"When conscious thought meets careless heart and two lost souls make one fresh start"

Eleven Ten things I learned from rereading The Comedy:

1. If you can at all avoid it, do NOT read a Miltonic translation. Especially Cary's.
   
   
2. The scope of Dante's vision is breathtaking, even in Miltonic dress. Now that's mythopoesis.
   
   
3. As a show of impartiality, Dante is perfectly willing to damn members of his own party -- but he does not, that I can see, save a single political opponent.
   
   
4. No matter what I think of Virgil as a writer, he rocks as an NPC.
   
   
5. Dante/Virgil: So close to canonical, you might as well accept it.
   
   
6. The middle book of the trilogy is (still) the best part.
   
   
7. When and if I write an epic where the tension shifts from character- to metaphor-driven, I need to signal this change clearly.
   
   
8. Verse is not the best vehicle for, say, detailed mechanical explanations, be it of setting or theology; it's an excellent vehicle for bringing to life the apparent contradictions of infinity when viewed by finite creatures.
   
   
9. If you ever meet Adam's spirit and get to ask him four questions, do not waste one of them on "What language did you speak?" Seriously. (Edited: see comments)
   
   
9. Not only does someone need to create the manga adaption, someone needs to write the Very Secret Diaries version. "The old guy showed me yet another pit full of dead people -- sodomites or something like that. What a depressing hell-hole. NB: Still not saved."
   
   
10. Ovid: It's what's for literature.

And in the end, despite the plotty problems and the fact that Dante's New Jerusalem is the Mystic Rose, which does not make for good ninjaing over the rooftops, I still think it'd be better if Beatrice were replaced with a ninja. Final Ninja Replacement Score = 1. Which is pretty darn good for a story this size.

I was wrong about one thing: instead of waiting till the end, Dante starts collapsing his structure of symbolism in the Primum Mobile, with the vision of God as an infinite point that is infinite space. He even points to the fact that he's collapsing it, with his question about the inverted circles. It's an intermediate step that softens the bang of the transformation, in the Empyrean, to the Divine River and then the Mystic Rose, but gives it more conscious power. It takes a creator with complete control, and complete confidence, to pause a climax like that.

I know I said I'd probably read Pharsalia next, but here's a volume I may not be able to resist: The Story of Troilus ed. by R.K. Gordon. Benoît de Sainte-Maure's history of Troy, or rather those parts that tell the first extant story of Troilus and Cressida, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato (in prose, alas), Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Transmission and redaction ho!

---L.