A coda to our episodes with Sapia, one of the most complex and intriguing souls in all of Dante’s COMEDY. Is this passage incredibly uneven or textured with a great deal of irony? How does it reflect back to INFERNO, Canto XIII? And how does it set us up for the canto ahead, PURGATORIO XIV?
Read MoreDante the pilgrim (and even Dante the poet!) may have met his match with Sapia on Purgatory’s second terrace, the ledge of the envious. She manipulates him into a confessional moment, then either turns that confession into flattery or comedy, all to get what she wants: a refurbished reputation back among the living. She’s caught in the human dilemma: neither good nor bad but a wild mix in-between.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim gets more than he asked for: Sapia’s incredible monologue, a master stroke of rhetoric, part honesty, part manipulation, all wrapped around one of the most blasphemous lines in all of COMEDY. The terrace of envy is full of surprises . . . none bigger than this woman who matches wits with Dante.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim, goaded by Virgil, has worked up the courage (or the flattery) to prompt one of the souls to speak on Purgatory’s second terrace, the landscape of the envious. She does . . . and gives Dante both more and exactly what (or in fact, perhaps a bit less) than he asked for. Her reticence, her generosity: the combined tension inside the human problem of envy.
Read MoreDante tiptoes by the envious on Purgatory’s second terrace, thinking he’s making some gaffe by staying silent. But Virgil is having none of it. He tells Dante to be brief . . . and Dante launches into overblown flattery (reminiscent of a certain moment for Virgil in INFERNO XIII). How much irony is found in the texture of this seemingly simple passage from PURGATORIO.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim finally sees the penitents on the second terrace of PURGATORIO. They’re huddled against each other, leaning back against the mountain’s cliff, and clothed in livid haircloth. But they also have their eyelids stitched shut with wire, blinded because of this sin that we have reinterpreted and tamed as jealousy but that entails so much more.
Read MoreDante and Virgil make great haste along the empty second terrace of PURGATORIO but are soon accosted by three disembodied voices, whipping them on to love but also offering a node of the alienation that will pervade this terrace . . . and that is crucial as a separating space between Dante the poet and his master, Virgil.
Read MoreDante and Virgil arrive at the second terrace of Purgatory proper in a passage that seems at first glance to be fairly straightforward, naturalistic detail . . . until we notice the neologism (new word) Dante has coined, until we notice the line that barely makes sense because it has so many possible meanings, and until we realize that Virgil is offering a pagan prayer in the land of the redeemed penitents.
Read MoreA read-through of the second terrace of Purgatory proper, the terrace of envy, in the second canticle of Dante’s masterwork COMEDY. We’ll cover the ground from PURGATORIO, Canto XIII, Line 1, though Canto XV, Line 84, walking among the ranks of the envious and asking some initial questions before we dig into it passage by passage in our slow walk across Dante’s known universe.
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