Dante's Inferno canto 1 (reading Dante in 2024 book club)

a man finds himself in a dark forest with no idea how he got there and no idea how to get out he sees a Sunny Hill in the distance and decides to head in that direction but out of nowhere a leopard jumps onto his path he heads in a different direction but then a lion appears and then a wolf and they look hungry the rumors are true the Dante book club has moved to YouTube If you found my channel through my commentary videos and have no idea what I'm talking about first of all don't worry commentary content is still my main type of content on this channel but complaining about everything on the internet is not the only thing I do in my free time a couple years ago I started an online book club dedicated to dant Li's Divine Comedy in 2022 we read Inferno last year we read purgatorio and this year we could have read paradisa and be done with it but I decided that would be too easy so instead we are reading the entire Divine Comedy from the beginning again one last time or at least I am anyway and hopefully some of you will join me every Wednesday and Friday I will be posting a video sharing my thoughts on AO starting with Inferno of course between Inferno purgatorio and Paradiso the whole poem has 100 Kos so two cantos a week for 50 weeks means that we will be done with it by the end of the year but without any further Ado what the hell is going on in Inferno as you will have gathered from my overly dramatic intro the poem opens with the narrator telling us that halfway through his life having lost his way he woke up in a dark Forest he says that this Forest is Eerie Beyond description and he is so freaked out that he couldn't possibly say where he is or how he got there the only thing he can remember is how terrifying this place is and how relieved he is when he finally sees a Sunny Hill in the distance he decides to head in that direction but as already mentioned he bumps into three beasts a leopard a lion and a wolf a She Wolf to be specific so he does a 180 and runs back into the dark Forest where he sees a ghost and since he is too desperate to have a normal reaction to seeing a ghost instead of running even faster he approaches The Ghost and asks it for directions more specifically he says M which is the Latin expression for have mercy on me save me whatever Shadow or truly man you be luckily the ghost turns out to be a friendly one and introduces itself as somebody who was born in the city of Mana then lived in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Augustus where he was best known for Singing In Praise of all the virtues of an's son who came to Rome from Troy after it was burned to the ground this is enough information for Dante to recognize him as Virgil the author of The nade Who also coincidentally happens to be dant's favorite poet ever he immediately tells Virgil about the three beasts and pleads with him tears in his eyes to please help him f find a way out of the forest Virgil goes on a bit as poets are known to do uh he talks about how deadly the She Wolf is and how nobody has ever gone past her alive but he does eventually reveal to Dante that there is another way out of the woods and that he is happy to guide him on that path however it will involve going through the three Realms of the afterlife hell purgatory and Heaven inconvenient but Dante doesn't really have much of a choice so he agrees and so the Journey Begins this is a little summary of the first Kanto that gives you a rough idea of what the premise of the Divine Comedy is on a literal level it's a story about a man's Journey towards God the man in question being dant liti who tells the story in the first person and ends up including a significant amount of autobiographical details although this remains a fictional story about a fictional Journey that we know of if you study The Divine Comedy in school in any capacity the first thing they they will teach you is that there are several layers of meaning to this story the main two being the literal story the story of a man traveling through the Realms of the afterlife as if they were real physical places and the allegorical story which is meant to teach the reader a lesson about the world or God or meant to criticize the Society of Dante's time or indeed tell us autobiographical details about Dante himself we know about these layers of meaning because Dante made sure to leave instructions in the letter to one of his benefactors where he says that the book should be read to the letter first and then allegorically which I love I love it when an author spoon feeds you how to read their book just in case you weren't incapable of figuring it out yourself so what's the big allegory first and foremost Dante's Journey Through the afterlife is not just about him the character of Dante the pilgrim who gets lost and then has to go on this huge journey is an Everyman figure and getting lost in a dark wood can be seen as as a metaphor for the universal experience of sort of straying from the person that you know you can be and that you want to be and falling further into Vice until you wake up in this scary unrecognizable place with three beasts waiting to pounce on you there are clues that Dante is not just talking about himself but about Humanity as a whole from the very opening lines of the poem where he writes Midway upon the Journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark for the straightforward pathway had been lost so already from the beginning he is dragging all of us into this another huge clue that helps us decipher the overarching allegory in the poem is his use of Christian and helenic imagery for context Dante was born in 1265 in Florence and was raised Catholic so regardless of whether he fully subscribes to the Catholic faith we will see later that he has his issues with the church his education and worldview are hugely influenced by Catholicism but he was also a big fan of the Greeks as we've already established he is a huge Virgil Fanboy so there will be a lot of references to Greek myths and epic poems as well for now let's just talk about some of this imagery first of all the Dark Forest is a pretty well-known symbol for evil and Terror so in the context of Inferno we could say it symbolizes corruption then we have the theme of losing one's way or as my translation puts it this straightforward path which is reminiscent of the Christian straight and narrow theme if you're not familiar with the Christian faith or the Bible the straight and narrow comes from a verse in the gospel of Matthew that goes straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life from here we've derived the English expression to walk the straight and narrow or keep the straight and narrow which means to act in a way that is honest and moral so already in the first three verses of the poem we can tell that Dante is trying to convey some sort of moral message and I say moral because although Dante was a Catholic like I just said and he is constantly going on and on about God and trying to find God and figure out God I have a personal belief that all men are obsessed with God for some reason he was also a philosopher trying to get to the bottom of what it means to be a human being specifically a good human being a productive human being so the dark wood is not just sin in the magical religious sense it's also an existential condition the condition of a person who is stuck in a dark place far from their real self in the second phase of the CLE we see him try to move out of this unfortunate situation and towards this light that he sees in the distance but three beasts get in his way together the Beast represent sin blocking man's way in his path towards God but individual usually they also symbolize specific sins so the leopard represents lust the lion represents pride and the She Wolf represents greed in the passage where he describes them Dante describes each of their movements as representative of the sin that they embody so the lustful leopard keeps dancing before his face as if trying to seduce him the lion advances its ravening head held high and the Wolf is gaunt yet gorged which is an incredible way to describe greed and how it's self generating in nature right the more people affected by greed have the more they want they are both gorged and gaunt bridel explains that there's no way physical or allegorical to get past the she wolfg greed and that she will continue to block the path to Salvation for humans for as long as she lives and she will continue to live until a hunting Hound that deals her death and pain will arrive most dant Scholars agree that the Hound is also a symbol and it represents a great political leader as we will see all throughout the poem Dante blames almost everything that is wrong in the world on human greed particularly the greed of the Catholic Church which continues to push it to get involved in politics and from his personal correspondence we also know that he hoped that the poem would inspire a social and political renewal at the hands of a new honest political leader who that person may be has been long debated and I don't think we have a definitive answer but I would like to point out that the Italian word that Dante uses to say Hound is vro which is a type of Greyhound I don't want to name names but I have one idea as to who it could be be just putting it out there for dant and Virgil however there is nobody who can slay the She Wolf so they have no choice but to make their way to the gates of hell and that's it that's the first kto thank you so much for watching I'm going to put all the links to the illustrations I've used and a couple of websites where you can read various translations of the poem and maybe read a little bit about Dante's life if that's something that you're interested in and uh I will see you in the next one

Channel: According to Alina

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Keywords: Dante book club, tiktok book club, study tube, dante's inferno, Dante inferno, Dante inferno summary, booktok, booktube, 2024 reading challenge, 2024 reading recommendations, booktok reading, booktok recommendations, 2024 book club, reading vlog, 2024 reading vlog, Dante explained, Dante inferno iceberg explained, Dante's inferno explained, Divine Comedy explained

Id: veDQUrkqVcg

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024