Tweeting Dante: One Hundred Days of Tweets from Dante’s Divine Comedy

By Donald Carlson

Seven hundred years after his death, Dante Alighieri's poetry continues to intrigue and move us. Donald Carlson invites us to relive the journey of The Divine Comedy in one hundred excerpts, one from each canto of the poem, that he tweeted over the course of one hundred days in observation of the septicentennial of Dante's death. He accompanies each excerpt with a reflection based on his own experiences of having studied and taught the poem for thirty-plus years. This reimagining of Dante's poem helps to underscore that the journey is not just Dante's, but that it is truly "our life's journey."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Mar 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666798401

Book preview

Introduction

People who know me think of me as a Shakespeare man. In doing so, they underestimate my regard for Dante, which is as great as it is for Shakespeare. I’ve been teaching Dante’s Commedia to my students for more than twenty years. Mostly, with the high school students I teach, we only read The Inferno¹; however, I have taught all three canticles to college students and every few years re-read the entire Comedy, even if I’m only assigning the first canticle to my classes.

In the summer of 2020, I read Guy P. Raffa’s excellent Dante’s Bones, basically the graveyard history of what has happened to Dante’s mortal remains since he died in Ravenna in September 1321 up to the present. I learned a great deal from Raffa’s book and enjoyed it so much that I read it again at the beginning of summer 2021. That re-reading drove home the realization that 2021 would mark the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, a year that, in spite of a pandemic that still raged, would see numerous events throughout the world, but especially in Italy, commemorating Dante’s passing into eternal life. Some of these events took place on the World Wide Web. I began to think about how I could make my own modest contribution to those commemorations of the divine poet’s life, work, and death.

Twitter is a social media platform in which I’ve dabbled for a couple of years. I don’t aspire to accrue a mass of followers or to achieve influencer status. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that Twitter might be the perfect platform for my Dante tribute. Its limitations of tweets to 140 characters or fewer presented both a challenge and an opportunity to capture the essence of Dante’s artistic vision and present it in a sort of shorthand that may itself be poetic. As Ezra Pound, himself a great Dante enthusiast, reminds us in The ABC of Reading, "Dichtung=Condensare."²

Then it hit me: My contribution to the Dante celebrations and commemorations of the 700th anniversary of his death would take the form of 100 days of Dante. Each day for 100 days, I would tweet a selection from his Commedia. What that translates into, as those who know would have already realized, would be an excerpt from one of the 100 cantos that make up his epic each day. I would try to make each excerpt, at least from my perspective, a representative moment of the journey he depicts as it unfolds in each canto. In this way, I could not only pay tribute to Dante, but also relive his journey with him in this landmark year. My choices may not seem obvious to others, but they are passages that have resonated with me across the years as I have visited and revisited the poem. They would also have to conform to the length limitations imposed by Twitter and, I hoped, largely reflect the terza rima stanzas of Dante’s original composition. I began on 21 June 2021, the date of the Summer Solstice, to tweet the first of the 100 consecutive tweets. If I have missed a day along the way, I may have posted twice on at least one occasion to keep up the proper pace. And, in fact, I did omit a day 19 tweet from Canto 19 of Inferno, which I have included here for the sake of completeness. I tweeted out my final entry on 3 October 2021, just a couple of weeks after the exact date of Dante’s death.³

This idea is not exactly original and was inspired/suggested by similar undertakings of which I am aware. None, however, have used Twitter as the specific platform for their observations of the event.

To help my tweets reach a Twitter audience, I started by using the hashtag #Dante700, changing after a few days to #dante700, because it appeared that the second was a hashtag already in use and might more readily win an audience. I then switched back and forth, not really knowing if the two hashtags were substantially different or the same. My lack of experience with hashtags is on display here, since my tweets were largely ignored. Perhaps I should have tried a different hashtag, but what I have done, I have done.

The question of a translation to use naturally entered my deliberations. I decided on the Allen Mandelbaum translation for the very practical reason that I own a copy and also because some of my friends and mentors, such as Dennis Patrick Slattery,⁴ regard the Mandelbaum text highly. It doesn’t hurt that about thirty days into the process, I found a convenient online version of the Mandelbaum text at the Digital Dante website, supported by Columbia University.⁵ The digital version of the text enabled me to transfer the chosen passage smoothly to my Twitter feed, as opposed to having to hold my book open to the designated page while trying to type. In the later stages of compiling this collection, the Digital Dante website became unavailable, and I had to resort to The World of Dante website, supported by the University of Virginia, which also features the Mandelbaum translation.

None of my tweets went viral, although a couple did garner likes and one retweet along the way. Again, the purpose wasn’t to draw attention to myself, but to re-echo Dante’s immortal verses, even if in translation, in a way that would reach the ears and eyes of people through a slightly different medium, thereby reminding them and myself of the wonder of Dante’s enduring poetic vision.

1

. From time-to-time, my students do ask why we only read The Inferno. My answer to them is usually that the first canticle is the most accessible of the three to younger readers. In addition, I do think also that it is the canticle that is easiest for most contemporary readers to get. Although distinctive, Dante’s portrayal of the ills of the world remain fairly uncontroversial, with some exceptions, to audiences of our time. However, the visions of both Purgatorio and Paradiso are grounded in an understanding of the summum bonum that many in our time would find suspect, either because they would question whether Dante’s portrayal of the bonum squares with their own conception of a summum or indeed whether any bonum could be described as summum.

2

. Pound recounts finding in a German-to-Italian dictionary the German word dichtung, poetry, translated with the Italian word condensare, the implications to him I hope now being obvious.

3

. Of course, with the adoption of the Gregorian reform of the calendar some

300

years after Dante’s passing, the precise day on which Dante died would correspond more closely to the end of September/beginning of October.

4

. Author of Day-to-Day Dante. I also have Dennis to thank for the two excellent books that use a similar approach, one on Homer’s Odyssey (From War to Wonder) and the other on Moby Dick (Our Daily Breach), each of which are made up of excerpted passages with Slattery’s commentary, one for each day of the year.

5

. This site also provided access to the Barolini commentaries on each canto, a resource that proved extremely valuable to me, especially as I navigated my way through the cantos of Purgatorio and Paradiso.

Inferno

Day 1 of 100 days of Dante on the 700th anniversary of his death

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,I found myself within a shadowed forest,for I had lost the path that does not stray.

(Inferno 1.1–3)

Where else to begin this journey with Dante than in the middle of things? When I teach this canto to my students, I always highlight that Dante describes his journey as one we all share. It usually doesn’t take much prompting from me for them to recognize that Dante depicts himself here as undergoing a midlife crisis, setting the scene, in his usual roundabout way, somewhere near the beginning of the thirty-fifth year of his life. ¹ It taxes my resources as a teacher, however, to help them recognize that this is a crisis where the stakes are life and death in the most profound existential sense imaginable. The sense of imminent danger is heightened after Dante believes he has found his way out of his predicament: a mountain that he finds at the end of the path he walks, which will allow him to leave the Dark Forest; however, three vicious animals—a leopard; a lion; and, most deadly of all, a she-wolf, drive him back down into the darkness. Here, Dante encounters the ghost of the poet Virgil, who informs Dante that he will lead the living poet