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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Mark Lilla, “Filippic” (2011)

September 27, 2011 By Professor Arielle Saiber

mark-lilla-filippic-2011
A poem for the Brooklyn Book Festival

The F train
Is the brain train.
iPad lasciate,
Voi ch’intrate,

Eve’s backlit apple,
Gold ‘n delicious,
Tempts us not.
We have spines to break,
Penguins to tame.
Thou user!
Thou blue of tooth!
Thou faceless face,
That hath no book!
@ us, towns talk & captions contest
While black-rimmed dandies
Wink at the straphangers
Who grin at the infinite jest.
But banished shalt thou be
Back into space,
No means of return,
No options, commands, or escape,
While we, the Brooklyn d’&eacutelite,
Knuckles bared, planted feet,
Bend dead trees at will
And inspect our kill.
Recycle that, battery boy.
I got your charger right here.

— Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books, September 16, 2011

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2011, Blogs, Festivals, Lasciate ogne speranza, Poetry, Trains, Transportation

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)

May 3, 2011 By Professor Arielle Saiber

the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-ts-eliotS’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
[. . .] 

Read the full poem at Poets.org

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 1915, Love, Poetry, United States

“Three Lost Cantos From Dante’s Inferno”

April 30, 2011 By Professor Arielle Saiber

three-lost-cantos-from-dantes-inferno “XXXV: Cell-Phone Users
The users of cell-phones in quiet places
Have merited scorn from all classes and races.
They talk to their pals with cocky assurance
While you bury your head in your book with endurance.
The gestures they make are of course unavailing
It looks like unseen taxis that they are hailing.
Their punishment, as each millennium passes,
Is to be drowned out forever by the braying of asses.”

“XXXVI: ‘Reply-to-All’-ers
We came to the furthest reach of hell-
A place that email users know well.
The woman or man whose unmitigated gall
Causes him or her to hit “Reply all”.
I don’t mean to work myself into a snith
But they ought to know better-it clogs server bandwidth.
For these folks a punishment fit for their crimes-
They’re surrounded and hounded by fast-talking mimes.”

“XXXVII: Credit Card Coffee Buyers
The lousy cup is called a “tall”–
the cost of it is rather small.
Those who chose to charge the price
In this ring are treated not-so-nice.
If plastic was the tender you used to pay
While the time of those in line wasted away
You will for eternity be burnt like toast
With free trade coffee, decaf dark roast.”    –Con Chapman

Available to read on Fictionaut.com (posted July, 2010).

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2010, Blogs, Coffee, Contrapasso, Humor, Inferno, Poetry, Punishment, Technology

Caroline Bergvall, Dante Variations

June 7, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

caroline-bergvall-dante-variations“As of May, 2000 the British Library housed 48 different translations of Dante’s Inferno into English.

“Poet and sound artist Caroline Bergvall gathers the opening lines of each translation in her sound piece VIA (48 Dante Variations).

“Bergvall reads the opening of each translation then names the translator and the date of the publication. The result is powerful. The overarching monotony sprinkled with the subtlety of each translation and the hypnotic drone of Bergvall’s voice leaves the listener transfixed as they await the next rendering of Dante’s lines. The piece conveys the inherent complexity of the art of translation and illuminates the uniqueness of each translator’s work.”    –Michael Lieberman, Book Patrol, December 15, 2009

Read Bergvall’s piece at poetryfoundation.org.

Listen to the performance

      here
.

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

Categories: Performing Arts
Tagged with: 2009, Dark Wood, Poetry, Sound, Translations, United Kingdom

Seth Steinzor, To Join the Lost (2010)

February 7, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

seth-steinzor-to-join-the-lost“Dante’s Divine Comedy — that poetic tour of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise written in the 14th century — never seems to get old. The latest proof is the new video game by Electronic Arts, Dante’s Inferno. As in the poem, the game’s Dante character and his guide, Virgil, travel down through the nine circles of Hell, hearing sinners’ stories and witnessing their horrifying punishments. But — this being a video game — Dante is armored like a Greek warrior and can choose to absolve the shades or slash them to bits.

“If that raises your literary hackles, you’ll appreciate another, rather different, Dante-inspired release: the book-length poem To Join the Lost, by Seth Steinzor of South Burlington. This achingly personal, contemporary version of the Inferno is both truer to its prototype and more daring.

“Preserving Dante’s structure of 34 cantos, Steinzor’s unrhymed but rhythmical poem is spoken by a poet named Seth. (It takes some guts to invite comparisons between the Tuscan bard’s poetic voice and one’s own.) Like Dante’s character-self, the middle-aged Seth finds himself lost in a murky, obstructed landscape at the poem’s opening. All is despair until out of the gloom steps Dante — the Florentine poet, that is — who, 700 years after penning his own tour of Hell, has become a guide.” [. . .]    –Amy Lilly, Seven Days, May 19, 2010

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2010, America, American Poetry, Inferno, Journalism, Poetry, Reviews, United States, Vermont

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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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