Walking With Dante

Help underwrite the costs associated with this free podcast! Licensing fees, hosting fees, streaming fees, music and sound royalties: it all adds up. You can donate to WALKING WITH DANTE at this PayPal link here . Still standing on the cusp of the valley of the negligent rulers, not yet among them, Dante witnesses two angels descend from heaven, the first we've seen come from the blessed realms. (...

Help me keep WALKING WITH DANTE sponsor-free. You can donate to support the podcast at this PayPal link here . We move closer to the negligent rulers on the slope of Mount Purgatory, seated or standing about in a dale on the slope before the main gate. Among them, we encounter longing, yearning, dreaming, sadness, all at the moment of the end of the day, its death, even as someone is already antic...

In the last episode of this podcast, we glossed (or explained) the long list of rulers who are in the darkening dale ahead of us, as well as Dante, Virgil, and Sordello. In this episode, let's ask interpretive questions of this long, difficult passage at the end of PURGATORIO, Canto VII. Some of these questions have answers; some, tentative answers; and some, mere speculation. But that's the intel...

Please help support this podcast. I have a great many hosting, streaming, licensing, journal, and royalty fees associated with this work. Anything you can give helps! Use this PayPal link here to make a contribution. We finally get to see who is down in that beautiful dale in front of us on the lower slopes of Mount Purgatory--and it turns out to be a roster of rulers from the mid- to late-1200s....

Help keep WALKING WITH DANTE sponsor-free by donating to help me cover its licensing, hosting, streaming, and royalty fees. You can use this PayPal link here to make a contribution. Sordello leads Virgil (and Dante the pilgrim, whom Sordello has hardly noticed) on to the beautiful dale on the lower slopes of Mount Purgatory. This passage is one of the first where the poet has to write about beauty...

Help keep WALKING WITH DANTE sponsor-free. Your donation at this PayPal link helps cover streaming, hosting, website, and licensing fees for this podcast. Donate here . Virgil has turned the journey into his own--but now confronts not only his limits but perhaps everyone's as Sordello warns him (and Dante the pilgrim) that night is falling on Mount Purgatory. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explor...

If you'd like to donate to WALKING WITH DANTE to keep it afloat without sponsors, you can give some a little in any currency using this PayPal link . Sordello stands amazed in the presence of the great poet Virgil. The pilgrim Dante? Seemingly forgotten. Sordello wants to know how this classical poet got into Purgatory. So Virgil offers an explanation that reiterates what we know about Limbo but a...

Please help support WALKING WITH DANTE to keep it sponsor-free. You can make a donation in any currency using this PayPal link . We've come out of the invective against Italian strife and returned to the plot of COMEDY--and Dante the poet clearly wants to return Virgil to the center of the narrative's stage. But can he? How is Virgil's position negotiated and renegotiated as the damned Virgil walk...

Donate to help keep WALKING WITH DANTE on its path by using this PayPal link here . Dante's invective against political strife reaches its height by turning its rhetoric toward Dante's own experience--and maybe even his experience in writing COMEDY. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we watch Dante's poetic craft fall apart a bit and then turn back to the poet's own experience, all to find his stance as...

Rage knows no bounds--even in a poem as controlled as Dante's COMEDY. The poet has been offering up an invective about Italian strife and the war-torn landscape that has ruined his home. But in the middle passage of his invective, he may have finally lost all control and committed outright blasphemy. Or maybe really complex irony. It's hard to tell. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the midd...

We've danced around the notion of Dante as the pilgrim and Dante as the poet and their competing voices in COMEDY for so many episodes--quite literally, years now. But does this split in Dante hold up? Why do we allow something to occur in interpretation which never occurs in the poem? Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for this interpolated episode of WALKING WITH DANTE. I want to engage in some rather hi...

Please consider supporting this work in WALKING WITH DANTE by donating to help me cover hosting, streaming, website, and licensing fees for this podcast by visiting this Paypal link here . The story (or narrative) of PURGATORIO comes to a halt in Canto VI and the poem turns into a political invective. There are interesting problems here: with metaphors, with history, with poetics, and with (perhap...

Help support WALKING WITH DANTE by donating to cover hosting, licensing, streaming, and podcast fees at the PayPal link here . Virgil has come in for a bit of a whipping. But no worries! All is forgiven. Dante still sees Virgil as his liege in a feudal context, his ultimate guide. And together, they find a solitary soul on the slopes of Mount Purgatory: Sordello, a troubadour poet and Dante's seco...

Help support WALKING WITH DANTE by covering the hosting, editing, and licensing fees. You can donate through PayPal here . The pilgrim Dante and Virgil pass on from the crowd. And now Virgil really becomes the loser. Dante inquires about a passage in THE AENEID. And Virgil answers like a prof who is caught with a question he can't answer. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore the second time in...

Help support WALKING WITH DANTE to keep it sponsor-free. Click here for a PayPal link to donate and help me cover licensing, hosting, streaming, and research fees. Having heard three stories of those who died violent deaths unshriven, Dante the pilgrim is besieged by requests from others. A crowd forms around him, all begging for prayer, including six individuals singled out from the crowd. But so...

In this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE, we'll read the three cantos that lead us up to the gate of Purgatory itself. These are tough cantos! It's important to hear them before we break them apart to study them. Many a reader has been daunted by what's happening here before we finally get into Purgatory proper. Don't despair. We'll get down the flow (or lack thereof!) in these cantos before we start...

Dante the pilgrim has heard two dramatic speeches from characters whose deaths were full of Sturm und Drang. Now, a quiet, lone voice comes forward to tell an elliptical, enigmatic tale of her violent death in only seven lines (one of which is a dialogue marker). Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we listen to "la Pia" and attempt to come to terms with her devastating speech which has befuddled commenta...

We come to the second monologue in PURGATORIO, Canto V. This time, we're on the other side of the battle of Campeldino with one of Dante's enemies. And we're on the other side of INFERNO, with a son whose father we saw damned with Ulysses and Diomedes. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore this most surprising speech and continue to discuss the ways PURGATORIO is changing the game for Dante's ma...

The frenzied souls had spoken in unison, in monophony. Now they begin to differentiate, to enter into polyphony with each other. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we hang out on the first minor ledge of Purgatory with Dante the pilgrim and Virgil, his guide. They've been confronted by a mad battalion charge of souls who want to know how the pilgrim is in his body and what he can do for them when he ret...

The pilgrim Dante and his guide, Virgil, have passed beyond the lazy souls and on to a group that's in a frenzy: running, calling out, speaking in one voice. The change is marked and important to understand how PURGATORIO works. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore this passage from the fifth canto of PURGATORIO. These souls have died violent deaths. And they want something from the pilgrim Dan...

We come to a second scene, certainly sequential, almost contemporaneous with the previous scene among Belacqua's cohorts. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we come to one of the great contrasting moments in PURGATORIO: the lazy souls with Belacqua vs. these souls, traversing the slope, singing, running, shouting, and making an all-around ruckus. The key here, as always (so far), is Virgil. His response...

Dante the pilgrim has had his last words with Belacqua and begins his journey on up the mountain. Or at least, laterally along the mountain of Purgatory. But those negligent souls with Belacqua are not done with the pilgrim. They point him out and seem suddenly to leap into action . . . or at least, into words. Dante is . . . flattered? Proud? Distracted. Virgil is having none of it. He reprimands...

We've reached the end of the first narrative arc of PURGATORIO. Dante the poet brings the first five cantos to a close with a very quiet, almost disturbing decrescendo: a small voice, a woman's voice, reduced the barest details. Join me as we read through PURGATORIO, Canto V, before we take it apart and start our slow-walk through it, passage by passage. My English translation is not found on my w...

We've talked about Belcqua as a parodic, ironic, or comedic figure in PURGATORIO. But is there a way to interpret his character as more straightforward? What if Dante the poet intends him to be a warning about negligence, a truth-teller sitting on the first minor ledge of the great mountain of Purgatory? Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I read back through Belacqua's speeches in PURGATORIO, Canto IV,...

Belacqua has been the subject of hundreds of commentaries over centuries as readers have grappled with who this figure is and what purpose he serves in Dante's poem. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I offer you multiple ways to interpret this most intriguing figure in PURGATORIO, a favorite character Samuel Beckett--and for me, too. I see him as a parody of the contemplative life. Which means I see Be...