University community invited to read Dante’s “Divine Comedy”

Members of the Salve Regina community are invited to read Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in English on alternate Wednesdays beginning Oct. 19. Sessions will be held from 5-6:30 p.m. in the McKillop Library special collections room.

The reading and discussion series will be led by Karen Abbondanza, an adjunct faculty member at Salve Regina. Participants are encouraged to use the University of California Press edition translated by Allen Mandelbaum, who uses the same rhyme scheme as the poet.

Dante’s “Divine Comedy” relates the allegorical tale of the poet’s journey through the three realms of the dead. Accompanied through the Inferno and Purgatory by the ancient Roman poet Virgil, Dante encounters mythical, historical and contemporaneous figures in their respective afterlives. Relying on classical (pagan) mythology and Christian imagery and theology, Dante imagines diverse vivid and inventive punishments for the various sinners he encounters, which have become part of the Western imagination.