Dante in Core

I'm in a course this semester where all we do is read and discuss the Divine Comedy by Dante. It's probably the best course I've ever taken. It's simply amazing.

With that said, we read bits and pieces of the Inferno for Core today, and I was utterly disappointed. First off, the translation they had us read was horrible. There were outdated words thrown everywhere, some parts didn't make sense, and they put actions and parts to the wrong characters! Then we just skip and jump all over Hell. We read the opening to the 3rd level, skipped to the first two rings of the 7th level. Screw the hoarders and wasters, the wrathful, the heretics, and those violent against God and nature! For our next reading, we just skip to the second ring of the 9th level! The 8th level and all of its bolgias are amazing, and Core said f*ck it. Don't read what happens to people that buy their way into church and political power, don't read what happens to pimps, don't read what happens to Mohammed. GRUMBLE! Oh, it gets better. F*ck Purgatory. It's not even touched. Nor is most of Heaven. We go directly from climbing down the shanks of Satan to the absolute last canto of the epic, where Dante sees God. All in all, we skipped 82 cantos. 82% of one of the greatest works of the human mind. I am thoroughly pissed at the readings they gave us.
And then in discussion, we didn't discuss it. "Who's in the second level? What's their punishment?" That was it. We didn't talk about the contrapassos and how they uncover the true nature of the sins. We didn't talk about how this was not a literal journey of Dante, but an emotional journey through sin and looking at the nature of it and learning the lessons each canto is dripping with. This is terrible, and I can't help but think the rest of our translations are horrible as well and that's why people have a hard time getting anything out of them.











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