Walking With Dante

Dante the pilgrim has met and spoken with the very heroes he's always admired. These are the Guelph leaders he himself admits he has remembered with so much honor. But their rhetoric is empty. Self-justifying. Flattering. And finally, ineffective. So Dante the pilgrim dares it all and translates his anger into something far more human: sadness and connection. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for this imp...

The three, naked, oiled, burned, hairless Florentines revolve in front of the pilgrim, Dante, and Virgil. One of them starts to speak. And what a speech! Such gorgeous rhetoric! The sort he used when he was a Guelph leader in Florence. The sort all three used. The sort all politicians love. The sort that adds up to nothing. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we listen to Jacopo Rusticucci tell the tale...

Brunetto may have run off like the winner of a foot race but he's far from gone from the text. In fact, the next canto of INFERNO, XVI, is in many ways a mirror of Brunetto's canto, XV. Dante and Virgil are still on the embankment, protected from the snowfall of fire, still looking out across the burning sands when three runners peel off and come over to them, attracted to the pilgrim by (of all t...

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for this special episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE. This episode is my interview with Kristen Hook, a Dantista who is writing her dissertation at UC-Berkeley on Inferno, Canto X. She's most interested in Guido Cavalcanti, the son of the man who raises his chin up over the edge of the heretics' tomb where Farinata is having his pissing match with our pilgrim, Dante...

From the get-go of Canto XV, I've told you my assumption: These are the homosexuals punished in Inferno. But am I right? I'm certainly standing with the bulk of the commentary tradition, reaching back almost 700 years. But lately, there have been challenges to this assumption. Let's look at the book that started the whole modern debate: André Pézard's bombshell work from 1950 that reassesses who t...

We come to the end of Inferno, Canto XV. We go out in the strangest ways. First, the pilgrim, Dante, wants a little bedroom gossip. Who are the other homosexuals down here with you, Brunetto? Brunetto Latini is cagey and forthcoming, all at once, about the way he's been throughout this canto. He offers three names. He turns excessively vulgar. And he reveals his hidden agenda: don't forget the boo...

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...