The Divine Comedy -- Inferno

by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

An Amateur?s Progress

March 24, 1999

This is not a book one would ordinarily pick to read on a whim. Using an annotated version, written in today?s English that does not try to maintain rhyming lines, is the least one can do for oneself. My choice was The Portable Dante, the Viking Portable Library, Penguin Books USA, 1995, soft cover edition that was translated, edited, and contains an introduction and notes by Mark Musa. In my opinion, it is more readable than the translation by Charles Eliot Norton that is contained in Encyclopedia Britannica?s Great Books of the Western World.

All of this story is told from the perspective of Dante, playing himself as a poet/pilgrim, who is lost in a dark wood on Good Friday, in the year 1300, at the opening of the book. To find his way out, he is being escorted through the afterlife by Virgil, the author of The Aeneid, and by the late Beatrice, Dante?s first love. The story begins in Hell, proceeds to Purgatory, and ends in Paradise. Anyone who was really dead, of course, would never get to see all three of those places: only two, at the most; one if he is incredibly lucky or unlucky, righteous or unrighteous.

At present, this Amateur has only reached Canto (Song) 26 of the Inferno?s 34 Cantos, or chapters of verse. This has brought the reader to very near the end of the 8th Circle, spiraling ever downward to the lowest part of the pit of Hell reserved for the most infamous sinners. Dante describes each Circle?s inhabitants, the nature of their crimes and punishment, and the demons who enforce the rules of the place, many of whom are from classical mythology. In each place, Dante looks for some of his fellow Florentines, and it is mostly of these that his woeful stories are told. If this doesn?t scare the most hardened sinner into repentance, it would be hard to imagine what would. This book has some extremely imaginative horror scenes. To balance this negative view somewhat, the Pope recently gave a series of talks that provides a more modern view of what the afterlife is believed to be.

© 1999 Herman Fontenot

Click on any number to go forward to another of the five articles on The Divine Comedy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

References found on the World Wide Web:

This amateur takes no responsibility for the content or availability of any of these references, nor does he necessarily agree with the viewpoints expressed.

• The Digital Dante - Columbia University
  Information and resources regarding the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Includes complete texts of his major works and images of medieval art related to them, scholarly articles, questions for discussion, and a bibliography. Also contains links for current events regarding Dante and his works.
• Renaissance Dante in Print (1472-1629) - Impressive collection of rare texts by Dante Alighieri housed at the University of Notre Dame and the Newberry Library. The texts are shown in their original form along with extensive commentary, biographical information, indexes, and supplementary material.
• The Deep Passage: Dante, Longfellow, and Pinsky - Wen Stephenson / The Atlantic Monthly Company Information about analyses and translations of Dante Alighieri's works, by poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Robert Pinsky, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly. Includes commentary, the transcript of an online conference with Pinsky, excerpts of Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno, the texts of four sonnets by Longfellow, and an excerpt of Longfellow's translation of Dante's Paradiso.

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