in case you were wondering
I spent several hours today split between several different bookstores, browsing for a couple of specific things, but also browsing other things just because... cookbooks, for one thing. And the Dante shelves.Having minored in Italian, I spent a lot of time reading Dante (a looooot of time) and I especially love the Inferno—for its rich, harsh language, its beautiful verse, and its song-like qualities. Dante is a master. I spent a semester immersed in la Divina Commedia and we barely scratched the surface.
One of the many books in the stack I am currently reading is "Il mio Dante" (My Dante) by Roberto Benigni. You may know him for this (his film La vita è bella and many others), but all across Italy he is also widely known for his public recitations of various canti of the Commedia, da memoria! From memory! He is brilliant—some of my favorites are the very first canto 1 and canto 5, and I just discovered this segment in which he lectures on the Canto di Ulisse (and Primo Levi) before reciting it. One of my professors saw him perform and I have always been jealous. The Italian people are fieri, proud of their literary forefathers, and indeed Dante was one of the three in whose work we find the origins of modern Italian. This kind of work is meant to be read aloud and I love how it is a tradition still strong in Italy, made even more visible by someone as influential as Benigni.
Another element of the Commedia that we studied and discussed was the differences of many translators. We read excerpts of the same passage as translated by several different Dante scholars and they were each so different, each capturing a new facet of the original. Someday I want to read Robert Pinsky's translation, but today I discovered a version translated in English verse by Longfellow! I was so intrigued and have added this to my very long reading list as well. This Longfellow discovery is the point of this entire post, but the rest of this was needed for contextual hints as to Why This is a Big Deal.
