« A beautiful Rube Goldberg Machine | Main | U.S. Northeast May Have Coldest Winter in a Decade »

September 25, 2009

Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVIII


High Water on the Tiber - Ponte Sant Angelo
Originally uploaded by Michael Tinkler.

Canto XVIII

Here we are right in the middle of Hell - or at least in the middle of the Inferno - the jump from XVII to XVIII is the mid-point of the 34 canti - and Dante kicks off with structure again. The first word in the canto is Luogo, "place." We can't quite capture that in English - for Luogo รจ in inferno we can't say "Place there is in Hell," but that's our problem. Dante is reminding us to check the chart, mental or posted on the wall. Once again, I'm a little amazed that the Esolen's translation in the Modern Library doesn't have one!

Here's a nice one, in case you're getting lost.

Dante explains the region they're starting to cross, the Malebolge, "Pouches of Evil," Esolen gives us as ringing the deep pit in the center of Hell (18.2). They will cross the trenches on little stone bridges that run like spokes.

Here we get an image of Hell right out of the popular imagination - horned devils with whips driving naked sinners. Dante compares the streams - some going in one direction, some the other - to pilgrims during the Jubilee crossing the Ponte San Angelo in Rome, half headed to St Peter's on the south bank of the Tiber and half leaving.

Dante, of course, disapproved of the great Jubilee of 1300 because he hated the pope who called it, Boniface VIII. If you want to get a really good idea of what Boniface was up to without half the sarcasm of Dante, you ought to read Kessler and Zacharias' Rome 1300: on the Path of the Pilgrim. They did a splendid job of recreating what a pilgrim to the first Jubilee would have seen. The photographs are amazing - taking advantage of the deep cleaning that seemed to happen to everything in Rome in time for the Jubilee of 2000.

Dante loathed Boniface, and is going to prepare a place for him in the next Pouch.

This Pouch, though, is for pimps, seducers, and flatterers - with a whore as the archetypical flatterer. I'm amused that his example of a serial seducer is Jason, as in the Argonauts. No offense to any Jasons out there, but I always wonder what parents are thinking who name their child after such an unpleasant classical figure as that one.



Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at September 25, 2009 8:14 AM