Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

After Hours: Dante – Heaven and Hell at Dante Season 2021

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On November 13, 2021, the collaborative effort behind Dante in Oxford hosted the “After Hours” event. The event was described as follows:

“An exciting ‘after hours’ programme of activities at the Ashmolean Museum showcasing the diverse range of researchers and performers who are connected to Dante.

“Oxford will be alive with opportunities to celebrate Dante in 2021 — exactly 700 years since the great poet’s death. Best known for his astonishing Divine Comedy — a three-stage epic poem, narrating a journey through the afterlife from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven, with all of human history, knowledge, love, and life encountered on the way — Dante was an advisor to princes, a political exile, and a revolutionary poet.”    —TORCH (retrieved February 13, 2022)

One of the “performers” at this event was a robotic poet named Ai-da; view our post about her poetry here.

More information about the “After Hours” event and its programming (which included live performances and other exhibits) can be found here.

Other Dante in Oxford posts can be found here.

Serata Dantesca at Dante Season 2021

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On November 13, 2021, the collaborative effort behind Dante in Oxford hosted the “Serata Dantesca” event. The performance was described as:

“A programme of music, poetry, and dance presented in the Holywell Music Room, featuring performers who are almost all Oxford-based teachers, researchers, and students. In addition to Italian and English readings and some older choral and solo musical compositions, new translations and settings have been specially commissioned for this commemorative occasion marking the 700th anniversary of the death of the great Italian poet.”    —TORCH (retrieved February 7, 2022)

More information about the “Serata Dantesca” and its programming can be found here.

Other Dante in Oxford posts can be found here.

Robot artist to perform Al generated poetry in response to Dante

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“Dante’s Divine Comedy has inspired countless artists, from William Blake to Franz Liszt, and from Auguste Rodin to CS Lewis. But an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death will be showcasing the work of a rather more modern devotee: Ai-Da the robot, which will make history by becoming the first robot to publicly perform poetry written by its AI algorithms.

“The ultra-realistic Ai-Da, who was devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller and named after computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, was given the whole of Dante’s epic three-part narrative poem, the Divine Comedy, to read, in JG Nichols’ English translation. She then used her algorithms, drawing on her data bank of words and speech pattern analysis, to produce her own reactive work to Dante’s.

“‘We looked up from our verses like blindfolded captives, / Sent out to seek the light; but it never came,’ runs one of her poems. ‘A needle and thread would be necessary / For the completion of the picture. / To view the poor creatures, who were in misery, / That of a hawk, eyes sewn shut.’

“In another, Ai-Da writes: ‘There are some things, that are so difficult – so incalculable. / The words are not intelligible to the human ear; / She can only speculate what they mean.'” [. . .]    –Alison Flood, The Guardian, November 26, 2021 (retrieved January 19, 2022)

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.

Purgatory Poetry Collection, Raúl Zurita Canessa (1979)

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“Raúl Zurita Canessa (b.1950) is a prominent Chilean poet whose work Purgatory is the first of three works based on the poetry of Dante (the other two being Anteparadise [1982], and The New Life [1994]). The late poet C.D. Wright provided the foreword to this English translation from Spanish published by the University of California Press. Wright wrote, ‘Purgatorio is arguably the seminal literary text of Chile’s 9/11/1973, the date of the U.S.-backed military coup led by Augusto Pinochet which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. With his first published collection, the young Chilean poet began his Dantean trilogy, his long, arduous pilgrimage toward earthly redemption.'”     –Contributor Devin Shepherd

Contributed by Devin Shepherd (University of Arkansas, ’22)

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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