Our pilgrim, Dante, arrives on the sixth, empty terrace of Mount Purgatory without a lot of fanfare. Instead, Statius and Virgil go ahead of him and talk about the craft of poetry. The passage is caught in the essential structural issue (and thematic one, too!) of COMEDY: circularity and linearity, fused into one state of being.
Read MoreVirgil and Statius reconstruct limbo. The sighs from that first circle of hell are transferred from the damned to the poet Dante (and to his reader). And the entire catalogue of the lost comes down to a final irony: Manto, lost in Dante’s own poem, misplaced and reassigned, a final misreading and misquotation in a canto full of them.
Read MoreVirgil finally gets to hear the story of Statius’s conversion. But for Statius to tell it, Dante the poet must make some concessions to the historical record, must account for the fact that Statius’s epic is dedicated to a Roman emperor, and must offer a compelling narrative vision . . . that devolves into the text as text, rather than as story.
Read MoreVirgil wants to know how Statius could have become a Christian since there’s no evidence of faith in his poetry about Thebes. Statius replies that it’s through Virgil’s poetry that he both became a poet and became a Christian. Damned Virgil lights the path to redemption.
Read MoreStatius answers Virgil’s question: He wasn’t guilty of avarice, as Virgil imagined. Statius spent all his money. And he learned the error of his ways when he interpreted a passage from Virgil’s AENEID . . . or rather, when he misquoted and misinterpreted the passage. We have to come to the quagmire of interpretation—and Dante’s hope for classical texts.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim begins his climb to the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory blinded and behind his two guides, Virgil and Statius. The drama of the pilgrim’s blindness is superseded by Virgil’s curiosity about Statius . . . complete with Virgil’s own misquotation of Francesca from INFERNO, Canto V.
Read MoreA read-through of Purgatorio, Cantos XXII, XXIII, and XXIV. A rough translation before we break it into smaller parts for deeper analysis. The ascent from the fifth terrace of avarice (and we learn, another sin) to the sixth terrace of gluttony: an arboretum with hollow, wasted souls purging their love of wine and food.
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