Dante's Inferno - Book 22

Gustave Dore created incredible illustrations for The Divine Comedy.  Works of art in and of themselves!

Okay, so my week was dominated by Italians!  We finished reading The Inferno this week in our high school studies.  I'll have to admit that this is my first sweep through Dante's Inferno.  I'm 51 and I have never read any Dante before, though of course, I've heard about him for forever!

My 16 year old son and I enjoyed reading this together.  He read from the translation by Dorothy L. Sayers and I read from the one by Longfellow, with beautiful illustrations by Gustav Dore.  Sayers had wonderful explanatory notes and also these great maps and graphs that helped you visualize the landscape of hell.

I did not realize that Dante had been called the "master of the disgusting."  The further one travels into hell the more gruesome and repelling things become, which makes sense, of course, but doesn't make for pleasant reading!  I also really didn't like Dante's characterization of Ulysses.  He's puts him in hell for all the wrong reasons, because he suffered from 'wanderlust!'  Of all things!  Poor Odysseus was forever trying to get home!   Also he's in hell because he tricked the Trojans with the Trojan Horse!

Here's a link to the wikipedia page on Dore, who is an amazing artist.

There is so much to this poem of course, that we really weren't getting any depth of meaning from it.  We used this study which was good for reading comprehension but didn't give us the background we needed to really understand the many layers of meaning in this poem.  We watched The Teaching Company lecture series on Dante's Divine Comedy which really made the whole thing come alive.  I really wouldn't have appreciated it much at all without the excellent help of Professors Cook and Herzman.

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