Reading Dante’s Purgatory While the World Hangs in the Balance - The New Yorker

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I thought of those scenes last spring when I began reading three new translations of Purgatory, being published to coincide with the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante's death, at fifty-six, in September of 1321. "Di che potenza vieni?" an old farmer had asked the godfather: "From what power dost thou come?" Purgatory, like the other two canticles of what Dante called his "Sacred" epic, Inferno and Paradise, takes place during Easter week in 1300.

The concept of Purgatory was relatively new when Dante was born; it came into currency in the twelfth century, perhaps among French theologians.

For many students of Dante, Purgatory is the Divine Comedy's central canticle poetically, philosophically, and psychologically.

As Dante and Virgil make their arduous circuit of Purgatory's terraces, they ask directions from the shades, who share their stories and explain their penances.

Finally, in the Earthly Paradise situated at Purgatory's summit, Dante reunites with Beatrice. In Purgatory Dante describes a process-slow and arduous, like analysis-of unriddling the mysteries of self-sabotage.



source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/reading-dantes-purgatory-while-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance

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