Dante-the-pilgrim gets to a vantage point where he can look across the "enameled" green to see the crowd gathered in and around Limbo's castle.
Our pilgrim, Dante--with our poet, Dante, never quite behind the curtain of this story--lists off the greats: Trojans, Romans, Caesar, Aristotle, even great pre-Socratic thinkers.
Problem is, our poet didn't know many of these thinkers and writers except by name. He only knew of Plato by an incomplete translation of one minor work.
What's more, he includes a few names in his list of the greats that are almost mind-blowing, figures I didn't see even after reading COMEDY for almost thirty years.
Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I continue on the slow journey across COMEDY. We've come to the end of canto IV in INFERNO, to the first big catalogue of COMEDY, a list of the great thinkers who Dante-the-poet damns if not quite completely.
Here are the segments of this episode:
[01:35] My English translation of the passage from INFERNO: Canto IV, Lines 115 - 151. If you want to see it, check it out on my website, markscarbrough.com.
[04:20] A bit about my history with COMEDY--and my apparent blindness to some of its details, despite reading it for so many years.
[05:40] The first pieces of this passage: questions about who the "we" is, questions about the description of the green grass in the castle ("enameled"?), and questions about the Dante-the-poet who never seems far behind the veil of these passages.
[07:54] The first list of who the pilgrim sees: Trojans, Romans, and (here it comes) an Islamic ruler. I also talk a bit about the notion of "fiction v. history" in medieval literature--and why it may not make that much of a difference to the text in its historical context.
[14:38] A second list of the ones the pilgrim sees as he "lifts" his eyes "higher: philosophers, thinkers, writers, mathematicians, astronomers, physicians--and two Islamic scholars, more names in the list I missed for years.
[22:58] A bit about the rationalizations for a list like this one. Maybe there's an emotional component to listing off those you honor when you're on the run.
[26:42] The last lines of the passage--and the intrusion of Dante-the-poet for one final time. The poet's never been far away in Canto IV, in Limbo. Why? What about this canto makes the poet continually pull back the curtain of the narrative to reveal himself? Those answers I'll hold until the next episode of this podcast.