Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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.

Dante Season at Oxford (2021)

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“Oxford will be alive with opportunities to celebrate Dante in 2021 — exactly 700 years since the great poet’s death.

“Dante in Oxford 2021 will explore the work and its many and rich afterlives, by exploring new forms of public engagement with research, with artistic practice, and with political and cultural history. We will draw on the strength of Oxford’s research community to curate a wide-reaching cultural festival with a range of public events, including live in-person and online programming.

“We are collaborating with important partners across and beyond the university, including the Oxford Dante Society, the Ashmolean Museum, and other national and international partners. Bringing together scholars and translators, international artists, dancers, theatre-makers, and musicians, community groups, and schools, our ambition is both to disseminate and showcase Oxford’s world-leading research, and to experiment with new forms of critically informed public engagement – all in celebration of Dante’s life and the many and complex contexts in which his work lives on, through both research and reinvention in contemporary cultures across the world.” [. . .]    —TORCH (retrieved February 7, 2022)

The complete Dante Season program can be found here.

Relatedly, find other Dante in Oxford 2021 events and posts 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)

Wandering Star Short Film, dir. Sai Kelly (2015)

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“Wandering Star is a short film by filmmaker Sai Kelly. The short film begins with Dante’s opening lines from Inferno, Canto 1 but with a notable difference in that the words “our life” are replaced in the film with “my life.” The protagonist of the film, Dante, is clearly in distress and confused, much like the poet Dante when he appears in the dark wood. As Kelly’s Dante struggles with his confusion, a payphone nearby rings. On answering the payphone, we, along with the protagonist are introduced to a voice who later is called Virgil. Virgil shows the protagonist the most painful and darkest parts of the city where Dante lives. The people suffering “see no way out” mimicking the way in which there is no escape for the sinners of the Inferno. In the end, Dante faints, calls out to Virgil who tells him to run, and wakes up back on the streets of his city a changed person.”    –Contributor Cameron Gunter

A full video of Wandering Star and more information about Sai Kelly can be found here.

Contributed by Cameron Gunter (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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