Dante per stranieri

A copy of a watercolor by Dante Gabriel Rosetti depicting the lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, the subject of my first composition in L’Inferno per stranieri.

I’m taking an Inferno per stranieri course on Zoom over winter break — it’s reading Dante’s Inferno over twelve weeks in the original/sometimes in modern Italian or English translation and discussing it in intermediate-to-advanced level Italian. My writing has noticeably improved although I find speaking frustrating (I’m much smarter in other languages!) and I’m still firmly in the intermediate-level camp as I don’t feel like I have good control over the subjunctive yet or any kind of handle on which prepositions go with which verbs. Also, in a class that’s for stranieri who aren’t necessarily spagnoloparlanti, I can get away with hispanisms in my vocabulary that someone teaching primarily Spanish-speakers would call me on; so I just need to be a bit more attentive to not letting myself get away with not looking up the real Italian word after I’ve made something up on the basis of Spanish. Be that as it may, it’s exactly the kind of language class I like because it integrates interesting content with language learning and practice rather than treating those two things like they are separable.