Resumen
Resumen de La divina comedia, traducción completa de Longfellow
Para quién es
For readers who love epic, history and ideas, and anyone who has always meant to start Dante and wants the shape of the whole poem first. A journey for those drawn to poetry, divine justice, reason and love.
De qué trata este libro
The Divine Comedy is a long poem in three parts by Dante Alighieri, a Florentine who wrote it in exile and finished it shortly before his death in 1321. It tells how Dante, in the year 1300, loses his way in a dark wood and is led through the three realms of the dead: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Each realm has thirty three songs, called cantos, and the first canto of Hell opens the whole work, making one hundred in all.
Dante wrote in Italian, not in Latin, so that ordinary readers could follow him. He fills the poem with real people: popes, poets, lovers, neighbours, enemies and rulers he knew or had read about. Each is placed where Dante believes God's justice would put them. The result is a story, a moral map, a history of his age and a love poem all at once.
In the next quarter of an hour you will hear how the story moves from the dark wood down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory and out into the circling heavens. You will also hear what the poem is about and how it is built. We begin where Dante begins, lost and afraid in the middle of his life.
En este resumen
- 1A man lost in a dark woodFree
- 2The gate, the first circles, and lovers in the storm
- 3Anger, heresy and violence run deep
- 4Fraud has its own pits below
- 5The mountain of Purgatory rises
- 6Seven terraces teach the cure of sin
- 7Paradise rises through the circling heavens
- 8What the poem is really about
- 9How the poem is built and told
Idea clave 1 de 9
A man lost in a dark wood
The poem begins in the middle of a life. Dante is thirty five, halfway through the span of seventy years the Bible promises, and he finds himself in a dark wood with no memory of how he came there. The straight road is gone. He is afraid, and he sees a sunlit hill ahead that might lead him out.
Three beasts block the way up the hill. A leopard, a lion and a she wolf drive him back toward the shadows, and the she wolf frightens him most. Readers have long taken these animals as signs of sins or temptations, though Dante does not explain them. What matters in the scene is that he cannot save himself by his own effort.
Help arrives in the shape of Virgil, the Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid. Dante honours him as his master and the source of his own good style. Virgil says the hill cannot be climbed directly, and that Dante must take a longer road that passes through the place of the lost, then the place of those being cleansed.
Dante hesitates. He is not Aeneas, not Saint Paul, and he doubts he has the right or the strength to make such a trip. Virgil answers by telling him how he came to be there. Three women in Heaven care for Dante, and the last of them is Beatrice, the woman Dante loved from youth and who has died. She left her place among the blessed, came down to Limbo and begged Virgil to guide him.
This opening sets the pattern for everything after. Dante is both a character and the poet, a frightened man and a man later telling the tale. The journey is a rescue, and love starts it. When Dante hears that Beatrice sent Virgil, his courage returns, and the two men step toward the gate.
The first canto also fixes the time. The journey takes place during Easter week of 1300, from Good Friday on. The date matters because Dante, writing years later, can treat the events of the following twenty years as the future. People in Hell can then foretell his exile, and he can pass judgment on men still living when he began the poem.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about La divina comedia, traducción completa de Longfellow
What is the Divine Comedy about?
It tells how Dante, lost in a dark wood, travels through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided first by Virgil and then by Beatrice. Along the way he meets real people and learns how sin, repentance and love shape the soul.
Why is it called a comedy?
In Dante's day a comedy was a story that moves from a sad beginning to a happy end, not a funny tale. Later readers added the word divine to honour the poem's religious scope.
Who are Virgil and Beatrice in the Divine Comedy?
Virgil was the Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid, and he guides Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory as a figure of human reason. Beatrice was a woman Dante loved, who guides him in Paradise.
What are the nine circles of Hell?
They are the levels of Dante's Hell, from Limbo at the top through lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence and fraud to the lowest one. Sins grow worse as the circles narrow, and each has a fitting punishment.
Is the Divine Comedy hard to read?
The story is easier to follow than many expect, with vivid scenes, a clear structure and a rhyming chain of verse that keeps moving forward.