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.