Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Original Sin – The Seven Sins Short Film, dir. Amy Tinkham (2021)

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original_sin_short_film_poster“Original Sin is a modern-day love story about a broken-hearted heroine and her journey through the seven sins and the quest towards the virtue of Hope. The music of the legendary global rock band INXS seamlessly accompanies the film, and ultimately, the young heroine finds true love while the world heals with her.

“The film is loosely based on and inspired by celebrated Italian writer Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and the spiritual journey through the Seven Sins of Purgatory — pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. The Original Sin short film reimagines Dante’s tale through the eyes of Jane, a 21st-century heroine isolated during the recent pandemic, who continues to search for love and the means to validate her soul.” [. . .]     –UMe, Cision PR Newswire, June 28, 2021 (retrieved January 6, 2022)

Watch a trailer (which includes direct quotes from the first canto of Inferno) for Original Sin here.

Listen to the short film’s Dante-inspired soundtrack here.

Austin Osman Spare, Earth Inferno (1905)

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Created and published when Spare was 18 years old.  “Influenced heavily by Dante’s Inferno the book is decorated with poems and aphorisms in an aesthetic style and clearly shows the design influence of Spare’s early supporter Charles Ricketts. Each pair of pages contains a painting and a commentary toward that painting. In addition to excerpts from Dante, the book also contains excerpts from Edward FitzGerald‘s translation of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”   –wikipedia

“London: Privately Published. 1905. First Edition. Hardcover. Folio (18″ x 13.75”). 30pp. … Eleven large black and white illustrations (mostly full page) and numerous decorations by Spare throughout. The scarce first edition of Spare’s first published book, SIGNED and numbered by the author. The book was printed for Spare at the Co-operative Printing Society in Tudor Street, London, in February 1905, in an edition of 265 signed and numbered copies… Earth Inferno was a truly remarkable first book. In it the young artist juxtaposed huge, sometimes sinister images with teasing lyrics to create a vivid image of the darkly magical philosophy which informed his world-view.”   —Weiser Antiquarian Books

Gluttony NFT: Kozachok’s Inferno

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“What is going on here? In the third circle of Kozachok’s Inferno, we find the realm of Gluttony. After a life of over-indulgence and over-consumption of food, the souls who land in this circle of hell, are now symbolically and literally becoming a never ending supply of food for the smaller creatures.

[. . .]

“‘Kozachok’s Inferno’ is a personal version, a customized representation of the 9 circles of hell, influenced by Dante’s Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is a long Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is not a direct reproduction of Dante’s Inferno, I do not follow the accuracy of those layers or circles of hell, except the main theme (eg circle of Lust, of Gluttony, of Greed etc), but the reasons and punishments of each circle of hell will be different in my version.” [. . .]    –@kozachok, SuperRare, 2019

Jorge Luis Borges, “Inferno, V, 129” (1981)

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Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges makes reference to the characters of Paolo and Francesca. The full text of the poem appears as follows:

Dejan caer el libro, porque ya saben
que son las personas del libro.
(Lo serán de otro, el máximo,
pero eso qué puede importarles.)
Ahora son Paolo y Francesca,
no dos amigos que comparten
el sabor de una fábula.
Se miran con incrédula maravilla.
Las manos no se tocan.
Han descubierto el único tesoro;
han encontrado al otro.
No traicionan a Malatesta,
porque la traición requiere un tercero
y sólo existen ellos dos en el mundo.
Son Paolo y Francesca
y también la reina y su amante
y todos los amantes que han sido
desde aquel Adán y su Eva
en el pasto del Paraíso.
Un libro, un sueño les revela
que son formas de un sueño que fue soñado
en tierras de Bretaña.
Otro libro hará que los hombres,
sueños también, los sueñen.
A translated version of this same poem may be found here.
Borges made plenty of references to Dante in his writings, some of which have been posted on our site before. See other Borges citings here and here.

Infernum Album, Claver Gold & Murubutu (2020)

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Italian musicians Claver Gold and Murubutu released their collaborative album Infernum (stylized Infernvm) on March 31, 2020. The hip-hop/rap album features songs that make reference to characters and features of Dante’s Inferno including “Paolo e Francesca”, “Antinferno”, “Ulisse”, and “Selva Oscura”. This album will be discussed by scholar Francesco Ciabattoni in his contribution to the forthcoming volume Dante Alive.

For more information about the album, view its Discogs entry here.

The complete album can also be found on a playlist here.

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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