Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
For I had wandered off from the straight path.
(Dante, Inferno, lines 1-3, Mark Musa, tr)
Ask me what I'm excited about this year, and I'll tell you: reading Dante with my seniors. I'm not sure how we managed to leave it this late – we've scheduled it into Level 5 Year 2 (roughly equivalent to 10th grade) in Mater Amabilis – but what with one thing and another, mainly dual-enrollment class loads for fairly young high-schoolers, we haven't gotten to it until now. It is the one thing I really, really want to accomplish this year, though honestly there's a lot I want to accomplish before they leave me forever (and if you wonder what all of that is, you can follow us on our 180-day journey to graduation).
Now, one of the things I think about Dante is that we think he's harder than he is. Yes, we need notes so we know who all those people in Hell are, and so on, and it's good to have some context for understanding why Dante puts them there, but even if you didn't know those details, and were just standing back, Canto after Canto, surveying the scene, there is a lot you wouldn't miss. In other words, to a very great extent you'd still get the point.
Notes and background info to prepare you to read ARE concretely helpful things, but if I – non-scholar that I am – had to name the one thing you need to be equipped to read Dante, I'd say: the conviction that you are perfectly capable of reading Dante.
What are our Dante lessons going to look like?
Well, really, they're going to look just like all our other lessons. The basic method is read and narrate. We'll read a Canto at a time, at a pace of roughly four days a week, though in the first week I am scheduling this video as a prep for our reading, so in Week 1 we'll just read the first three Cantos of the Inferno. You can see the weekly breakdown of our whole program here. Note that math, for the child still lacking a math credit, plus science and history (also for the child still short a credit) are being covered by dual enrollment.
Resources:
My personal favorite translation of the Divine Comedy is John Ciardi's, and his notes are very good. That's what I have in my house and what we'll use.
As insurance against lost or forgotten books, however, especially as people will be in transit between home and campus, I'm linking to this excellent site, which uses Longfellow's (kind of Latinate but still readable) translation and includes links to the entire Yale Online lecture series (I'm offering videos from that series every week, though we'll see how much we actually want or need them), plus study guides and other resources. I also rather like the Salvador Dali illustrations.
I will be reading alongside my seniors, though from a distance, as I'll be assisting my mother before and after an upcoming surgery, ten hours from home.
This reading will account for some of my Mother Culture in upcoming days, though I have my eyes on a new book by my friend, poet and Dante scholar Andrew Frisardi, which is recently out from Angelico Press: Love's Scribe: Reading Dante in the Book of Creation.
Though to a huge extent narration at this stage can still be a straight retelling (and certainly you have to know what's going on, and engage with that, before you can move to any other level of engagement), I might also throw out the following kinds of prompts:
*In what ways might a person be "lost in a dark wood" even if he isn't literally in a wood?
*Why Virgil?
*What do you think about the idea of the "Virtuous Pagans?"
*How does your reading of things change when you remember that Dante was an exile from his beloved home?
*What do you think Dante's thoughts are on the subject of vengeance?
*Which circle of Hell would you least like to occupy? Why?
And so on. At this level you can ask more pointed questions, though you still want to draw them out in thought, not put them on the spot to perform in a pass-fail-you-don't-understand-anything way. Study guides with discussion or essay questions can be helpful for framing narrations, though I wouldn't waste time on the kinds of questions that invite the student to comb back through the text for the correct answer. That's not thinking. You want prompts that really push them to assimilate and synthesize what they read, not just find the thing to plug in and plug it in. And as always, just retelling what happens can be enough. It's an important point of entry to any text. Before you start reading between the lines, you do have to read the actual lines and grasp what they say.
At the moment, I'm interested in Longfellow's choice of "panther" instead of "leopard" in Canto I of the Inferno – that seems very American! Maybe it's just all those Little House books I've read all my life, as it seems that the panther is actually indigenous to Africa and Asia as well, and really, leopards are panthers. So maybe it's not, objectively speaking, a specifically American touch, though for me it calls up all those panthers screaming in the big American woods of the 19th century.
Anyway, I might, as we write back and forth in Google Docs, which is how we've handled narrations for years now (again, people in transit and not often home), throw out my own thoughts and observations as narrations as well.
I also like Mark Musa's translation (quoted in the caption above).
We won't start until next week, but I have our first week of lessons queued up already and have been clicking through and running my eyes over things. Note that our picture study and composer study, also linked on the blog page weekly, are AO's rotations. Credit where credit is due.
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