Adam Burgess. Professor of English. Adam Burgess, Ph. Updated November 01, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Burgess, Adam. A Guide to Dante's 9 Circles of Hell. The Gates of Hell in Derweze, Turkmenistan. Your Privacy Rights.
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You should now be on a screen that looks like this: On the right, there's a scrollable pane with the first 30 lines of the Inferno in slightly modernised Italian orthography. You can hover your mouse over any line to see it in Longfellow's English translation - we chose Longfellow since he's both a great poet in his own right and translates very literally.
At the top, there's an embedded audio file where you can hear Sabina reading the text aloud. Italians who've tried out the app have been complimentary about her interpretation. On the left, we have an area where you can practise reading yourself.
You're shown the poem one line at a time. If you press the Help button question-mark icon , you'll get Longfellow's translation and hear Sabina reading just that line. The intention is that you should listen a few times, then press on the Record button microphone icon , keep it pressed down while speaking , and release.
You should hear your voice echoed back, and the app will let you know if you said it approximately right: you'll get a green border for "okay", red for "try again".
You use the arrows to move to the next and previous lines. You can find the other extracts by using the Lesson tab on the left. Speaking just for myself, I've found the app very helpful for developing my appreciation of the beautiful language; I've soon got to the point where I want to learn pieces by heart, and find myself repeating them mentally.
We're curious to hear what people think - please let us know! If you want to try creating your own interactive versions of poems, it's straightforward and just involves copying text onto a spreadsheet and recording the audio using an online tool. Message me and I'll send you details.
Happy Easter! Italians who've heard them say they're quite good. Here is the first one, with a beautiful translation by Peter Robinson: Amore di lontananza Ricordo che, quand'ero nella casa della mia mamma, in mezzo alla pianura, avevo una finestra che guardava sui prati.
Io allora non avevo visto il mare che una sol volta, ma ne conservavo un'aspra nostalgia da innamorata. Verso sera fissavo l'orizzonte socchiudevo un po' gli occhi. Towards evening I stared at the skyline; narrowed my eyes a little; caressed outlines and colours between my lids; and the line of hills flattened out, trembling, azure: and seemed the sea to me and pleased me more than the real sea.
She wrote it in , when she was only seventeen. Nine years later, she was dead. You can find it here. The other day, in the comment thread to her review of The Aeneid , Meredith called The Divine Comedy "lame": specifically, she objected to the fact that Dante put all the people he didn't like in Hell.
Well, Meredith, you're perfectly welcome to your opinions - but I'm half Italian, and I've been politely informed that if I don't respond in some way I'm likely to wake up some morning and find a horse's head lying next to me.
So here goes. I actually have two separate defenses. First, let's consider Dante's artistic choices, given that he's planned to write a huge epic poem where he's going to visit Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, each of which is divided up into a large number of smaller areas corresponding to differents sins and virtues.
Now, who is he going to meet there? One option would be to have allegorical figures directly representing Pride, Wrath, Charity etc. Or he could just make people up, but then he wouldn't have any space for character development, and you'd never be able to keep track of all the invented figures.
Lindsay tried that route in A Voyage to Arcturus , and, even though the book's worth reading, he showed how hard it is to make it work. Every time someone interesting turns up, they always seem to get killed fifteen pages later. I think the choice Dante made was the best one: to use real people. Of course, it is a bit presumptuous to decide that the ones going to Hell are mostly guys he doesn't like, but nothing else makes sense.
If you want damned souls to populate the Hell of the Hypocrites, isn't Caiaphas, the high priest who falsely condemned Jesus, a sensible choice? If you're looking for Traitors to Lords and Benefactors, then don't Brutus and Cassius fit pretty well?
And every now and then he meets his friends down there too. His beloved teacher Brunetto Latini is damned for sodomy, which shocks Dante just as much as it does me, but in his world-view it makes perfect sense; homosexuality is plain wrong, that's all there is to it.
Okay, that was my first defense. My second is that it's far too simplistic to say that Dante is self-righteously damning all his enemies and extolling his own virtues. The theme that continually comes back through the first two books is that Pride is the root of all sin, and Dante is very conscious of his own sinful nature. For example, he's way too happy to gloat over the fact that his enemy Filippo Argenti has been condemned to the Hell of the Wrathful, and Virgil gently points out the irony.
Then, later, he has to spend the whole of Book 2 climbing up Mount Purgatory, which is hard work. He's got plenty of sins to purge. To me, the real problem with Dante is that his world is so very different from mine, and I keep having to scramble to the footnotes to get the necessary background; so it's hard to keep the flow of the book, since you're constantly being interrupted.
But even so, it's still a remarkable piece of work. We just don't think seriously any more about the nature of Good and Evil, Sin and Redemption. Dante's world thought they were crucially important, and he's one of the few people who's still able to give us a window into that view of life. It's nowhere near as irrelevant as we like to make out. Don Corleone, will this do? Or do I have to add footnotes as well?
Joshua Nomen-Mutatio. Bill Kerwin. Author 1 book An excellent translation--even better than John Ciardi. Like Ciardi, Pinsky is a real poet and makes Dante the poet come alive.
His verse has muscularity and force, and his decision to use half-rhyme is an excellent one, since it allows us to attend to the narrative undistracted. LIMBO - A place of monotony, here the souls are punished to wander in restless existence while they moan helplessly in echoes between the ruins of a temple ii.
LUST - Surrounded by erotic representations, those overcome by lust are forced to watch and experience disgusting things, ultimately being condemned to drown in the menstrual river iii. GLUTTONY - The circle itself is a living abomination, a hellish digestive system revealing horrific faces with mouths ready to devour the gluttons over and over for eternity iv. Click on any of these terms for a list of the Creatures, Deities, Images, People, Places, and Structures found in each canto.
Information will appear 1 as abbreviations in the margin between the Italian and English versions ie PL for Place and 2 in list form to the right of the English translation. Click on any terms listed under the categories for additional information. Readers can view at a glance the wide range of expressions that Dante uses to characterize people, places, creatures and other entities throughout the poem. Every canto also contains visual material, keyed to specific passages.
Click on Images to view a list of the visual material available for each canto.
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