Inferno Read Online

45

The lion represents for most commentators either violence or pride.

49

The wolf is representative for most commentators of either incontinence or wrath.

GLOSSARY

Allegory

An allegory is a narrative that has a literal meaning but also carries hidden or symbolic levels of significance. In the first canto of the Comedy the three beasts that oppose the pilgrim’s journey are literal impediments, but each one symbolizes another meaning.

Medieval thinking is full of such symbolic representations, and Dante’s epic involves many allegorical moments and methods.

Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was the great scholastic philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. He worked to harmonize the classical rational philosophy of Aristotle with Christian belief. Dante has Aquinas appear in the sphere of the sun in Paradiso, Cantos 10-12, as the spokesman for the theologians.

Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) was the most influential classical philosopher in the Middle Ages. His Nicomachean Ethics forms the most important background to Dante’s structure of Inferno. His writings on the natural world, human society, and logic provided a systematic approach to the world that influenced Aquinas and Dante in major ways. Except for the Bible, Dante refers to Aristotle more than to any other single source. Dante places Aristotle as the most honored philosopher in Limbo (Inf. 4.131) and calls him “the master of those who know.”

Beatrice

Beatrice Portinari (1266-1290) is the idealized woman of Dante’s earliest work, La Vita Nuova or The New Life. In that work Dante starts with aspects of courtly love poetry but soon raises the object of his love to theological expectations. Beatrice becomes the ideal of Christian belief and beauty as the pilgrim’s guide from the end of Purgatorio through Paradiso. She is introduced in the second canto of Inferno when Virgil explains to the reluctant pilgrim that Beatrice summoned him from Limbo. According to Virgil’s narration (Inf. 2.52-120), Beatrice was encouraged by Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Saint Lucia to intercede on the pilgrim’s behalf to save him from spiritual and perhaps physical death.

Beatrice’s Christian knowledge complements and perfects the humanist knowledge of Virgil in the Comedy.

Black Guelfs

See entry for Guelf factions: Whites and Blacks.

bolgia

Dante names the ten subdivisions of Circle 8, the circle of plain fraud, as bolge (the Italian plural form of bolgia), or pockets. Each bolgia contains a class of souls who have used conscious reason for evil purposes. For instance, bolgia 7 (Inf. Cantos 24 and 25) contains the thieves.

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D

Tom Simone’s translation is simply superb.  Of all the A

translations with which I am familiar, this is the one that N

is the most faithful to what’s there in the Italian: no frills, TE 

no poetic sallies, no choosing a word because it brings the line closer to iambic pentameter -- just unadulterated Dante with good old Anglo-Saxon words and in highly readable prose.

IN

- Peter Kalkavage, St. John’s College

FERNO

Tom Simone has taught at the University of Vermont 

for more than thirty years. He is the author of books 

•

on Shakespeare and on the beginnings of the Western 

Tradition as well as numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett, Shakespeare on film, and the history of recorded classical TO

music.  He currently is working on a translation of Dante’s “Purgatorio” for Focus Publishing.

M SIMONE

Focus Publishing

R. Pullins Company

PO Box 369

Newburyport, MA 01950

www.pullins.com

Inferno

I S B N 978-1-58510-113-9

Tom Simone

Focus

For the complete list of titles available from Focus Publishing, additional student materials, 9

7 8 1 5 8 5 1 0 1 1 3 9

and online ordering, visit www.pullins.com.

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