nenos 25/06/2023
Without hope, we live in on desire
Dante, along with his guide Virgil and the poets, are destined to roam the divine structures starting at the “neglect of god”, a spiritual torpor journey about recognition of sins. Inferno is meant to be, as much studies says, an anagogical allegory about the guilty conscience of the damned and a projection into a physical reality of the damned inner state.
This kind of read requires a lot of context and the footnotes are indispensable. The comedy was written at the Renaissance age, long before Copernicus, Galileu and Newton. It can be hard to associate and recognize figures if you’re not well versed in history. For example, the comedy was written making a cross section with the Ptolemaic system to the circles of hell, being 9 circles of hell and 9 known astronomical bodies including the primus mobile, the sun, the moon and the fixed stars.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Hell is structured in circles and darkness grows more to the absolute depth of Hell according to the sin you committed. With the only way out being through, they descend further in each circle all the way to the center, visually describing the torture and anguish faced by each category of sinner.
The citadel inhabitants embrace various figures such as great philosophers, Alexander the great, some unknown figures which made part of Dante’s life, astrologers, demons to make sure each sinner is suffering according to his degree, mythological creatures as guardians of the underworld, Mahomet, Nimrod and at the very center, lies Judas, Brutus and Cassius along with Satan himself.
Semantically, a great effort was made by the translators of every language to make denotations seem reasonably firm. It is very important to understand how unequal, translation between languages can become, in this case, archaic Italian to English. For example, literal language would kill the meaning because, every word has a root connotation and English being a rhyme-poor language, it fails to maintain the rhyming tercets form, known as, terza rima.
Link to my highlights: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-N-mL679qx7KURyDjtMT6mgNr-4tOEio/view?usp=share_link