Dante Books

This book contains essays on Dante, Borges, Rushdie, Leopardi, Sebald, Seth, Verga,Buruma, Svevo, Joyce, Saba,Green ,Buzzati, Neugeboren, Sironi, Montale, Bateson and Ugazio, Stead. The opening essay on Dante's ambivalence while turning from the world and at the same time intending to make himself a central poet of mankind is excellent. I took especial interest in the essay on Borges and his analysis of Borges ' engaged' modesty, the profess of self- effacement .This is Parks on Borges non- fiction his essays. " Again and again he takes on a new subject , marshals his reading his faithful friends of old, gives us fresh ways of seeing things, suggests lucid, often conflicting , frequently bizaare ways of understanding the world.It is astonishing. And though the yearnings are ever the same- the desire to annihilate time, to approach a transcendental perception of life, to grasp an ungraspable truth- Borges never stoops to wishful thinking."pp.33-34
This is an excellent work of practical criticism which without ever forming a comprehensive theory provides insights into diverse writing worlds.

Written by Noble Peace Prize winner and Mayan activist Rigoberta Menchu with the assistance Dante Liano and enhanced with full color artwork by Domi, The Honey Jar is an entertaining collection of short stories and encouraging tales drawn from the author's childhood growing up in a Mayan culture. These are tales and stories her grandparents told during her childhood, collected under one cover and offering a new generation of children a special insights into a Native American culture's captivating and imaginative folklore offering explanations of certain natural phenomena, magical twins, the sky, the sun and the moon, animals, plants, and the gods. Especially suitable for school and community library Folklore/Mythology collections for children, The Honey Jar is a very highly recommended read as a high interest for any young reader for its entertaining, imaginative, and vibrant tales, fables, and mysteries.

This book is a weighty large format hardback with well reproduced drawings by John Flaxman. The illustrations contain both Flaxmans preliminary drawings and final versions. Flaxman is not well known as an artist but the design work, detail and structure of these drawings is amazing.

The Tranaslator Notes Pgs 9-11 by John Ciardi end with the sentence following his acknowledgements "....I think ,too, I should acknowledge a debt of borrowed courage to all other translators of Dante: without their failures, I should never have attempted my own".The introduction(Pgs 13-26) by Archibald T. MacAllister(dated 7/14/53) rates Ciardi's translation as one of the 1st American translators to perceived this special quality of " the Inferno",which meant he had to abandon any attempt to reproduce Dante's complicated rhyme scheme and even had to "do some violence"to conventional poetic usage". Dante's Inferno contains a summary before each poem in each Canto , ,so the reader knows what's happening before they read the poetry for the sake "of enjoying the intense graphics & rhyme".It begins in Canto I with identifying the fictious Dante as "midway in his alloted "3 scores and 10" years of 70 ,identifies "worldliness"as the dark wood of error) ,identifies the 3 beast of worldliness as the leopard of malice & fraud), the lion of violence & ambition),the she-wolf of incontenience. In Canto I , translator Ciaro's rhymes use beats of 10 or 11 in each line and rhymes such as "apart & start"(in the 1st Stanza)..His translation will make you curious to see the graphics and translations of others(his sketches are simplistic in this Mentor Classic/1st Printing 1954 ),and some translators have done almost an "oil painting" in their books. For those who do not want to beautify "pain and suffering", they will appreciate Ciardi's sketches. I happened upon this "find"(as a used book) in a Philadelphia Pharmacy many years ago. Dante's Inferno so vividly discusses and describes an imagined glimpse of purgatory,hell Pg 265 (in a graphic prior to Canto XXXII) with sheets of ice) and "at the end of the tunnel" the beacon of paradise. Pg 288 ends with more of "notes"(which are at the end of each Canto... ,the last of which is Note 143 (notes are numbered by reference to which verse they are (e.g. Canto XXXIV had 143 verses)explaining why Dante ended this Canto with the word "Stars".

"Midway life's journey I was made aware/that I had strayed into a dark forest..." Those eerie words open the first cantica of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno," the most famous part of the legendary Divina Comedia. But the stuff going on here is anything but divine, as Dante explores the metaphorical and supernatural horrors of the inferno.

The date is Good Friday of the year 1300, and Dante is lost in a creepy dark forest, being assaulted by a trio of beasts who symbolize his own sins. But suddenly he is rescued ("Not man; man I once was") by the legendary poet Virgil, who takes the despondent Dante under his wing -- and down into Hell.

But this isn't a straightforward hell of flames and dancing devils. Instead, it's a multi-tiered carnival of horrors, where different sins are punished with different means. Opportunists are forever stung by insects, the lustful are trapped in a storm, the greedy are forced to battle against each other, and the violent lie in a river of boiling blood, are transformed into thorn bushes, and are trapped on a volcanic desert.

If nothing else makes you feel like being good, then "The Inferno" might change your mind. The author loads up his "Inferno" with every kind of disgusting, grotesque punishment that you can imagine -- and it's all wrapped up in an allegorical journey of humankind's redemption, not to mention dissing the politics of Italy and Florence.

Along with Virgil -- author of the "Aeneid" -- Dante peppered his Inferno with Greek myth and symbolism. Like the Greek underworld, different punishments await different sins; what's more, there are also appearances by harpies, centaurs, Cerberus and the god Pluto. But the sinners are mostly Dante's contemporaries, from corrupt popes to soldiers.

And Dante's skill as a writer can't be denied -- the grotesque punishments are enough to make your skin crawl ("Fixed in the slime, groan they, 'We were sullen and wroth...'"), and the grand finale is Satan himself, with legendary traitors Brutus, Cassius and Judas sitting in his mouths. (Yes, I said MOUTHS, not "mouth")

More impressive still is his ability to weave the poetry out of symbolism and allegory, without it ever seeming preachy or annoying. Even pre-hell, we have a lion, a leopard and a wolf, which symbolize different sins, and a dark forest that indicates suicidal thoughts. And the punishments themselves usually reflect the person's flaws, such as false prophets having their heads twisted around so they can only see what's behind them. Wicked sense of humor.

Dante's vivid writing and wildly imaginative "inferno" makes this the most fascinating, compelling volume of the Divine Comedy. Never fun, but always spellbinding and complicated.

Epic poetry is the most difficult literary genre to translate in an accessible manner, but Seth Zimmerman's version of Dante Alighieri's Inferno makes this work both easy to understand and enjoyable as poetry in English. This achievement is all the more impressive as Zimmerman has retained Dante's terza rima rhyme scheme throughout the 238 pages of the poem. (Terza rima is a series of three-line stanzas in which the rhyme scheme is as follows: a b a, b c b, c d c, etc.)

In addition to the poem itself, this book also includes a diagram of the Inferno with its descending circle of sinners and sins as the medieval world would have seen it, a chronology of Dante's life and time, and an excellent essay entitled "Triple-rhyming in the Inferno: Is it worth the torture?"

Of course, Dante's Inferno has been translated into English many, many times before. However, among the several renderings that this reviewer has seen, Seth Zimmerman's version is the most successful at making it something to be read for pleasure-rather than endured.

If you love the rewarding challenge of studying James Joyce and chasing through all of the required texts and commentaries, knowing there is infinite meaning and substance within his work, ever just beyond your complete and secure grasp, like Tantallus, though at times it sinks into mists and at others hits your tender toe like granite, at times disappears into a million jigsaw pieces into the breeze, and at others drawing all firmly together in total comprehension, then you will love this book.

At times as you read this, as with Joyce, you find yourself within an ornate rococo or baroque chapel of infinite height, glowing with intricately carved white marble, vaults so high and carefully carved that no human eye can perceive so high what God alone can see. So it is with this book, delightfully, incalculably beautiful and illuminating, yet written in a way that one feels it only half translated by the author from his native learned and lovely Italian.

Yet, there is much here that clarifies Joyce and explains the Joycean characters and their contexts, within and without the text; nevertheless, you must search and contemplate and reread and review and think, above all. You must think, as it is when you read Joyce; yet you assuredly discover any and all effort abundantly rewarded.

Let me quote for your consideration a few of the briefer sentences, as the author explains his purpose, from page 20:

"My aim in the present study is to write a Joycean chapter in the history of the irreducible separation between the existential experience of factical life and the ordinary representation of human existence. I show in my discussions of Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that the mature Joyce-s renditions of "spectacle of redemption" fill some of the most banal, vulgar, prosaic, realistic actions of his protagonists with the negative core whereby human existence is made eccentric to the domain of the phenomenally experienceable. I show, more particularly, that Joyce bestows on his protagonists a distinct catalogue of messianic connotations informed by the Christic stations of death and resurrection, fall and redemption, burial and manducation, incarnation and transubstantiation; this catalogue evolves gradually through Joyce's successive writings, . . ." etc., etc., etc.

This learned tome presents a very substantial and powerful insight into the meaning of the writings of James Joyce. Once you have entered the reading of Joyce and grown comfortable yet curious and more thirsty there, please consider this book to find out what the heck is really going on within. You will not be disappointed.

Esta traduccion de Crespo es la mejor que se puede encontrar,ademas de que en esta edicion viene pagina a pagina la version original y la traduccion.

This a great CD, with all of Dante's Divine Comedy, read very expressively by the actor Claudio Carini. All files are in mp3 format. Its a great way to become familiar with this work in the original italian. A free copy of the text can be downloaded from various sites on the internet. I bought the CD in Italy. Greatly recommended.

The great Florentine master must have had lots of fun when writing his Inferno. See with what glee he takes pleasure in fancying his enemies' fate after death. A medieval masterpiece, a "summa" of Fourteenth-century filosphy and scientific knowledge.