Published in Languages and Cultures in Tradition

The objective of this article is to understand the temporalities emanating from Dante Alighieri’s “Commedia” and to illustrate this with a brief study of the Old Man of Crete, a hybrid being described in Canto XIV of the first part of the work, called Inferno. Dante, both a writer and a character in this work, journeys through the medieval afterlife as a living being, discovering its mysteries and deciphering its messages. Thus, I seek to understand mythical time and how it relates to an idea of cyclical time and the manifestation of a linear and teleological time elucidated by the strengthening of Christianity in the 14th century. I then relate these ideas to the presence of Dantean hybrid beings, paying special attention to the poetic creation of the Old Man of Crete, understanding him as a holder of a hybridity of temporalities. The study proposed here draws on Gumbrecht concepts of the presence of the past, Auerbach concepts of figuration, and Costa concepts of hybrid beings.