"...consider a particular moment in the eighth circle (for your Wednesday reading), when Dante and Virgil encounter Ulysses (Odysseus). You will note that Virgil instructs Dante to remain quiet, that he (Virgil) will speak to Ulysses. The reason he offers is that Ulysses may be "disdainful" (in Mandelbaum's translation) of Dante's Tuscan dialect. Interestingly, however, in the next canto, Dante meets Guido da Montefeltro (still in the circle of the fraudulent counselors). In that episode--which I know you are not reading for class--Virgil says the opposite: "You speak; he is Italian."
I find it fascinating that this is only part of the Inferno in which two cantos are dedicated to the same sin: fraudulent counsel. And here, at this most curious spot of the Inferno, we have an issue, I believe, of translation. Why does Dante-poet construct this sense of decorum and language, translation and comprehension? Why must Virgil play the intermediary, if we look beyond the surface-level reasons Virgil offers to Dante-pilgrim. (Remember: Virgil, too, is but a character in Dante-poet's epic.) And why must Dante carry the discussion in the following canto, which, all the obvious differences aside, treats the same sin?"
Dante-poet constructs a two canto’ed circle because the reader must deal with two different versions of Dante-pilgrim and Virgil. In the canto with Ulysses, we see Dante-pilgrim/listener, who must allow Virgil to talk and be the intermediary for Dante because there is a sense that Dante might not understand the importance of intelligence. Dante-poet, as the writer of the “Christian epic” put Ulysses in Hell because of the stock he put on finding knowledge and having intelligence. Dante-pilgrim is not on this quest for eternal knowledge, but Dante-poet interjects with a conscious censoring of his knowledge. Virgil, and Dante-poet, might be working as an intermediary in order to modulate his intelligence because he doesn’t understand the Greek ways like Virgil does: “I crib and confine my intelligence” (Mary Jo Bang, XXVI:21). In the next canto, however, Dante is familiar with Guido da Montefeltro and might have been in Ravenna while Dante was exiled there. He was a Ghibelline captain but worked against the Ghibellines later in life. This man was not as thirsty for knowledge as Ulysses was and would not have been disdainful of someone lower in status, as the Italians would have been to the Greeks. Virgil allowed Dante to talk because it was safer for him and more would have been accomplished. Dante-poet constructs a sense of decorum and language because language is the easiest way to discuss status. The fact that Virgil was familiar with the Greek tradition and Dante was not, allowed for Virgil to communicate with someone of that stature. This is a commentary on the importance of knowledge, and when one does not gain the same knowledge as the rest of the world, then that puts one behind. Dante must carry into the next canto to differentiate between the levels of fraud, between the differences in these characters.
I think you have a good read of the relationship that Dante-poet builds between Dante-character and Virgil in the poem. The language does in fact seem to reflect the already established hierarchy of language and literature in Dante's time. I wonder, however, how we might consider the fact that the reader is reading this exchange in one language, Italian. I read it as Dante making the audience even more aware of what he may have seen as "outdated" or an "antiquated" way of thinking about language. It seemed kind of showy to me. The way Dante has Virgil introduce the atmosphere of decorum to Dante-character and audience seems to underscore the actual system of decorum in Dante's real life. I saw it as a commentary at the very least with a little bit of criticism.
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