2018 Archives - Dante Today

Succession Season 1, Episode 8 – “Prague” (2018)

November 3, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“Succession is an HBO series created by Jesse Armstrong which showcases a fictional battle between four adult siblings to succeed their father, Logan Roy, as CEO of Waystar/Royco, a multibillion-dollar media conglomerate.

“In Season 1, Episode 8, entitled ‘Prague,’ Roman Roy, one of Logan Roy’s four adult children, recites a line from Canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter.’ This is a variation of line 9 of this canto as translated into English by John Ciardi in 1954, the full line being ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'” –Contributor Cesca Craig

See also the related post on HBO’s Succession here.

Photo and citing contributed by Cesca Craig (University of Arkansas, ’23)

Requiem of the Crazies Comics (2018)

October 23, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“A young troubled man who finds himself living on the streets with a gun in his mouth and nowhere to go is given hope for a new life when he is taken in by a streetwise bum named Vern. Dante is introduced to the underground world of the homeless, the Crazies, where a bum can stay for the month of May and won’t need any money. A sanctuary for all those who have been forsaken. . . If only it were that easy. When corrupt politicians, drug dealers and an insane cult leader begin fighting for power, the meek homeless become nothing more than pawns in a malicious game of power. “I thought being homeless would be really easy,” Dante thinks, as him and Vern set off on their journey to fight the evil forces bent on corrupting the minds of the homeless. ” [. . .] –Rusty Cage, Indiegogo (retrieved October 18, 2021)

The series was started by Rusty Cage in 2018 and is currently on the third of eight planned installments.

Ying Zheng, “Remembering Dante” (2018)

September 18, 2021 By Professor Arielle Saiber

Ying Zheng was born and grew up in Shanxi, China, where she received her first Master’s degree from Shanxi University, and has since been working for the Foreign Languages Department of Taiyuan Normal University. In 2013-14, she visited Peking University, where she took a Dante course with Professor Thomas Rendall. In late 2014, she started to write poems in English. Her first poem, a sonnet sequence written in the terza rima form, was dedicated to her lifelong mentor Professor Rendall. In 2019, she earned her second Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, UK. On 14 June 2021, her ekphrastic poem “Dante and Beatrice” was published in Forum Italicum. Her English translation of Mu Yang’s poem “Loneliness” appeared in An Anthology of Chinese Poetry, 2020. Her most recent English translations of three poems by Ta Bei – “Qingxi Lake in Dusk,” “Drunk on Mao-Tai Liquor,” and “Morning Scene” – can be found here. Her ekphrastic poem “Out of the Ante-Inferno,” one of the selected artworks from the Dante 700th London competition, is on display in London through September 2021. She is currently pursuing PhD studies at Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.

“Dante and The Divine Comedy: He took us on a tour of Hell”

April 3, 2021 By Jasmine George, FSU '24

“Literary ambition seems to have been with Dante, born in 1265, from early in life when he wished to become a pharmacist. In late 13th Century Florence, books were sold in apothecaries, a testament to the common notion that words on paper or parchment could affect minds with their ideas as much as any drug.

“And what an addiction The Divine Comedy inspired: a literary work endlessly adapted, pinched from, referenced and remixed, inspiring painters and sculptors for centuries. More than the authors of the Bible itself, Dante provided us with the vision of Hell that remains with us and has been painted by Botticelli and Blake, Delacroix and Dalí, turned into sculpture by Rodin – whose The Kiss depicts Dante’s damned lovers Paolo and Francesca – and illustrated in the pages of X-Men comics by John Romita. Jorge Luis Borges said The Divine Comedy is ‘the best book literature has ever achieved’, while TS Eliot summed up its influence thus: ‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.’ Perhaps the epigraph to The Divine Comedy itself should be ‘Gather inspiration all ye who enter here.’

“But it’s not just as a fountainhead of inspiration for writers and visual artists that The Divine Comedy reigns supreme – this is the work that enshrined what we think of as the Italian language and advanced the idea of the author as a singular creative voice with a vision powerful enough to stand alongside Holy Scripture, a notion that paved the way for the Renaissance, for the Reformation after that and finally for the secular humanism that dominates intellectual discourse today. You may have never read a single line of The Divine Comedy, and yet you’ve been influenced by it.” –Christian Blauvelt, BBC, 2018

Read the full article here.

“Where Did Our Ideas About Hell Originate?”

March 1, 2021 By Jasmine George, FSU '24

“The recent dispute over whether Pope Francis denied the existence of hell in an interview attracted wide attention. This isn’t surprising, since the belief in an afterlife, where the virtuous are rewarded with a place in heaven and the wicked are punished in hell, is a core teaching of Christianity.

“So what is the Christian idea of hell?

[. . .]

“Perhaps the most fulsome description of hell was offered by the Italian poet Dante at the beginning of the 14th century in the first section of his ‘Divine Comedy.’ Here the souls of the damned are punished with tortures matching their sins. Gluttons lie in freezing pools of garbage, while murderers thrash in a river of boiling blood.” –Joanne M. Pierce, Sojourners, 2018

Read the full article here.

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