The cantos before the main gate of Purgatory end with a hymn to generosity—or specifically, the praise of the Malasprina family who will support Dante in exile and even hire him as a peace negotiator. Our wild diatribes against political strife and corruption finally come down to an ethic of care: the answer to the ills of this world is to take care of each other.
Read MoreAs Dante the pilgrim stares up at the stars in PURGATORIO’s dale of negligent rulers and as the snake enters the redeemed landscape of the poem, we may finally be witnessing the setting of the infernal mindset of COMEDY as well as the setting of the poem’s classical “landscape.”
Read MoreAfter Dante shocks Judge Nino and the poet Sordello with his corporeality, Nino launches into a diatribe against his “unfaithful” wife who has married another man after Nino’s death. It’s a shocking bit of misogyny in a poem that so often steers clear of such things. What are we to make of a great poem with such a foul bit in it?
Read MoreDante steps down into the dale of the negligent rulers and finds a compatriot: noble judge Nino. They embrace and Dante is so glad to find this friend in Purgatory, the very person the poet himself put there, the very way he can bolster the reality claims in COMEDY: by being amazed at the people he finds exactly where he put them.
Read MoreStill on the cusp of the valley of the negligent rulers, Dante sees the first two angels descending from heaven in PURGATORIO. (The previous angel was a boatman who ran the route between a spot in Italy and the mountain.) It’s a deeply mystical passage that seems to get deflated at its end and as we learn this is a nightly bit of street theater.
Read MorePURGATORIO, Canto VIII, opens with six of the most beautiful lines in all of Dante’s COMEDY: full of yearning, sadness, death, sunset, sunrise, hope, and human emotion. It continues on to explore the yearning through the third hymn or antiphon of Purgatory, then moves to see the stars wheeling above—that is, the spheres we’re walking toward.
Read MoreReading Purgatorio, Cantos VI - VIII in my English translation. These are three tough cantos before we arrives at the gate of Purgatory proper. Before we break them down into smaller chunks to study them, let’s read them straight through to discover the issues Virgil, Dante, and the reader face as the journey becomes increasingly difficult.
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