“Una nuova forma di saggio sperimentale presentato come monologo lirico-drammatico sul più grande rapporto d’amore della letteratura mondiale. Fu vero amore? Oppure Dante si prese qualche licenza poetica e qualche libertà espressiva? Un divertente cavalcata al femminile nei canti del Paradiso che vengono smontati e ridefiniti dalla protagonista stessa, Beatrice, che finalmente fa sentire la sua non più flebile, ma dura e contestatrice voce.” –Enrico Bernard, Amazon, December 1, 2016
posted on August 13, 2020 by
Per le rime: Beatrice risponde a Dante by Enrico Bernard
posted on August 12, 2020 by
Waiting for Dante by Roger Williamson
“It was then she appeared, Beatrice, she who would show me, just in time, the illusion of the beast and the spell to return it to the glass.
Virgil, who was able to bring me into this world but not out of it, because of his own self imprisonment in it, began to fade from view and as he paled so Beatrice seemed to absorb his substance and morphed into my new guide.” –Roger Williamson, Saatchi Art, October 24, 2015
posted on August 10, 2020 by
Hogwarts and Dante – Empyrean Heaven
“In our little excursion through centuries spanning medieval classic to contemporary literature we come now to an end that is really the beginning. Piccarda explained as early as Canto 4 of Paradiso that everywhere in Paradise is Paradise. Yet as a concession to the limited human understanding Dante is introduced to a split up version where the blessed are categorized like in a lexicon.
One could also say the blessed were planted like lovely flowers into different beds of the same garden. The original Hebrew version of the Bible speaks of the Paradise as ‘gan’ what means garden. Only when translated into Greek gan became paradeisos. And as already stated in the very beginning the Greek word paradeisos deceives from a Persian word meaning ‘walled-around place’.
So, the question remains: Is Hogwarts just another ‘walled around place’? Or is Hogwarts Paradise?
[. . .]
Hogwarts is the solid ground that gives the students a home in the outside world as well as in their mind. Only if the students lower their protection and that of the school, Voldemort and the ideas he stand for have a chance to cling to the minds. Otherwise, Hogwarts and his inhabitants are a patch of outer and inner eternity, a temenos, a gan, a paradeisos, the same place Dante saw on Good Friday 1300. Was Dante perhaps truly magical?” –Aviva Brueckner, Stranger Between Worlds, July 10, 2011
posted on August 9, 2020 by
“Il Dante di Pupi Avati”
“Da studiosa del tardo medioevo letterario, nonché da appassionata di cinema, trovo molto interessante l’idea di Pupi Avati di costruire un racconto cinematografico sulla vita dell’Alighieri prendendo le mosse dal Trattatello in laude di Dante di Giovanni Boccaccio, che è – come si sa – la biografia più antica sulla prima corona della nostra letteratura. Si tratta di un’idea senza dubbio originale e, nel contempo, difficile.
[. . .]
Il Trattatello in laude di Dante è il risultato di un’instancabile ricerca di notizie e documenti recuperati dal Certaldese in diversi luoghi della nostra penisola (soprattutto fra Toscana e Romagna) e grazie alla diretta testimonianza di amici (Giovanni Villani, Cino da Pistoia e Dino Perini), discepoli (Pietro Giardini), parenti del poeta (Andrea di Leone Poggi) e di familiari della stessa Beatrice (la cugina Lippa de’ Mardoli). Una parte degli elementi biografici è poi da lui desunta naturalmente dalle opere letterarie dell’Alighieri, comprese le sue epistole.” –Monica Berte, Insula Europea, January 30, 2020
posted on August 8, 2020 by
Dante’s Inferno Video Game 10 Years Later
“Released back in 2010 by Visceral Games – the lovely folks who brought us Dead Space – Dante’s Inferno is a creative adaptation of the classic poem. Through its incredible design, gameplay, and narrative, Dante’s Inferno has come to be one of the most exhilarating action games of the 2010s.
For the sake of presenting a more action-driven story, Visceral went ahead and made a few changes to the source material. Whereas Dante is a poet and Beatrice is a symbol of Divine Love in the poem, the former is a soldier and the latter is his lover in the game.
The story begins with Dante during the Third Crusade (1189–1192). In the midst of combat, he is all of a sudden stabbed; he awakens on another plane having to confront the physical embodiment of death. After defeating death, Dante steals his scythe and returns home – only to find his father and love Beatrice dead. This is when Dante discovers the latter’s soul being dragged to Hell by Lucifer. From there, along with his guide Virgil (just like in the poem), Dante transverses through Hell to save his love (laying waste to every demon in his path).
[. . .]
Ten years later and I’m still amazed by this game. From its fantastic action and creative approach to the source material, Dante’s Inferno is a fascinating title. Inferno proved to be a visual treat to me when I first read it; never could I have ever expected how Visceral Games could take such a classic and elevate its imagery. Dante’s Inferno is not only an amazing action game, but it’s also an excellent journey into one of the most nightmarish representations of Hell ever depicted in art.” –Michael Pementel, Bloody Disgusting, February 4, 2020
posted on August 5, 2020 by
“Why we should read Dante as well as Shakespeare”
“Dante can seem overwhelming. T.S. Eliot’s peremptory declaration that ‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them: there is no third’ is more likely to be off-putting these days than inspiring. Shakespeare’s plays are constantly being staged and filmed, and in all sorts of ways, with big names in the big parts, and when we see them we can connect with the characters and the issues with not too much effort.
Dante is much more remote – a medieval Italian author, writing about a trip he claims to have made through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise at Easter 1300, escorted first by a very dead poet, Virgil, and then by his dead beloved, Beatrice. and meeting the souls of lots of people we only vaguely know of, if we’ve heard of them at all. First he sees the damned being punished in ways we are likely to find grotesque or repulsive. And then, when he meets souls working their way towards heavenly bliss or already enjoying it, there are increasing doses of philosophy and theology for us to digest.
[. . .]
The addictiveness is evident from the fact that Dante enthusiasts, Christian or not, find it hard to imagine Hell in any other way, and spend happy minutes musing about which circle is best suited to some particular friend, enemy or public figure. Dante thought Paradise was much more difficult to get into and much more difficult to describe. We are certainly not accustomed to prolonged evocations of happiness. Paradiso gives us one way, and an astoundingly dynamic one, of thinking about what human happiness might ultimately be.” –Peter Hainsworth, Oxford University Press Blog, February 27, 2015
posted on August 3, 2020 by
“Dante, Near and Far”
“There is much strange in La Vita Nuova, the libello or ‘little book’ that Dante composed fifteen or so years before starting in on the Divine Comedy. Take, for starters, the form of the book, an alternation of prose and poetry that produces effects as dizzying as any in Williams’s Spring and All. Or take the central narrative, which describes a love—young Dante’s, for the slightly younger Beatrice—so intense that it causes the poet to faint in public and forces him, poor lad, to write lying love poems to the donne dello schermo, the ‘screen ladies’ he uses to hide the real object of his affection. Take even Beatrice herself, who begins the book as a girl in a girdled dress only to reveal herself not long after as a miracle made flesh.
[. . .]
That night Dante has a dream, and—perhaps predictably, dreams being dreams—this is where things get weird. In his sleep the poet sees uno segnore di pauroso aspetto emerge from a fiery cloud. Despite his fearful aspect the lord is happy, very possibly because he is carrying in his arms a naked woman asleep beneath a crimson drape. After Dante realizes that the woman is Beatrice, the lord holds up a burning object and tells the dreaming poet, in Latin, Behold your heart. At that moment the lord wakes Beatrice and starts to force-feed her Dante’s flaming heart. With understandable reluctance, Beatrice eats the thing until the lord’s happiness mysteriously turns to grief and he carries her away, presumably to heaven.
[. . .]
Here, too, we get the chance to meet Dante at his most queasily familiar: not as a prodigy reveling in the warm validation of his peers, but as a callow poetaster hearing harsh words from a poet he respects. It’s probably too easy to admire da Maiano’s sonnet for its precocious snark, but I appreciate his poem even more for the rare gift it affords: the chance for once to meet Dante outside the glare of his own genius.” –Robert P. Baird, The Best American Poetry, January 9, 2012
posted on July 31, 2020 by
Wear a Mask
” ‘Lasciate ogni Speranza, voi ch’entrate.’ Abandon all hope, ye who enter. The words inscribed on the gates of hell, according to Dante Alighieri in the “Divina Commedia,” could be the best way to describe the tumultuous year we have experienced so far. No matter the age, generation or social status, every single human being on the planet has been affected. The novel coronavirus, formally known as COVID-19, has upended human life as we knew it. Long are the days when we could go out to our favorite pub, restaurant or store and enjoy a genuinely good time. Nowadays, we leave our houses with a new fear. Will we get it on our trip to get groceries? Will we get it from that group of careless people that refuse to wear a mask or social distance? If I get it, will I die? Will I infect my loved ones? Will I see them die?” […] –Jorge Luis Galvez Vallejo, Iowa State Daily, July 30, 2020
posted on July 31, 2020 by
Christopher R. Miller, “Purgatory Is for Real” (Review of G. Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo)
“The afterlife has also been having a cultural moment in recent fiction, but typically in the form of something other than heaven—call it, for lack of a better word, purgatory. In the popular television series The Good Place, the vaguely named realm of the title turns out to be something else entirely, and its characters find they have their ethical work cut out for them. Two recent novels have also set their action in a postmortem limbo, with similar narrative implications: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) and the Finnish author Laura Lindstedt’s Oneiron (just published in an English translation by Owen F. Witesman) imagine versions of the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist transitional state between death and rebirth.
[. . .]
“From the perspective of the petal-scented heaven that Saunders intimates, the ghosts are the myopic schlemiels, but their fear of ‘leaving behind forever the beautiful things of this world’ takes on a touchingly quixotic grandeur. Writ large, their sense of peril, uncertainty, and loss has obvious allegorical resonance, suggesting both the president’s interminable state of mourning and the nation’s passage through war and precarious rebirth. In this, Saunders’s bardo is not unlike Dante’s purgatory—a place of unfinished business, nostalgic longing, imaginative engagement with the living, and above all, therapeutic forms of work.” — Christopher R. Miller, “Purgatory Is for Real,” Public Books, May 23, 2018
posted on July 31, 2020 by
“Dante Inspires Us to Follow Our Own Path”
“The Italian government has designated March 25 as ‘Dantedi,’ a day set aside to honor and pay tribute to Dante Alighieri, ‘Il Sommo Poeta’ (‘The Supreme Poet’). According to scholars, Dante’s journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, which he recounted in his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy began on March 25 (his travels in the afterlife began during Easter week in they year 1300).
This year, 2020, commemorates the 700th anniversary of the completion of the Divine Comedy, Unfortunately, Dante died in 1321, some 150 years before the Divine Comedy was published.
[. . .]
‘Dantedi’ reflects the spirit of the Fourth Canto of the Inferno, depicting Virgil’s welcome as he returns among the great ancient poets spending eternity in Limbo: ‘L’ombra sua torna, ch’era dipartita’ (‘His spirit, which has left us, returns’). Indeed, ‘Dantedi’ is an opportunity for us to welcome Dante’s spirit back to our society – a spirit that encompasses innovation, imagination, inspiration, and intensity. Taken together, those ‘4-i’s’ are the essential ingredients for hope and a brighter future for ourselves and our posterity. And, perhaps, embracing those ‘4-i’s’ will help us to find a way to get through the current global health crisis – to stop this dreaded illness that continues to inflict our world.
Dante’s lesson to all of us: “Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le gente” (“Follow your own road and let people talk”). Basically, Dante is telling us to follow our own star – to walk our own unique path. And, when things become challenging, Dante reminds us that ‘The path to Paradise begins in Hell.'” –Hudson Reporter Reader, Hudson Reporter, March 15, 2020
