Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia When Knowledge Passes Away Virgil’s long explanation of the genesis of souls and bodies poses a particular sort of intellectual challenge: this version of how human bodies develop reached its expiration date long before I was born, and there’s little chance that the refined-blood theory of human reproduction,…
Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia The Speech of the Saved I’ve taught Dante’s Purgatorio to three cohorts of upper-division literature students, and each time, the students do alright among the prideful. Carrying a grand rock seems unpleasant, to be sure, but it stoops them down, and students get that basic body motion. They…
Series Index John Ciardi’s Translation of the Commedia Worthy of the Kingdom Dante couldn’t care less about my evangelical sensibility and sensitivities, and I love him for that. Even beyond the fact that a third of the Commedia has to do with Purgatory, a state of post-mortem being that I’m not supposed to believe in, and…
One reason that I can teach Purgatorio without the other two is because of its slow start. Since the poem is a third done when the Pilgrim finally gets into Purgatory proper, that allows me some class time to set up the big-picture stuff that one needs to make sense of the poem as a…