NEW Special Slow Reading Pathway – The Ancients Speak to Us: A Slow Reading of Dante’s “Purgatorio”
(Depicted in image: Domenico di Michelino, Florence 1465.)
There may be many opportunities to read Dante’s Divine Comedy with groups, but the problem is this: the book itself is so rich, reading it over a short period of time, we leave feeling that far too much content or meaning has passed us by. Having only the most fleeting impression of the work – or having depended on one interpretation, or, what is worse, common prejudice – how can we be sure that we have a good idea about what the Commedia is really saying or what the author is up to?
The intention of this group, therefore, is to remedy this situation, by engaging in a deep dive of the text.
We want to take the time that we ordinarily do not give to a book whose riches can only unfold to us with time and careful attention.
You can spend inordinate amounts of time with notes and essays and secondary material on the Divine Commedia. And this can be a worthy undertaking.
But Dante says in the Paradiso that he is most concerned with speaking to “a people to whom I will be ancient” – that is, us!
So getting closer to the text directly in conversational reading as a group is the approach that we think best conserves the true spirit in which Dante wants us, his readers, to take in his work.
English-speaking readers who do not know Italian are actually equipped to at least look at Italian and read it aloud, even if we need to go slowly and look things up.
The shape of this pathway
The first 30 minutes of each seminar, we will look at three lines of the canto in Italian, read them aloud, look up the words, and get a feel for what might be happening in them with the help of the translation.
Then, we’d spend the last hour in a seminar discussion with a carefully-pitched opening question, avoiding outside sources as much as we can to try to commune with Dante directly.
For example – in the first seminar, we might read the first three lines aloud:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
We look up some of the words, get a feel for what the sentences are saying – not thinking too much about grammar or technical details, but just getting a feel for the poetry and its sound.
The sort of passive action Dante does in the middle line, for example, “finding himself” in the dark wood, and the rhyming pun in the third line between “diritta” (correct) and “smarrita” (lost). Then, after half an hour, we’d start with an opening question – say, “what is the ‘selva oscura’ or ‘dark wood’ Dante is lost in?” – and then seminar on that question.
This special slow reading pathway is not quite a language class – like our Homeric Greek course – although we take our inspiration for this Dante study from that.
The idea here isn’t learning Italian; it would be learning Dante, and yet the Italian vernacular – through which Dante’s thought is embodied – is simply part and parcel of this learning.
Ordinarily, either great books seminars elsewhere, or our own slow reading pathways, we stick to translations, and only rarely pick out words in the original language.
This pathway will take more time with the original language, peeking past the translation into the original, to get a better more rooted sense of Dante’s wonderful work.
Pathway duration
Begins January 2025
Day and Time
Wednesday Evenings
8-9:30 pm EST
7-8:30 Central
6-7:30 Mountain
5-6:30 Pacific
Seminar duration
1.5 Hours
Average Weekly Reading
1 Canto per session
Nature of Course
This course offers a slow-reading, craftsmanlike approach (through conversation, question-and-answer and interpretation) to Dante’s Divine Commedia. The opening portion of each session will be spent examining selected lines from each Canto, in the original Italian. No prior knowledge of Italian is necessary.
Recommended edition:
Mode of Instruction
Purposive conversational reading or dialogue.
Regular Cost: $250 all access subscription
Seminar Archon: Jeff Johnston
Jeff Johnston is an independent scholar, musician and computer programmer, and a pioneering member of Symposium’s slow reading program (which began with Plato’s Laws). In addition to offering a slow reading of Dante, he offers a year long thematic reading course on “Islamic Poetry and Philosophy of the Abassid Era“ at Symposium. He has also led a slow-reading of Dante’s Paradiso, as well as a year-long slow-reading study of the some of the works al-Farabi. And he is also the leader of the ongoing Shakespeare Sonnets slow reading pathway. Jeff has a B.A. from St. John’s College, and did his graduate work in Political Science at Boston College, concentrating on Medieval thought, with a Master’s Thesis on al-Ghazali.
