the divine comedy of dante the inferno dante alighieri

La Vita Nuova tells the tale of this prepubescent kind of love of Dante for this beautiful young girl, who dies when she is 18. 'In the 19th century, Dante is thought of primarily as the lovesick boy of nine years old who meets the nine-year-old Beatrice in the streets of Florence.

'His very first work is a work called La Vita Nuova (The New Life), which had enormous success in the 19th century, particularly among pre-Raphaelites. 'We don't know much about Dante Alighieri - but we're not terribly interested in what happened to him before certain critical moments in his life, which are recorded in his written work. Marcel Proust is a novelist that one thinks of in the 20th century whose structure and work is much like Dante's own.' The life of Dante Alighieri

Augustine is alive, even in the 20th century. 'It is a situation in which a particular sensibility feels somehow privileged outside of time and space - and able to judge himself, his neighborhood, his family and everything with a kind of detachment that is given to very few people. My first introduction was in an English translation, the first English translation, which was by Henry Francis Cary and published around 1805. If you wanted to think of a 20th century equivalent of The Divine Comedy, with a vision at the limit of vision, you would have to think of perhaps prison literature in the 20th century: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. 'My first Dante was a romantic Dante it was a Wordsworth, Keats kind of Dante. Even today, as one reads Cary's translation, it sounds like Wordsworth there's a wonderful, romantic musicality to the speech that doesn't have very much to do with the original Italian, but it's captivating in and of itself. 'My first introduction was in an English translation, the first English translation, which was by Henry Francis Cary and published around 1805. Obviously, I haven't gotten rid of him yet.' My first Dante Dante is, above all, the poet of order - and a kind of universal order. 'Dante is, above all, the poet of order - and a kind of universal order. Together with the horrific illustrations of Gustave Doré, with all of these monsters and demons, it makes quite an impression on a susceptible young mind. It's a vision of the universe, as well as a poetic statement. 'I can't think of any other poem in the history of literature, before Dante, which claims a kind of consistent intellectual, theological and philosophical framework. In 1996, Robert Pinsky published a new translation of Inferno with a foreword written by leading Dante scholar John Freccero.įreccero spoke with Eleanor Wachtel from New York City when the book came out - about the enduring appeal of Dante and his brilliant epic poem.

The divine comedy of dante the inferno dante alighieri