Dining with Dante

You have been invited to dine with Dante. In order to be an inspirational guest, you must choose your meal carefully. For each section, you must choose the correct number of “dishes.” HIGHLIGHT the options you chose for each category.

Appetizer (Choose 1): 20 points● [Visual] Who is my Guide? Based on your personal journey and need for fulfillment,

choose an appropriate guide. Create a LinkedIn (or other social media) profile that establishes your guide’s qualifications to lead you. Include pictures and background information, accomplishments, etc.

● [Written] Read “What the Hell” and turn it into an EOC Prep piece with a minimum of 5 high-level/critical thinking-based multiple choice questions and a constructed response. Answer Key must be provided.

● [Written] Read “Up from Hell: Dante’s Lessons for Millennials” and turn it into an EOC Prep piece witha minimum of 5 high-level/critical thinking-based multiple choice questions and a constructed response. Answer Key must be provided.

● [Visual/Written] Find at least 5 movies, shows, video games, or literature that reference or adapt Dante’s Divine Comedy. Explain how the allusion is used for specific effect. Include a visual image with each written explanation.

Entrée (Choose 1): 40 points● [Visual/Written] Complete the 9 Circles of _____ Hell. Create a visual representation to

accompany each circle.● [Visual] “My Journey”: Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven brings him

spiritual renewal and a return to faith. Draw a map, and explain a parallel journey for yourself, describing what is missing in your life or yourself. What would be your metaphorical Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso? What are the stops along the way to the end of the journey?

● [Written] Who could be a modern-day Dante? Find a figure in media, film, books, reality TV, etc., and explain how he/she is a modern-day Dante in a four-paragraph essay.

● [Visual/Written] Create a newspaper in which all of the stories surround Dante’s journey. The newspaper should include a variety of article categories: news, features, opinion, advice, sports, advertising, etc. Each item must establish a tone in keeping with its genre. The newspaper must include at least 5-7 articles/items. The length of each individual item will vary based on genre, so if you have several brief pieces, you will need to compensate with other articles and with number of items.

Side Dish (Choose 1): 20 points● [Written] Choose a specific Canto, and determine the theme. In the first brief paragraph,

explain the theme of the canto, using support from the text. In the second brief paragraph, find a modern song, poem, or short story that has the same theme and explain the connection, again using textual support.

● [Written/Visual] Pull a poem from Dante’s book, Vita Nuova, about his love for Beatrice. Analyze it and create a written or visual explanation. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41085/41085-h/41085-h.htm

● [Visual] Using Dante’s version of hell or paradise, create a graphic representation of who, in modern times, would be placed in each circle. Include a blurb for each to explain who these people are and why they belong in the circle. You must have at least one person for each circle.

● [Performance/Visual] Turn one Canto of your choosing into a song, rap, children’s book, graphic novel, movie, etc.

Dessert (Choose 1): 20 points● [Performance] Re-enact one Canto (filmed performance).● [Written] Write an original Canto based on your concept of Inferno or Paradise.● [Performance] Parody one aspect of The Divine Comedy (filmed performance).● [Visual] Create 10 memes for The Divine Comedy, have a certain tone, and contain

figurative language. These need to be original (we have Google too). http://www.imagechef.com/meme-maker Find images that would help to create the mood and reinforce your purpose. You may use computer images or your own original pictures. ALL PICTURES AND PHRASING MUST BE SCHOOL APPROPRIATE!

● [Written] Choose a character that Dante meets along his journey, and re-tell that Canto from his/her perspective.

Rubrics

Written ProjectContent: includes all required components and information; accurate; detailed; relevantOrganization: each paragraph includes precise, focused topic sentence; ideas are arranged in a logical flow; details and

examples directly support the topic sentence of that paragraphMechanics: minimum of grammar and spelling errorsFormat: MLA heading, pagination, title, margins, font and font size

Visual ProjectContent: includes all required components and information; accurate; detailed; relevantAppearance: professional quality; no notebook paper or pencil writingOriginality/Creativity: no retelling or redrawing of already created work (should be completely original)Written Component: follows Written Project rubric

Performance ProjectContent: includes all required components and information; accurate; detailed; relevantOriginality/Creativity: no retelling or redrawing of already created work (should be completely original)Professionalism: high-quality work; no notebook paper or pencil writingScript: follows Written Project rubric

Score:

_________ Appetizer _________ Entrée _________ Side Dish _________ Dessert________Total

Up from Hell: Dante’s Lessons for Millennials

By Rod DreherSeptember 1, 2014

This article was originally printed in the Fall 2014 issue of the Intercollegiate Review. We enjoy this one immensely, so we’re running it again one year later.

I was late coming to Dante. Never read him in high school or college, and after my formal education ended with my bachelor’s degree, why on earth would I have bothered? As a professional journalist, I read voraciously, but a seven-hundred-year-old poem by a medieval Catholic was not high on my list.

And then, a year ago, I stumbled into the Divine Comedy by accident. I was going through a deep personal crisis and couldn’t see any way out. One day, browsing in a bookstore, I pulled down a copy of Inferno, the first book of the Commedia trilogy, and began to read the first lines:

Midway along the journey of our lifeI woke to find myself in some dark woods,For I had wandered off from the straight path.(trans. Mark Musa)

Well, yes, I thought, I know what that’s like. Like me, Dante (the character in the poem) was having a midlife crisis. I kept reading and didn’t stop until months later, when I slogged with Dante through Hell, climbed with him up the mountain of Purgatory, and blasted through the heavens to see God in Paradise. All made sense after that pilgrimage, and I found my way back to life. I was, in a physical and spiritual sense, healed.

That’s the testimony of a forty-seven-year-old writer, late to wisdom. What if I had encountered Dante as a young man and taken the lessons the pilgrim learned on his journey to heart back then? Would I have had an easier time staying on the straight path? Perhaps. At least I would have been warned how to avoid the false trails.

Countercultural Icon

Most readers of the Commedia never go past the Inferno, which is a serious mistake. It’s impossible to understand Dante’s teaching withoutPurgatorio and Paradiso, which tell the

reader how Dante, enslaved by his passions in the thicket of despair, finds his way back to light and freedom.

Nevertheless, Inferno is the book most relevant to young adults, most of whom will not have yet made the errors of passion that landed the middle-aged Dante in the dark wood. The pilgrim Dante must listen to the words of the damned with skepticism, for they are all liars—and, in fact, the chief victim of the lies they told themselves in life. “Be careful how you enter and whom you trust,” says Minòs, the judge of the underworld. “It is easy to get in, but don’t be fooled!”

What’s more, the testimonies of the damned reveal precisely the nature of the deceptions to which they fell victim—and to which Dante himself, like all of us, is susceptible. All the damned dwell in eternal punishment because they let their passions overrule their reason and were unrepentant. For Dante, all sin results from disordered desire: either loving the wrong things or loving the right things in the wrong way.

This is countercultural, for we live in an individualistic, libertine, sensual culture in which satisfying desire is generally thought to be a primary good. For contemporary readers, especially young adults, Dante’s encounter with Francesca da Rimini, one of the first personages he meets in Hell, is deeply confounding. Francesca is doomed to spend eternity in the circle of the Lustful, inextricably bound in a tempest with her lover, Paolo, whose brother—Francesca’s husband—found them out and murdered them both.

Francesca explains to Dante how she and Paolo fell into each other’s arms. How could she have controlled herself? she says.

Love, that excuses no one loved from loving,Seized me so strongly with delight in himThat, as you see, he never leaves my side.Love led us straight to sudden death together.

She ends by saying that reading romantic literature together caused them to fall hopelessly and uncontrollably in love—unto death, at the hands of her jealous husband.

To modern ears, Francesca’s apologia sounds both tragic and beautiful. But the discerning reader will observe that she never takes responsibility for her actions. In her mind, her fate is all the fault of love—or rather, Love. We know, however, that it is really lust, and that her grandiose language in praise of romantic passion is all a gaudy rationalization. It’s a rationalization that is quite common in our own time, as everything in our popular culture tells us that desire is the same thing as love, and that love, so considered, is its own justification.

For me as a writer, there is a more subtle lesson here, one I wish I had learned before writing so many column inches of cruel, clever journalism in my twenties.

Dante faints at the end of his encounter with Francesca, apparently overcome by the shock of her suffering in eternity for what he would hardly have considered a sin at all. It’s not hard to suspect, though, that Dante’s shock came at the recognition that the love poetry she read on her road to perdition included some of his own verses.

Francesca’s fate is not Dante’s fault, exactly, but that doesn’t mean he is not implicated. The lesson here is to think carefully about the things you say in public, because your words can have unintended consequences. This is not a warning to avoid ever saying anything critical or harsh. Sometimes, harsh criticism, even mockery, is necessary. But it is necessary far less than we think, and, in any case, one should never be deliberately cruel.

In the age of social media, this is even more important to keep in mind. Words written or spoken in public can have terrible private consequences. We all live in a narcissistic, confessional culture in which speaking whatever is on your mind and in your heart is valorized as “honest” and “courageous”—just as calling lust love falsely ennobles it by dressing up egotism with fake moral grandeur.

What Disney Gets Wrong

Believe in yourself. Many graduates hear some version of that advice in their commencement address. It’s as common as dirt and shapes virtually the entire Disney film catalogue. The pilgrim Dante hears it as well, deep in the heart of Hell, from his beloved teacher and mentor Brunetto Latini, thrilled to see his pupil passing through.

Brunetto suffers in the circle of the Sodomites, though Dante never mentions his old master’s sexual activity. Theirs is a tender meeting, with Brunetto full of praise for Dante’s work. “Follow your constellation,” the old man says, “and you cannot fail to reach your port of glory.”

It is terrific flattery, and it comes from a Florentine who was greatly admired in his day as a writer, scholar, and civic leader. Addressing Brunetto with great respect and affection, Dante says, “You taught me how man makes himself eternal.”

It’s enough to make the reader forget that Brunetto is damned. If Dante isn’t talking about sexual immorality, why is Brunetto in Hell? It becomes clearer later in Purgatorio, when Dante meets other Italian artists and learns that art pursued for the sake of personal glory, as distinct from the service of God or some other high cause, is in vain. Brunetto is a vain man, a writer who thought the way to pursue immortality was to serve his own cause in his work—and a spiritually blind teacher who sees Dante’s fame as bringing glory to himself.

How much happier would young people be if they began their careers thinking not of the fame, the fortune, and the glory they will receive from professional accomplishment but rather of the good they can do for others and, if they are religious, the glory they can bring to God through their service? Dante Alighieri’s early verse was good, but he would today be as forgotten as Brunetto Latini if he had not written the Commedia, which he composed for transcendent ends. Few if any of us will accomplish a feat like that, but what good we may do in this world, and what glory may remain after we leave it, will come only if we serve something greater than ourselves.

Tales of Selfish Ulysses

Following one’s own constellation can only get one lost—or worse. This is the lesson Dante learns in Canto XXVI of the Inferno, when he meets Ulysses, the great voyager, suffering in the circle of the False Counselors—that is, those who used their words to mislead others intentionally.

In the version of the Ulysses myth that informs Dante, the silver-tongued Greek cast aside his obligations to his family back home and to his faithful crew, urging them to keep rowing into forbidden waters, in search of discovery.

“You are Greeks!” Ulysses exhorts them. “You were not born to live like mindless brutes but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge.”

Who among us would disagree with that noble sentiment? Certainly not Ulysses’s crew, whose hearts blazed with desire to follow their courageous captain. Except it was a lie. Ulysses rationalized wanting to indulge his own boundless curiosity by sailing in uncharted waters, and he led himself and his men to their deaths.

Two lessons here stand out for the modern reader. First, selfishness that knows no limits, and that tells itself it is pursuing a worthy goal, can have terrible consequences that affect more

than just the individual. Ulysses didn’t think about what he owed the old and worn-out crew that served him so loyally in war. Nor did he think about his own wife and son waiting for him at home on Ithaca. All he cared for was his “burning wish to know the world and have experiences of all man’s vices, of all human worth.”

Second, excellence and knowledge are fine things, but they do not justify themselves. The pursuit of excellence and knowledge must be bounded by moral and communal obligations that rein in the ego and hamstring hubris. Today we live in an age when science often refuses limits, claiming the pursuit of knowledge as a holy crusade. The world praises as daring and creative the transgression of nearly all boundaries—in art, in media, in social forms, and so forth—inspiring those who wish to pursue this debased form of excellence to be even more transgressive.

All these damned souls—Francesca, Brunetto, and Ulysses—suffer hellfire because they worshipped themselves and their own passions. In Dante, egotism is the root of all evil. Yet this unholy trio would be admired, even heroic figures in twenty-first-century America for their bold passion and fearless individualism. Love as you will, whatever the consequences, says Francesca. Follow your bliss and navigate by your own stars, says Brunetto. Honor that burning curiosity in your breast and pursue knowledge and excellence no matter what, says Ulysses.

For most of my twenties, I more or less believed these things, because that’s how our culture catechizes us. But then, Dante is rarely on the syllabus. Had I read the Divine Comedy as a younger man and taken its lessons to heart, I would still have been eager to pursue romantic love, achieve professional success as a writer, and explore and know the world—but I would have grasped that these goals can be understood as good only if they are subordinated to right reason, to virtue, and, ultimately, to the will of God.

Dante shows us that you can just as easily go to Hell by loving good things in the wrong way as you can by loving the wrong things. It’s a subtle lesson, and a difficult lesson, and a lesson that is no less difficult to learn in the twenty-first century than it was in the fourteenth. But it’s still necessary to learn. Happy is the man who embraces this wisdom at any point in his life, but happier is the man who does so in his youth.

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at the American Conservative. He is currently writing a book titled How Dante Can Save Your Life.

Save paper and follow @newyorker on TwitterMAY 27, 2013 ISSUE

What the HellDante in translation and in Dan Brown’s new novel.BY JOAN ACOCELLAWhy is a fourteenth-century allegorical poem about sin and redemption still such a draw?

People can’t seem to let go of the Divine Comedy. You’d think that a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrels. But no. By my count there have been something like a hundred English-language translations, and not just by scholars but by blue-chip poets: in the past half century, John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, W. S. Merwin. Liszt and Tchaikovsky have composed music about the poem; Chaucer, Balzac, and Borges have written about it. In other words, the Divine Comedy is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for students. It’s one of the reasons there are professors and students.

In some periods devoted to order and decorum in literature—notably the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—many sophisticated readers scorned the Divine Comedy as a grotesque, impenetrable thing. But not in our time. T. S. Eliot, the lawgiver of early twentieth- century poetics, placed Dante on the highest possible rung of European poetry. “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them,” he wrote. “There is no third.” A lot of literary people then ran out to learn some Italian, a language for which, previously, many had had scant respect, and a great surge of Dante translations began. In some—Laurence Binyon’s (1933-43), Dorothy Sayers’s (1949-62)—the translator even tried to use Dante’s rhyme scheme, terza rima (aba bcb cdc, etc.), a device almost impossible to manage in English, because our language, compared with Italian, has so few rhymes. Since then, we have had many kinds of Divine Comedy—lowbrow, highbrow, muscly, refined. The more fastidious ones, the ones that actually try to give equivalents for Dante’s words, are in prose, because in prose the translator doesn’t have to sacrifice accuracy to such considerations as rhyme and rhythm. As for verse translations, they may be less accurate, but it can be argued that they are more faithful than prose versions. The Divine Comedy, after all, is a poem, and its meanings are contained as much in sound as in “sense.” Verse translations require more courage, and more thinking, because they are generally more interpretive. Within the past year, two more have been published, one by the American poet Mary Jo Bang, the other by the Australian essayist and poet Clive James.

In his translation of the complete Divine Comedy (Liveright), James made the crucial decision to rhyme, in quatrains (in his case, abab). But, as he tells us in the introduction, end rhymes were no more important to him than rhymes or chimes within the lines: alliteration, assonance, repetition. He says that his wife, Prue Shaw, now a celebrated Dante scholar (her book “Reading Dante” will be out next year), pushed him in this direction, by teaching him, years ago, that the Divine Comedy had to be read phonetically. The great thing about it was its richness of sound, as word after word, line after line, beckoned the next and thus kept the reader moving forward. James says this is what he was intent on, above all.

All is a lot. James gave himself permission to add lines to Dante’s text and to incorporate background material. He didn’t want footnotes—nothing should stop the reader. Many things do, though. Here are Dante’s famous opening lines:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vitami ritrovai per una selva oscura,ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa duraesta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!And here is James’s rendering:

At the mid-point of the path through life, I foundMyself lost in a wood so dark, the way

Ahead was blotted out. The keening soundI still make shows how hard it is to say

How harsh and bitter that place felt to me—Merely to think of it renews the fear.

“Keening sound”? If ever there was a forced rhyme, this is it. Also, Dante didn’t say anything about wailing, only about fear, and the two are different matters.

Soon the pilgrim (as the protagonist of the poem is usually called) and his guide, Virgil,arrive at the gates of Hell, with its dread inscription:

Per me si va ne la città dolente,per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

per me si va tra la perduta gente.Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;

fecemi la divina podestate,la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore.Dinanzi a me non fuor cose createse non etterne, e io etterno duro.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.

James translates this as:

To enter the lost city, go through me.Through me you go to meet a suffering

unceasing and eternal. You will bewith people who, through me, lost everything.

My maker, moved by justice, lives above.Through him, the holy power, I was made—made by the height of wisdom and first love,whose laws all those in here once disobeyed.From now on, every day feels like your last

Forever. Let that be your greatest fear.Your future now is to regret the past.

Forget your hopes. They were what brought you here.

This shows a considerable drop in energy, partly because of a loss of compression. James has lengthened the passage by a third. But, also, he has added some confusion about what the gate is telling us. At least in the first line, it seems to think that we have a choice about whether or not to enter. We don’t, and that is what makes going to Hell a serious business.

From what I can tell, these two problems, awkwardness and inaccuracy, are due to exactly the thing that sounded so nice when James told us about it in the introduction, his intention to capture the phonetic richness of Dante’s lines. Worse are the demands made by the internal echoes. In the Hell-gate inscription, there’s almost no word that isn’t singing a duet, or more. We have “through me” / “through me”; “suffering” / “unceasing” /“everything”; “me” / “me” / “meet” / “be” / “people”; “maker” / “moved” / “made”; “him” / “holy.” And that’s just in the first six lines. The technique asks a great deal: that the translator obey, simultaneously, the summons both of English-language sounds and ofDante’s meaning.

Still, the freedoms James takes allow him to get off some beautiful phrases. When the pilgrim realizes that his guide is Virgil, his idol, he says to him, “Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte / che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?” James turns this into “Are you Virgil?Are you the spring, the well, / The fountain and the river in full flow / Of eloquence that sings like a seashell / Remembering the sea and the rainbow?” I love that seashell, and the rainbow. Neither is in Dante. James is a poet, doing a poet’s work. Also, however interested he is in being fancy, he can be plain as well, sometimes poignantly so.

See the last line of the Hell-gate inscription: “Forget your hopes. They are what brought you here.” The second sentence is not in the original poem, but it is wonderful, both sarcastic

and sad. James is also a premier practitioner of the high-low style that became so popular in the nineteen-twenties, notably via Eliot and Pound, which is to say, in part, via Dante. He can be colloquial. Of the she-wolf that blocks the pilgrim’s path, Virgil says, “In a bad mood it can kill, / And it’s never in a good mood.” (This could be from“The Sopranos.”) James likes, iconoclastically, to do this sort of thing with the grandees, like Francesca da Rimini, who says to the pilgrim, “What you would have us say / Let’s hear about.” It’s all rich and strange.

Mary Jo Bang, a poet and a professor of English at Washington University, in St.Louis, has much the same purpose: to convey Dante’s internal music. Unlike James, she has made some major sacrifices to this end. In her Inferno (Graywolf), the only canticle she has taken on so far, she does not use end rhyme, and she does not hold herself to any regular metre. (James used iambic pentameter.) But, having cast off those restraints, she adopts another one. James was trying, he said, to be true to Dante. Bang is trying to be true to contemporary life, to the “post-9/11, Internet-ubiquitous present.” As this implies, she aims to be faithful to something else as well: undergraduates. She writes, “I will be most happy if this postmodern, intertextual, slightly slant translation lures readers to a poetic text that might seem otherwise archaic and off-putting”—especially, I presume, to nineteen-year-olds. On the surface, this appears to be a laudable purpose, but whenever you hear those words “true to contemporary life,” run for cover.“Tickets to the birth of my son or daughter? I got ’em–who needs ’em?”

The trouble starts on the first page. The pilgrim speaks of his relief upon issuing from the dark wood. He says that he felt like a person who, almost drowned at sea, arrives, panting, on the shore. Bang places him, instead, at the edge of a swimming pool. But these two things—the ocean and the neighborhood pool—are nowhere near the same, and every nineteen-year-old knows what the ocean is. Other anachronisms create worse problems. Bang, in her lines, includes references to Freud, Mayakovsky, Colbert, you name it. She picks up swatches of verse from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. But, if readers get into the swing of these, what are they going to do when they encounter the Roman Catholic theology that is the spine of the Divine Comedy, and which Bang says, in her introduction, that she will honor?(“God has to look down from Heaven; Satan has to sit at the center of Hell.”) Wouldn’t it be better if she let the reader know that there are old things as well as new things— that there is such a thing as history? She is not unaware of this, as her learned footnotes demonstrate. Why is she keeping it from her readers? If they knew it, they might find out who Mayakovsky is, which I doubt that they have done.

Oddly, given Bang’s stated aims, she’s happy to court obscurity. She says that the she-wolf that detains the pilgrim outside the wood has a “bitch-kitty” face; Virgil tells the pilgrim to climb the “meringue-pie mountain” that lies ahead. “Bitch-kitty” gets an explanatory footnote: Bang says it’s something that she found in the Dictionary of American Slang. My edition of that book says “bitch kitty” was a phrase of the nineteen-thirties and forties. (Roughly, it meant a “humdinger.”) Did Bang expect today’s readers to know it? Not really, it seems. She says that she wants these oddities to be fleeting pleasures for us. To me, they’re not pleasures, but just oddities, something like finding a Tootsie Roll in the meat loaf.

Translators are not the only ones drawn to Dante. Since 2006, Roberto Benigni has been touring a solo show about the Divine Comedy. In 2010, Seymour Chwast rendered the poem as a graphic novel. There are Inferno movies and iPad apps and video games. As of last week, their company has been joined by a Dan Brown thriller, “Inferno”(Doubleday).

In many ways, the new book is like Brown’s 2003 blockbuster, “The Da Vinci Code.” Here, as there, we have Brown’s beloved “symbologist,” Robert Langdon, a professor at Harvard, a drinker of Martinis, a wearer of Harris tweeds, running around Europe with a good-looking woman—this one is Sienna Brooks, a physician with an I.Q. of 208—while people shoot at them. All this transpires in exotic climes—Florence, Venice, and Istanbul—upon which, even as the two are fleeing a mob of storm troopers, Brown bestows travel-brochure prose: “The Boboli Gardens had enjoyed the exceptional design talents of Niccolò

Tribolo, Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti.” Or: “No trip to the piazza was complete without sipping an espresso at Caffè Rivoire.”

As we saw in “The Da Vinci Code,” there is no thriller-plot convention, however well worn, that Brown doesn’t like. The hero has amnesia. He is up against a mad scientist with Nietzschean goals. He’s also up against a deadline: in less than twenty-four hours, he has been told, the madman’s black arts will be forcibly practiced upon the world. Though this book, unlike “The Da Vinci Code” and Brown’s “Angels and Demons” (2000), is not exactly an ecclesiastical thriller, it takes place largely in churches and, as the title indicates, it constantly imports imagery from the Western world’s most famous eschatological thriller, Dante’s Inferno. Wisely, Brown does not let himself get hog-tied by the sequence of events in Dante’s poem. Instead, he just inserts allusions whenever hefeels that he needs them. There are screams; there is excrement. The walls of underground caverns ooze disgusting liquid. Through them run rivers of blood clogged with corpses. Bizarre figures come forward saying things like “I am life” and “I am death.” Sometimes the great poet is invoked directly. The book’s villain is a Dante fanatic and the owner of Dante’s death mask, on which he writes cryptic messages. Scolded by another character for his plans to disturb the universe, he replies, “The path to paradise passes directly through hell. Dante taught us that.”

The hellfire material makes the book colorful and creepy. It also sounds notes of conspiracy. (The villain, with his “Transhumanist philosophy,” has many followers.) Religion and paranoia have a lot in common: above all, the belief that something big is going on out there and also that everything means something else. Further, both religion and paranoia are short on empirical evidence, so that greater faith is required. Finally, the conviction that everything refers to something else generates codes and symbols, which is what generates Robert Langdon. As a symbologist, he can read these runes. Often, the clue they give him does not point him to what he’s looking for but rather to something that will offer a further clue, which will get him a little closer to what he’s looking for, and so on, as in a treasure hunt.

That process is the plot, or at least the skeleton of it. It is then fleshed out with a million details: dreams, murders, priceless paintings. There is a yacht lurking off the Adriatic coast, where, for vast fees, sinister, tight-lipped men arrange for governments to change, wars to be hushed up, and the like. Meanwhile, we are given lessons in how to do ancient mosaics and how to make a death mask. We are introduced to products galore: Plume Paris glasses, Volvo motors, Juicy Couture sweatsuits, even a “Swedish Sectra Tiger XS personal voice-encrypting phone, which had been redirected through four untraceable routers.” Page after page, things keep coming at you. People who sit down to read “Inferno” should bring a notepad.

The book has almost no psychology, because one of Brown’s favorite plot devices is to reveal, mid-novel, that a character presented all along as a friend is in fact an enemy (see Leigh Teabing in “The Da Vinci Code”), or vice versa. To do that—and it’s always pretty exciting—Brown can’t give his characters much texture; if he did, they would be too hard to flip. Of course, without texture they don’t have anything interesting to say, except maybe “Stop the plane there.” The dialogue is dead. As for the rest of the writing, it is not dead or alive. It has no distinction whatsoever. Because “Inferno” transpires in so many glamorous places, Brown may rise to the grandiose. In Hagia Sophia, he speaks of the “staggering force of its enormity,” and barely a page passes without italics. But this is to relieve the general coldness.

No, Brown is a plot-maker, and only that. This story is a little more complicated thanNo, Brown is a plot-maker, and only that. This story is a little more complicated than usual, because although Langdon, with his trusted Brooks, is looking for something, he’s not quite sure what it is. Meanwhile, from one side he’s being chased by the storm troopers—black-clad thugs, with umlauts over their names—and from the other by Vayentha, the lady with the Swedish Sectra Tiger XS. There’s also a reconnaissance drone buzzing through the sky, telling them where to find Langdon.

Too bad for them, because our hero knows more secret tunnels than you can shake a stick at. At one point, it takes Brown twenty pages to get Langdon and Brooks, in Florence, up and down the Palazzo Vecchio’s hidden passages: through the corridor behind the Armenia panel in the Hall of Geographical Maps, into the cupboard in the Architectural Models room, down the Duke of Athens stairway, and so on. Never does the story slow down, though. Brown gives us extremely short chapters (often just two or three pages) and constant cross-cutting. He also adores cliff-hangers. One of the storm troopers calls his superior: “ ‘It’s Brüder,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve got an ID on the person helping Langdon.’ ‘Who is it?’ his boss replied. Brüder exhaled slowly. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ ” Cut to Vayentha, who thinks she’s been fired for failing to kill Langdon and is revving her motorcycle disconsolately. She’s not the person helping Langdon, though. She’s something else, which you have to figure out.

The book ends weakly, because Langdon—and Brown, too, clearly—actually sympathizes with the villain, or at least with his motives. And those who are familiar with Brown’s previous books will not be surprised that the boy doesn’t get the girl. Brooks clearly wishes it were otherwise. “You’ll know where to find me,” she says, as she and Langdon part, and then she kisses him on the lips. He gives her a big hug and puts her on the plane. In “The Da Vinci Code,” Langdon’s companion, Sophie Neveu, turned out to be a descendant of Jesus, and this made the question of a romance between them a tricky business. Brooks is free, though. Maybe Langdon is gay.

For all its absurdities, Brown’s book is a comfort, because it proves that the DivineComedy is still alive in our culture. The same is true, on a higher level, of the James and the Bang translations. Take James. He probably gave us more oddities—outrages, even— than he would have with a less famous text. Surely he knew the number and the excellence of his predecessors. But he is seventy-three and ailing, so, if he said to himself,“What the hell, let’s just do it,” you can see why. As for Bang, she’s not seventy-three (she’s sixty-seven), but if she has taught the Divine Comedy she has unquestionably faced a lot of young people saying, “What?” “What?” You can’t blame her for trying to do something about that. At least she cares. All of us should worry about her students, though. They’re going to go off thinking that Dante wrote about meringue-pie mountains, and this is wrong. Furthermore, there is no reason that they couldn’t have faced the mountain without the pie, and the fourteenth century without the twenty-first. Thankfully, because the original text survives more faithful translations will keep coming. Thankfully, because the original text survives more faithful translations will keep coming. Indeed, they have. The edition by Jean and Robert Hollander (2000-07) is both accurate and beautiful. I don’t think any general reader, or any student of Mary Jo Bang’s, needs more than this. But if Bang—and James, and even Brown—disagrees, so be it. As long as Dante is here, and the text is available, why shouldn’t they have some fun? ♦

Nine Circles of Your Hell: Planning GuideCreate your own version of Dante’s Inferno, but for personal Hell, high school world, sports, dance, friendship, etc.

You must create nine circles. Assign each circle a specific crime or moral wrong (ex: stealing cafeteria food, gossip, etc). For each crime, devise what you think would be an appropriate punishment (it must match the crime). Give a brief description of the circle and punishment. Use this chart to plan your project, which you will then turn into a poster or other visual that includes appropriate images and neatly typed/written (no pencil-scratched stuff) explanations.

Least

Worst

Circle Crime/Sin Describe Circle and Punishment

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Unpacking the Standards: English II EOC Released Test

Question Stem Skill/Vocabulary StandardWhat evidence describes the speaker’s feelings?

Tone/ Inference (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.(R4) Analyze how specific choices shape meaning or tone.

Which word could replace_______?

Vocabulary in context (L4) Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple- meaning words and phrases by using context clues

According to the selection, why has__________been described as______?

Textual evidence and supporting details

(R2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail itsdevelopment over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details(R4) Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining figurative meanings.

What is the effect of the literary device in the sentence below?

Figurative language (R2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail itsdevelopment over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details(R4) Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining figurative meanings.

How does the author structure the text?

Organization patterns (R5) Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text relate to the whole.

What is the significance of the text?

Organization patterns (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly andto make logical inferences from it.(R5) Analyze the structure of texts, including how specificsentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text relate to

How does the author connect ideas in the selection?

Connection of ideas (R2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details

What group of words from the selection conveys the author’s attitude toward the topic?

Tone (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.(R4) Analyze how specific choices shape meaning or tone.

How does the author achieve his purpose?

Author’s purpose and style (R4) Determine the meaning of words or phrases as they are used in the text including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact on specific words

Which lines from the poem support the theme?

Theme (R2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development overthe course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined byspecific details

How does the author’s use of rhyme scheme enhance the theme of the poem?

Rhyme scheme/Theme (R5) Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text relate to the whole.(R2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development overthe course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined byspecific details

What is the meaning of the phrase?

Vocabulary in context L4) Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues

How has the speaker changed between the first and the last stanza?

Speaker’s attitude/tone/ point of view

(R4) Analyze how specific choices shape meaning or tone.(R6) Analyze how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

How does the speaker’s cultural background affect perception?

Point-of-view (R6) Analyze how point –of- view or cultural perspective shapes the content and style of a text.

What does the speaker achieve in the poem with his/her description of setting?

Inference/Setting (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.(R3) Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

How does the speaker’s point-of-view affect his/her impression?

Speaker’s attitude/tone/ point- of-view

(R4) Analyze how specific choices shape meaning or tone.(R6) Analyze how point- of- view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

How do characters help to develop the theme of the text?

Characterization/theme (R2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details(R3) Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

How does the use of personification help develop the setting?

Personification and setting (R4) Interpret figurative language and determine how it shapesmeaning

What is the meaning of the simile in the sentence?

Simile (R4) Interpret figurative language and determine how it shapesmeaning

What is implied in the sentence below?

Implied/Inference (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

What is one possible reason why a character may

_______________?Inference

(R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

What does a character’s reaction reveal about him or her?

Characterization (R3)Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

In the sentence below, how does the connotation [of a group of words] reflect a character’s attitude?

Connotation/Character/Attitude

(R3)Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.(R4)Interpret connotative phrases and how they shape meaning or tone

How does the author introduce additional depth to the conflict between two characters?

Author’s style/conflict/ character

(R3)Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.(R4) Interpret words and phrases and how they shape meaning

How does the author’s use of third person point of view reinforce the reader’s understanding of a character’s internal conflict?

Third person point-of-view/character/conflict

(R3)A(R3)Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

What is an objective summary of the selection?

Objective/Summary (RI2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail itsdevelopment over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details

What is the purpose of beginning the selection with dialogue and then moving to geographical and statistical information?

Purpose/Dialogue/Patterns of

organization

(RI4) Interpret words and phrases and how they shape meaning(RI5) Analyze the structure of texts, including how specificsentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text relate to the whole.

What can be inferred from the paragraph?

Inference (RI1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

What does the author mean when she describes?

Inference/Details (RI1) Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.(RI2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail its

development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details

Why does the author include the sentence

__________________?

Inference(RI1) Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

What is the significance of the statement below from the last paragraph?

Inference (RI1) Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

What is the author’s purpose in writing this selection?

Author’s Purpose(RI6)Assess how purpose shapes the content and style of a text

How does the author unfold his/her ideas?

Structure and Word Choice(RI4) Interpret words and phrases and how they shape meaning(RI5) Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text relate to the whole.

How does the author use language to advance her point ofview? Use evidence from the selection to support your answer

Constructed Response/ Point of view/Evidence

(W2)Write explanatory texts to examine and convey complexideas and information clearly and accurately through theeffective selection, organization, and analysis

(RI4) Interpret words and phrases and how they shape meaning

(R6) Analyze how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

How does the description of a character develop the theme of the selection?

Characterization(R3)Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

In the selection, the use of the word ___________to describe a character’s interactions is meant to convey what about his/her character?

CharacterizationVocabulary in context (L4) Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-

meaning words and phrases by using context clues

Based on the paragraph, what does the author mean when he uses the word _______________?

Vocabulary in context

(L4) Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues

In the selection, what is the purpose of the sentences below?

Inference/Word choice (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.(RI4) Interpret words and phrases and how they shape meaning

What can be inferred from the statement below?

Inference (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

What assumptions can the reader make about the character?

Inference (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

What is the effect of the author’s excessive use of [the word] in the selection?

Word Choice

RI4) Interpret words and phrases and how they shape meaningBased on paragraph ________, what can be inferred about a character? Use evidence from the selection support your response

Constructed Response/

Inference/ Character

(W2)Write explanatory texts to examine and convey complexideas and information clearly and accurately through theeffective selection, organization, and analysis

(R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

(R3)Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

Which statement summarizes the central idea of the selection?

Summary/Central Idea (R2) Determine central idea of a text and analyze in detail itsdevelopment over the course of the text, including how itemerges and is shaped and refined by specific details

(R3) Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

In paragraph 3, what effect does the word_______________have on the selection?

Vocabulary in Context

(L4) Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues

What is the effect of the metaphor in the sentence below?

Figurative Language (R4) Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text including determining figurative meanings.

What is the effect of the phrase below on the overall selection?

Word choice (R4) Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining figurative meanings.

What is the purpose of the figurative language in the sentence below?

Figurative Language

(R4) Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining figurative meanings.

Which statement describes the connection between the selection and the following oxymoron?

Inference/Figurative Language

(R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly andto make logical inferences from it.

(R4) Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text including determining figurative meanings.

What can be inferred from the author’s focus on__________ past and present situation?

Inference/ Point-of-view (R1)Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.(R6) Analyze how point of view or purpose shapes the content

and style of a text.In the excerpt below, why does the author choose to end the selection with a rhetorical question?

Constructed Response/Rhetorical Question

(W2)Write explanatory texts to examine and convey complexideas and information clearly and accurately through theeffective selection, organization, and analysis

(R4) Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining figurative meanings.