Reading Notes: Dante's Inferno A

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Dante and Virgil 
For this week I had scheduled to do the Brothers' Grimm stories because of how much I enjoyed them as a kid. But when I sat down to begin reading A for it, I saw that Dante's Inferno was also an option and I could not resist (no pun intended!). So for this week I will be concurrently doing the Dante reading. I had always been curious about the Comedy, and the first half of this unit's reading did not disappoint. I had checked out sections of the text in the past, so I was familiar enough to recognize that this is a very different translation than I was used to. For instance, I have been made to recognize the plaque above the entryway to Hell as ending with "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here." I think that the difference is not incredibly important as far as an informal reading like through this unit, but if I was doing a close reading I imagine I would want to get as close to the original Italian as I could. Running into Socrates and Plato was a bit unexpected, but it made sense when I connected the dots that Dante was still a devout believer. Philosophers who would have been in contrast with Christianity would not have been situated anywhere "above" purgatory at the least.

Story source: from Tony Kline's prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Link.
Image source: Link. 

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