Three Themes In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy is a poetic Italian masterpiece by Dante Alighieri composed of three parts which he called respectively: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso. As this edition’s translator, John Ciardi puts it, originally Dante simply entitled his works as The Comedy, however, in later years, it was renamed The Divine Comedy for the connections that the public saw it had with human behavior and morality (Ciardi, 2003). For the goals and purposes of this review, we will focus specifically on the portion of the book called The Inferno. At a time when religious and secular concerns were at their peak in fourteenth century Italy, a tone of conflict broke out between the church and the government. Beyond the commonalities of corruption …show more content…

Dante writes, “Midway in our life’s journey” (Dante, 1314). Generalized we think that he is referring simply to halfway through his life. In his introductory remarks, the translator of this edition, John Ciardi, asks us to look deeper into the meaning. Critically, Ciardi tells us that we see that the Bible’s allotted span for the life journey is three-score years and ten (Ciardi, 2003). Furthermore from understanding that, one can deduce that Dante was hypothetically thirty-five years of age when he entered the underworld and it was the year 1300, due to his birth having been in 1265. The symbolically infused phrasing was common for the time, but curiously something that is lacking in the writings of the Western world, save for the vivacious Victorian era of vernacular. Unless you make a habit of reading in Italian, you will need to find a translated copy of the piece because Dante did not make a habit of writing in the English language. Because the translations vary to different degrees, one might even want to read several copies translated by different writers. The theory is the same: man meets hell. But the use of language can fluctuate. In addition to being filled with outspoken material, this was also one of the very first pieces of great revered literature to be written in the author’s native language of Italian, verses the church’s dialect of