, there's a giant statue. It's in Crete. In Mount Ida, to be exact. It's made out of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and terra co...

We've left Capaneus spread eagle on the burning sands and have begun to pass into this hellish desert-on-fire--that is, the third ring of the seventh circle of hell, of INFERNO. This podcast episode is about a short transitional passage before we get to some wilder stuff. But it gives us a chance to slow down and look at Dante-the-poet's poetic and narrative techniques. In essence, our poet is alw...

Finally, a blasphemer. A monk who wrote a heretical treatise? A priest who tainted orthodoxy? A run-of-the-mill atheist? Nope. A classical figure out of Statius' poem THE THEBIAD: Capaneus. Wait, can a mythical figure who wanted to take down a mythical god commit blasphemy in a Christian context? For Dante he can! Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore this center passage of Canto XIV of INFERNO....

We now get a fuller glimpse of the third ring of the seventh circle of hell, of inferno, in this passage that lays out the ranks of the damned before us and helps us see the landscape more clearly. Sort of. Because this is Dante. And this is The Inferno. And nothing is quite what it seems. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we find three types of naked souls, lying, walking, and sitting under a snowfall...

Here's a fascinating opening passage of a canto--breaking over from the previous one, including quirky rhetorical techniques, showing us classical references, and offering us a glimpse of a slower pacing for the narrative as a whole. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we slow-walk through Dante's masterpiece, COMEDY. We're in Canto XIV, the seventh circle of hell, the third ring of that circle. This is...

On this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE, I'm headed toward the mail bag--or maybe the email bag--to look at three questions from listeners. These questions have come up over the course of the episodes about INFERNO, Canto XIII. I think they're important and interesting. One question is about my making clear the notion of literary interpretation I see in the text. Another offers an alternate reading...

A bush has been torn apart by a crazed squanderers and black dogs. But it's got something to say, too, just like Pier delle Vigne. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we finish off this tour-de-force of a canto from INFERNO. Canto XIII is a never-ending grab bag of surprises, none more so than the pagan wish or hope that ends the whole thing--and then a final metamorphosis, the most horrifying one in a c...

Pier may have stopped speaking--Virgil and Dante, our pilgrim, aren't sure--but he doesn't carry on because through the underbrush crash two naked souls, all scratched up, trying to get away from horrible, black hounds. These are those who commit economic suicide, who squander their property until there's nothing left--and who perhaps masochistically take pleasure in the destruction of their own w...

Pier seemed to have come to a conclusion in his last speech with Virgil and our pilgrim, Dante. But he's clearly not done. Prompted by Dante, Virgil asks the shade how it got to be a bush and (more tellingly) whether it can escape. This is a passage rife with problems: Virgil's dualism, at odds with a Christian understanding of the resurrection; Dante-the-pilgrim's on-going silence in the face of...

Dante, our pilgrim, has done as Virgil instructed: he's torn a branch off a bramble, only to have it spit blood and air--and words! The bush is the soul of one of the great courtiers of the Middle Ages: Pier della Vigne. He's here because . . . well, if you trust him, for nothing of his doing. His speech is a tour de force of literary technique. Our poet is pulling out all the stops. And maybe sta...

Nessus has dropped our pilgrim, Dante, off on the other side of the river where he and Virgil step into a gloomy wood with thorns rather than fruit, twisted limbs rather than shapely trees. We know from Virgil's map of hell in Canto XI that this should be the place of the suicides, those who have committed violence against themselves (and their property). But what we find instead is a landscape th...

Without a doubt, Canto XIII of INFERNO is one of the most astounding in the enter canticle of pain. It ranks up there with Canto V and the lustful, with X and the heretics, and with some of the ones we're headed for down the road. It's dense, opaque, elliptical, and ironic: a tour de force from our poet Dante. But before we step into the second ring of the seventh circle of hell, the second sectio...

INFERNO, Canto XII, comes to its conclusion with a "zoo" of those who have been violent against others, including Alexander the Great (perhaps), Attila the Hun (more sure), and even local brigands from the highways of Tuscany. It's been a long ride to get here: down a scree-filled slope, past the Minotaur, up against threatening centaurs (who turn out to be really nice guys), and on across the riv...

In INFERNO, the question of our pilgrim's corporeality continues to dog us (and perhaps the poet). Is the pilgrim in his body? Is this "merely" a dream sequence in which he's imagining he's in a body? How "real" is his journey? Although these may seem modern problems, they in fact bother Dante-the-poet in COMEDY, forcing him to make decisions about his narrative that will eventually pay off. For i...

We've come to the river of blood in the seventh circle of INFERNO, the first ring of the violent--and we don't meet any sinners. Instead, we meet the tormentors: the centaurs who fire cruel arrows at those sunk in the boiling muck. This passage has some problems in it, but none more than the opening three lines, a direct address from the poet. Why does Dante feel the need to step out from behind t...

In this passage from INFERNO, Virgil offers us (and the pilgrim, Dante) more of a glimpse into his last trek to the bottom of hell. Here, he tells us that things have changed, that hell now lies in ruins, that the harrowing caused havoc across hell--and he descends into a little heresy along the way, quoting Empedocles, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for an in-depth ex...

Virgil has finished his lesson on the geography of hell, he's answered the pilgrim's two questions, and we're back to the start of Canto XI, only at the start of Canto XII. Here, Dante, our pilgrim, confronts a dangerous rockslide that leads us straight past the Minotaur, the "infamy of Crete." Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I look over so many questions in the passage. What's the point of the Minot...

Even at this point, at the end of INFERNO's Canto XI, we've come a long with Dante-the-pilgrim. We've walked down six circles of hell. We've also encountered lots of problems in the text, moments that need explanation, lots of interpretive knots. But I want to call our attention to the criticism of an Italian scholar who essentially says that at this point, the COMEDY has been killed with footnote...