Walking with Dante podcast is obviously an amazing labor of love and passion about the poem. Highly rated! I recommend you start your journey.
As part of my own COVID journey - which is when the host started this podcast - I returned to classical literature, starting with the Iliad. I'm moving my way forward with my destination eventually being Milton. Like the podcast, six years later, I haven't gotten there yet. In fact, I've spent the last year focusing on Dante's Comedy.
So, after reading through a few translations of the poem and then listening to it, and doing a Great Courses series, I looked for commentary that I could engage with to better understand what I had read, even after I paid heed to the footnotes that my translations included. This podcast provides what I was looking for and much more.
I'm now up to Canto 10 and the March 2021 podcasts on my journey with Mark. I've waited to make a comment until getting about 10% through. That indicated no hesitation on my part of recommending this podcast, which I do wholeheartedly. I just wanted more of it in my ears.
Like any good commentary or lesson series, starting at the beginning is the best recipe for fully engaging with this material. The fact that Mark is retranslating this 10,000-plus-line epic is in itself tremendous. And I appreciate that he explains some of his word choices to us as the listeners.
And while I am in no way able to immediately spot a translation issue, it's great to have the thought process behind some of the key phrases. But, moreover, what is really enjoyable about this podcast that I am imbibing on my daily runs is the various perspectives that are presented. I can make my own choices about what I think is or is not in the poem: first, Dante's intent, and then with more modern techniques involved, how I'll react to it and how a modern reader might engage in the material vs the contemporary audience of 1320.
The pacing is breezy, and the sound mix is generally good. The various voices Mark affects during his initial readings are helpful but in no way meant to be overly dramatic. Rather, they help us just to individuate the voices which, frankly, in reading the poem, is actually very hard at times, because Dante might go on for a few tercets before he identifies who's speaking. So I might think, "Oh, it's the pilgrim," and then, in line 10, "Oh no, actually it was Virgil," or someone else entirely. Mark’s readings make it all clear.
In any case, thanks, Mark and the team, if any, behind him - I guess his family putting up with this epic effort - for really just an amazing resource and sharing your love of Dante's Comedy. This meal is one I will keep coming back to all the way to Canto 100.
(Side note: I do recommend reading the Comedy for the first time before engaging with this podcast. You could do that first reading in parallel, but the Comedy is so complex that having some sense of it before dissecting it would be helpful. That is not in any way a fault of the podcast! Blame Dante! He gave us a 9-course meal. Mark is giving us a tremendous dessert to follow.)
