Dante, Neruda, & Metafora
“ Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was!”
The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Dante, Neruda, & Metafora: I have always taught, in World Literature (and its other iteratioins) an excerpt from Dante's Inferno (which in turn is taken from The Divine Comedy). And I've done this from the first year onward of my career. The project that the students have done - and how we covered that excerpt in class have changed over the years - but perhaps nothing had as huge an effect on this unit as my viewing of the film, Il Postino in the summer of 1994 - when I was a student of the incredible summer seminar on The Renaissance at New York University. I left the theater enchanted, and knew that I wanted to do something with both the film directly - but to try and replicate what it did - tying Dante together with Pablo Neruda - our own lives and the impact that poetry can have on those lives.
You will see that I attempted to make this unit very personal for the students (and their teacher as well). The narrator of The Divine Comedy is at a Cross-Roads in his life - a dark wood - as are so many of the students. They are seniors (and some advanced juniors) and they are about to embark on the next part of life's journey. It is one of the reasons that I loved teaching seniors so much. To watch that journey - and to try and help them on their way - is both humbling and awe-inspiring.
For this short unit (which - in a way continues until the end of the year) we begin with an excerpt from the Inferno. Some years I have broken that reading into two days (see the bookmark). After one or two days on that - we next look at the poems of Pablo Neruda. Next, we watch (over the course of 2 class periods) that film that originally inspired me so much, Il Postino. That movie ties Dante to Neruda and then in turn to us. Finally, there is a project that the students do - for many years, that project had the students translating from the original Italian a Canto or two from our reading - and then we would put all of their Cantos together into our own text. In later years the project had the students get into groups - they would pick a couple of Cantos from our reading - and they would act it out. First, they would act it out literally - next, they would interpret their portion of The Inferno in a creative performative way. That could be a play about a modern occurrence that they see paralleling Dante's work; it could be a song; it could be an Illuminated Text - it could be anything as long as it gave us (the rest of the class and the teacher) some insight into Dante's original words. As always, I created a bookmark for the unit - this time a short poem by Sylvia Plath on the Divine Comedy and a map of the many levels of hell.
This lesson is ideally given on the "in-between" day of their reading of "The Inferno" excerpt. In other words, I gave them two days to read the excerpt (it's rather large) - and this is what we do in class - before we begin to talk about the story. The lesson always began with a private and personal examination by each of my students. I give them a handout with some questions about where their lives are - at this moment. They fill it out - and then we took a trip to the basement of my school. With each examination (silently) we go further down the stairs. When we reach the bottom - we consider who it is that we have guide us out of these hard situations we find ourselves in. Next, we look at the happiest, most fullfilling parts of our lives and with each of these contemplations, we would take steps up the stairs - back towards our classroom. This echoes - in a way - what we did on the first day of class ("What is Truth?") - tWhen we return to the room - the students finished their worksheets - and with any time left were given some rare time to work on finishing their Dante reading.
For the longest time - the majority of my teaching career, I had done this lesson - after the students read the excerpt from Dante's "Inferno" as a Group Work. I believe the biggest reason for that was just that I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of Dante's writing. There is SO much there - I felt the only way that I could "tame" it was to compose a Group Work that touch on the many ideas and words that are in the students excerpt. In any case, I have both the Group Work and the Vertext below - and I believe both are worthwhile (but it wouldn't make sense to do both). The very first slide of the Vertext references - through Dante's journey - so many of the other journeys we've seen in this class - it is the perfect review for how far we have come.
The assignment is two-fold - for the first part the students act out the scene from the Canto(s) that they have chosen. They act it out as it appears in the text, in the most creative way they can, to show the rest of - literally what takes place in that scene. The student who plays Virgil wears a white cape and hood; the student who plays Dante wears a black version of that same costume. After they are done acting that out - Part 2 of the project takes place: They need to show us what that scene (those lines from "The Inferno") that they just acted out - mean to them - mean to us in our modern world. They can do this in any creative fashion that they please - as long as it helps illuminate a deeper meaning of Dante's words. With that in mind, students over the years put on skits, read stories, created original songs, made Illuminated Texts, drawings and more. At the end of the class period we are all left with a much better understand of why Dante's words have lasted for so many years.
This was the original project that students did for Dante's Inferno - before they started doing their Creative Performance Projects. While I really like that latter project better - I know that something was lost when we stopped doing this. This project gave the students the original Italian for what we had read - and asked them to first transliterate (a word-for-word reckoning) the passage they were responsible for and then to turn that nonsensical collection of words into something resembling poetry. A very tall order in deed - and I will admit I was very generous with the grading. Just as not everyone, with the other Performance Project, is an actor - not everyone for this project is poetic. Just getting them to try - and to see what translators do - not only gives them a project that draws a deeper meaning out of the text (The Inferno), it also gives them an opportunity to see the importance of translation and the effect it has on all of the works that we read in this class (that were not written initially in English).
For the longest time - the majority of my teaching career, I had done this lesson - after the students read the excerpt from Dante's "Inferno" as a Group Work. I believe the biggest reason for that was just that I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of Dante's writing. There is SO much there - I felt the only way that I could "tame" it was to compose a Group Work that touch on the many ideas and words that are in the students excerpt. In any case, I have both the Group Work and the Vertext below - and I believe both are worthwhile (but it wouldn't make sense to do both). The very first slide of the Vertext references - through Dante's journey - so many of the other journeys we've seen in this class - it is the perfect review for how far we have come.
And so we get to this wonderful film that ties the entire unit together (something that I strive for with all of my movie picks). There is Neruda, there is Dante - there are poems and metaphors. The sublime ending of the movie will be echoed in a project that the students will do as well (you can find the project at the end of the movie questions, but I am also planning on giving it a page of its own on this site).