8. An Interpolated Episode: A Look Back At Inferno, Canto I, And A Look Around The Poem

Here’s a chance to see Canto I in its scope, strangeness, and knottiness.

I also want to fill you in on some of the poetics of the COMEDY. This may seem technical, but it helps you understand how COMEDY is put together. Mostly, it helps you understand the epic task Dante set for himself. He created a new poetic form, standardized a Tuscan dialect, and composed the poem in an absurdly complicated system of rhythm and rhyme.

Join me for this look back at the first canto of INFERNO. Scroll down this page for a study guide and even a place to leave a comment for me. And if you’re enjoying this walk through the known universe, consider a one-time donation or a very small monthly stipend to cover the many fees associated with this work:

The segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[00:59] The whole of INFERNO, Canto I. For a study guide to this first canto, complete with translation and interpretation questions, please scroll down this page or look at the other episodes for Canto I on this website.

[07:38] The overall structure of Dante's COMEDY.

[11:23] The stanza structure of COMEDY.

[23:08] Even deeper in, the structure of the individual lines of COMEDY.

[26:54] Everyone fences in the world to make their own pasture. Problem is, we often mistake our pasture for the world. To understand this complex poem, we must discover both Dante's fence and his pasture. But Dante goes beyond what most of us are willing to do. Again and again in COMEDY, he moves his fence to make his pasture bigger.

FOR MORE STUDY

A translation issue:

Those crazy stress patterns in Dante’s eleven-syllable (or hendecasyllable) lines! There’s no way to make them happen in Germanic-influenced English. A few English translators try every so often to get close in a line or two, but no one can sustain Dante’s rhythm, mostly because these triplicate stresses require a much more, well, “musical” language. Here are the opening lines in the original Florentine with the stresses in bold:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che la diritta via era smarrita.

In the second line, the primary stress is on the fourth (not the sixth) syllable. That middle stress does move around in the poem, based on where the line has a natural pause. Almost all lines do. (It’s called a “caesura”—seh-ZOOR-ah.) You might be able to see that in the first three lines there’s a natural break after “cammin” (l. 1), “ritrovia” (l. 2), and “via” (l. 3).

Further complicating matters for us English speakers, Italians—and especially medieval Florentines—don’t divide syllables the way we do. Look at the second line: “oscura” is a two-syllable word when you might think it looks like a three-syllable word.

A journaling prompt:

When have you moved the fence in your world? Or when did you need to move it and still refused?