Table Of ContentReading Dante
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Reading
Dante
Giuseppe Mazzotta
New Haven and London
Copyright © 2014 by Yale University.
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Excerpts from Dante’s Divine Comedy are taken from the following
editions, translated and with commentary by Charles S. Singleton:
Divine Comedy: Inferno © 1970 Princeton University Press, 1998
renewed. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Divine Comedy: Purgatorio © 1991 Princeton University Press. Reprinted
by permission of Princeton University Press.
Divine Comedy: Paradiso © 1975 Princeton University Press, 2003
renewed, 1991 paperback edition. Reprinted by Princeton University Press.
Set in Minion type by Westchester Book Group.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 1942–
Reading Dante / Giuseppe Mazzotta.
pages cm.— (Th e Open Yale Courses Series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-19135-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Dante Alighieri,
1265–1321—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—
Appreciation. I. Title.
PQ4390.M544 2014
851'.1—dc23
2013024101
A cata logue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Th is paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I dedicate this book with love to my grandchildren:
Peter, Dasha, Giuseppe Khaleel, and Azura Marie
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Contents
Preface ix
1. Lectio Brevis 1
2. Vita Nuova 6
3. Inferno 1– 4 23
4. Inferno 5– 7 38
5. Inferno 9– 11 52
6. Inferno 12– 16 66
7. Inferno 17– 26 78
8. Inferno 27– 29 92
9. Inferno 30– 34 103
10. Purgatorio 1– 2 116
11. Purgatorio 5– 10 130
12. Purgatorio 11– 17 143
13. Purgatorio 18– 22 152
14. Purgatorio 24– 26 164
15. Purgatorio 27– 33 169
16. Paradiso 1– 2 181
17. Paradiso 3– 10 191
18. Paradiso 11– 12 204
19. Paradiso 15– 17 215
20. Paradiso 18– 22 226
21. Paradiso 24– 26 237
22. Paradiso 27– 29 248
23. Paradiso 30– 33 258
Notes 271
Index 281
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Preface
In the fall of 2008 I complied with a request to have my Dante in Transla-
tion course videotaped in the Open Yale Courses series. It is a course that I
began teaching in 1969, when I was on the faculty of Cornell University,
and I have been teaching it ever since, with very few occasional intermis-
sions in between.
Over all these years (as is my wont with all other courses), I have
taught without notes. Th is habit has one defi nite advantage but also at least
one big disadvantage. Th e disadvantage is clear: my “oral” style does not
directly translate into the legible prose it has become in this book thanks
to the extraordinary talent for creative writing of Taylor Papallo. Taylor
has masterfully transformed the nebulous approximations of the tran-
scripts of my course’s twenty- four lectures into faultless En glish, and I
gratefully acknowledge my debt to him. Above all, he and I have decided
to keep in this book the skeleton structure, indeed the rhythm (the move-
ment of a sentence, repetition, cadence, the improvisation, and so on), of a
spoken talk.
On the other hand, one obvious stylistic advantage in the adoption
of the conversational, informal tone of the classroom is that it allowed me
to cut to a bare minimum the use of technical, philosophical language and to
engage in spur- of- the- moment, extemporaneous, offh and remarks and in-
terpretations. Plainly, in a book the act of improvisation, which we usually
link with impromptu musical or poetic per for mances or the comic theater,
typically fi nishes in mere contrivance or fi ction, however desirable it may
be for the sense of immediacy it conveys. Th e qualities associated with oral
communication were replaced in this book by what could be called a delib-
erate artlessness. I have deployed this rhetorical mode not because I meant
to write a “pop u lar” book on the Divine Comedy, but because I think that
Dante did write a poem that would be “sung” in public and would be suit-
able to all, to the scholars, the phi los o phers, the friars and the popes, po liti-
cal fi gures as well as “everyman” in the streets of medieval cities. As is
known, the poem represents a wide assortment of characters, styles (the
high, the low, the plain, and their mixtures), schools of thought, theological
perspectives, and diverse social and po liti cal backgrounds.
ix
