INFERNO CANTO 19 explained
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 มิ.ย. 2024
- Synopsis and analysis of Canto XIX of Dante’s Inferno.
Great Divine Comedy online resources to bookmark:
1) dante.princeton.edu/index.html
2) dantelab.dartmouth.edu/
3) digitaldante.columbia.edu/
Books referenced in this video:
"The popes of Avignon: a century of exile" by Edwin Mullins
www.amazon.com/Popes-Avignon-...
"On the Donation of Constantine" by Lorenzo Valla
www.amazon.com.au/Donation-Co...
English translations used for this video:
Robert Pinsky, "The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation", Bilingual Edition. You can find it here: www.amazon.com/dp/0374524521/...
Thanks as always for your comments and questions. I will keep trying to upload at least one video every week with the next cantos.
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So I loved this canto so much ....the way it starts , throwing us right in , you know something big is coming ...Dante taking down the Pope(s) !!! Brilliant. And the imagery is so good ...I'm glad you pointed out he did this from the safety of exile ..it made it so contemporary for me as we still need to listen to dissident voices the world over . I'm stunned by his audacity . Thank you
I also love it. And selfishly, I have to say I am grateful that he had nothing to lose, and that he was in that position to write like that!
I liked this dichotomy that Dante’s shows: the Pope is both a man, susceptible to every weakness, and the head of the Church, hence Dante’s deference towards him.
I did, too. And it’s a point that today is often overlooked when many people tend to conflate church, doctrine and religion as if they were one single thing.
@@tomlabooks3263 Exactly. Sometimes people have a bad experience with a person (a nun, a priest, or other) and they extrapolate that to the whole.
I am glad that I was able to read/watch this canto aside canto 18. As you mention in the last video, the language in 18 is in complete contrast to the rest of inferno. Throughout, Dante seems to be very conscious with the wording as to how it relates to the text and what is being perceived in hell. For example, where Dante takes pity, in Canto 16, the language reflects the mood. The deviation of language in Canto 18 presents this dualism of comedy and tragedy as a way to reflect the two contrasting sins he highlights. One trench being reserved for ‘flatterers’ or ‘deceptive speakers,’ it would then make sense for Dante to write this canto with the most ‘unflattering’ descriptions of his time. Canto 19 presents Dante as a more confident traveler, and the language now mirrors this-with the use of exclamation marks within the first two stanzas. This may be a stretch, but I also wouldn’t put it past Dante to be purposely doing this.
The physicality of this canto somehow hit me very hard, and then your description of actual punishments where people were placed upside down in the ground--basically buried alive--brought home the cruelty of the world that no satire can assuage. I've been drawn to Dante's skill in using physicality throughout with the interactions between Virgil and Dante, and all the manifestations of contrapasso, but every once in a while my imagination crosses the boundary from just a literary exercise to imaging the real pain on a real body. Perhaps my weird education with intensely descriptive stories told by intensely fervent nuns has overcharged my imagination, but Oh, Humanity!
Haha 😂 I spent my elementary schools with intensely fervent nuns and they too LOVED to tell us kids some good old soul-scarring stories.
That was really pretty outrageous to confidently allocate a series of Popes to hell.
The physicality of the torments in this canto was particularly powerful for me. I read a book by CS Lewis last week where he talked about Dante to illustrate one form of realism in literature, the realism of presentation. So Dante may be describing something fantastic but makes it vivid to us by realistic detail or comparison with things we know and can easily visualise or call to mind. This made great sense to me.
I am constantly stunned by the subliminal ways that I realize he is using (still discovering them at my 4th reading) to draw us in and make us believe that his journey took place exactly how he describes it. I’m going to do canto 21 today (maybe I’ll finish it tomorrow) where once again he casually mentions some things that he and Virgil discussed but that “do not need to be reported in this poem”, just like someone who is telling us a non-fictional story. To me, this all goes back to the definition of “truth” that we are open to accept.
It will be interesting to see if there were any popes who made it to purgatory or paradise. It is so fascinating that it seems like the constant corruption of Vatican has always been a contemporary truth, yet the power of church has remained rock solid through two millenia. It is quite disheartening to realise that the notorious susceptibility of humans to the authority of unscrupulous ambition will always remain one of our main characteristics.
Saint Peter - technically not a “pope” but in theory the first one - will vent in Paradiso in one of the Commedia’s toughest invectives against the Church. You’re right about human ambition, so often a destructive force. I try to look at our future in terms of an evolution of our collective consciousness, and therefore with hope, but as you say, if you look around that’s a really difficult thing to do. One thing I do wonder sometimes is whether A.I. will get to a point where it will be able to help us manage ourselves, in other words with politics. Not in the sense of taking over, but potentially as an “oracle” that can process an immense amount of data and publicly indicate the best political choice for the collective good in every sector.
I checked out the Dartmouth site. Quite good. Thank you
Great. It looks like a LOT of work went into that website.
Thank you for helping us understand what I found confusing. 3 popes. One on top of the other.
You’re very welcome, Leah. It’s not something we are used to seeing everyday… : )
The punishments in this one are pretty memorable, as are many from the second half of Inferno. Thank you for linking those resources! I originally intended to read my Longfellow translation, but I left that copy at my parents' house, so I've been reading the Mandelbaum translation from digitaldante. They also have the Longfellow translation there, but since I own a physical copy of that, I wanted to try something I didn't already own. One of the great things about reading the Comedy is the crazy amount of free resources there are online. I'm not sure if you're familiar with these: a Catholic Encyclopedia (www.newadvent.org/cathen/index.html), pretty useful to find references, and The World of Dante (www.worldofdante.org/index.html), which is full of cool resources and the text in Mandelbaum's translation.
Oh wow, thank you. I had stumbled upon the World of Dante but not the other one. I’ll check it out for sure. 🙏🏻
Another great chat, with a lot of great background information.
The Dartmouth site includes not only Longfellow's translation, which I have a printed copy of and am reading, but his commentary as well. Thanks for making me aware of it.
That website is really a labor of love! So much great information. I hope you’re doing well John.
Wonderful as usual. I have a question regarding Dante's very careful apportionment of punishment. How much do you think he has influenced modern ideas of justice? I'm doing a video, the theme being 'why bad things happen to good people' it bounces off a Cormack McCarthy book in which a very bad guy gets away with his crimes. The Inferno has I think had a profound influence on what we expect should happen to sinners. Any thoughts much appreciated now that you have proven yourself to be quite smart😀👍
Haha thanks a lot my friend : ) Wow... that sounds like such a fascinating but also TOUGH topic to tackle. I'd genuinely love to have a proper conversation with you about this, but for the sake of this comment, here are my 2 cents: in terms of cultural influence, it's difficult to separate Dante from "Christianity" (and also in part Judaism) as a whole, because despite his immense originality, he was pretty aligned with St. Thomas Aquinas in his philosophy and theology. So when it comes to our modern sense of justice, I'd say the Bible is probably where most of it still comes from, whether we like religion or not. The specific matter of "Why do evil things happen to good people" has a literary root in the Book of Job, which is discussed in Harold Kushner's book by the same title, and I'm sure there is an equivalent of that in Sumerian and in Egyptian literature as well, but I don't think a non-soul-crushing answer to that question can be given outside of any faith-related context. I really look forward to your video!
@@tomlabooks3263 A fascinating and helpful reply. I'm doing a series that pairs literary realism with psychology/spirituality. I'm steeped in Eastern spirituality, not Christianity, hence help required! It's funny that you say that this topic is tough. In my world, one word - karma- explains all. Mind you, it's like trying to cut a hole in water to understand intellectually so maybe it is as tough as you say. I shall explore the references you've provided with great interest. Thanks so much Tom. You are charmingly intelligent and very kind to answer my question with such care.
@@thefont4345 Next time you say I'm smart I might even start to believe it : )) I am very curious and ignorant about the concept of karma and I'd really love to listen to your take on that.
I know we always say this but ... This is one of my favorite Cantos in "Inferno." Pope Boniface was a Black Guelph and Dante a White. Such violent times, then! You might do an entire video just upon that 🤓☘️😎
Hi Allen, yes that would be a cool topic to get a little deeper into. You’re right, the more I learn about those times the more I realize how much violence was all over , every day. Thanks for watching- Chat soon!