Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity (2021)

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“In The Way of Integrity, Beck presents a four-stage process that anyone can use to find integrity, and with it, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering. Much of what plagues us—people pleasing, staying in stale relationships, negative habits—all point to what happens when we are out of touch with what truly makes us feel whole.

“Inspired by The Divine Comedy, Beck uses Dante’s classic hero’s journey as a framework to break down the process of attaining personal integrity into small, manageable steps. She shows how to read our internal signals that lead us towards our true path, and to recognize what we actually yearn for versus what our culture sells us.

“With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach and human being to help readers to uncover what integrity looks like in their own lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that not only will change the direction of our lives, but bring us to a place of genuine happiness.”   —marthabeck.com

Ned Denny, B (After Dante) (2021)

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“Gustave Doré’s Beatrice is disappointingly bland, a strapping damsel in a nightgown, not that fierce beauty whose name the poet can barely utter. His angels, however, are sublime. It was important to me that we have an uplifting image on the cover, Dante being so associated with the infernal regions and the austere features of his face (which the large B was originally to have overlaid). A comedy is, of course, a story that ends well, and what better end could there be than coming face to face with ‘eternal light’? Such is, moreover, the ‘joy that man is meant for.’

[. . .]

“B was supposed to have come out in 2020, seven hundred years after the original’s probable 1320 completion (this latter number inscribing itself, miraculously, into the actual structure of the poem). Yet, happily perhaps, and due only to a delay in the editing process, it is instead appearing on the 700th anniversary of not only Dante’s death but the last Cathar’s prophecy – spoken from the flames – that ‘in seven hundred years the laurel will grow green again.’ It is also May, month of the Virgin, with the sun having just entered Gemini (Dante’s natal star and mine).”   —Ned Denny for Carcanet Press, describing B (After Dante), his 2021 translation/adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy

“Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, Ned Denny’s baroque, line-by-line reimagining – the follow-up to his Seamus Heaney Prize-winning collection Unearthly Toys – shapes the Divine Comedy into nine hundred 144-syllable stanzas. Audacious, provocative and eminently readable, tender and brutal by turns, rooted in sacred doctrine yet with one eye on the profane modern world, this poet’s version – in the interpretative tradition of Chapman, Dryden and Pope – is a living, breathing Dante for our times. Hell has never seemed so savage, nor heaven so sublime.”   —Carcanet Press

Purchase B (After Dante) from Carcanet Press here.

Read Denny’s full blogpost here.

Seth Steinzor, In Dante’s Wake (3 volumes)

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“In Dante’s Wake is a journey in poetry through the moral universe, from blinkered evil to heaven’s networks by way of the muddled-up places in between.

“Once Was Lost, the third and final volume of the trilogy, finds heaven on a North Atlantic beach, beginning with a breakfast of fried claims at sunrise, moving through encounters with people whose lives have been a blessing to humanity, and ending in a series of visions of psychedelic strangeness and power.”   —Seth Steinzor’s Website

Fomite Press published Steinzor’s Once Was Lost on June 18, 2021. Each of the three volumes of In Dante’s Wake revisits one canticle of Dante’s Commedia: To Join the Lost (Hell), Among the Lost (Purgatory), and Once Was Lost (Paradise). See our previous post of Steinzor’s To Join the Lost here.

Contributed by Seth Steinzor

Garry Wills, “The Bishops Are Wrong About Biden—and Abortion” (June 27, 2021)

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“What is the worst crime a society can commit? Some people (I among them) would say the Holocaust, the cold methodical murder of six million people just for being Jews.

“But some Catholics and evangelicals say they know of an even greater crime — the deliberate killing of untold millions of unborn babies by abortion. They have determined that a fetus is a person and abortion is therefore murder. This is a crime of such magnitude that some Catholic bishops are trying to deny the reception of Holy Communion by the president of the United States for not working to prevent it.

“No one told Dante that this was the worst crime, or he would have put abortionists, not Judas, in the deepest frozen depths of his Inferno. But in fact he does not put abortionists anywhere in the eight fiery tiers above the deepest one of his Hell.” [. . .]   –Garry Wills, “The Bishops Are Wrong About Biden—and Abortion,” New York Times (June 27, 2021)

Read the rest of Wills’s opinion piece at the New York Times.

See also this response to Wills’s essay in The National Review, which includes an extended discussion of Dante and his era.

Contributed by Hilary Barnes (Widener University)

Stefano Jossa, “Dante e Pinocchio, Fratelli d’Italia” (June 5, 2021)

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“Quando una democrazia è debole ricorre ai simboli che unificano: simboli spossessati di qualsiasi rapporto con la realtà e funzionali alla rappresentazione di una comunità ideale. Servono, questi simboli, a eliminare i conflitti e favorire l’armonia: che è fittizia, naturalmente, perché una società moderna, democratica e funzionante si dovrebbe fondare sulla differenza anziché sull’omologazione, tranne nei casi in cui l’uniformità venga costruita a forza, com’è avvenuto storicamente, ahinoi, con i regimi totalitari. Nel caso italiano il simbolo unificante per eccellenza è Dante, cui è stato ora dedicato un giorno memoriale, il Dantedì, che si è celebrato il 25 marzo con grande clamore di iniziative, pagine giornalistiche, invenzioni figurative, riedizioni, letture e video: basta aprire i siti dei principali quotidiani italiani per trovare interviste ai discendenti di Dante, viaggi nell’Italia di Dante, sproloqui sul padre della patria e il padre della lingua, inviti alla coerenza e all’impegno, ecc. ecc.

“Dante onnipresente, vera e propria icona pop, che va dalle canzoni di Gianna Nannini su Pia de’ Tolomei e Caparezza su Filippo Argenti fino agli oli di Guy Denning e i graffiti di Kobra: un Dante dappertutto, sorprendentemente simile a quel Dante monumento che segnò la topografia italiana tra il Risorgimento e il Fascismo, quando sorsero piazze Dante, con monumenti a Dante, in tutta Italia, col culmine simbolico in quella piazza Dante a Napoli che segna l’identità tra Dante e l’Italia nelle parole di chi la promosse, spostandone definitivamente la ricezione dall’universo letterario a quello patriottico: se «Dante a Firenze è un grand’uomo», «Dante a Napoli raffigura l’ingegno, il sapere, le sventure, le glorie, le fatiche, le speranze e tutta la vita dell’intero Popolo Italiano».” [. . .]   –Stefano Jossa, “Dante e Pinocchio, fratelli d’Italia,” Doppio Zero (June 5, 2021)

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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