"Been ten years waitin' but it's better than late than the never we've been told before"

[larryhammer]

The local Borders has 14 translations (none the one I'm reading) of the Comedy, not counting separate editions, plus a 15th on the discount rack that had pen-and-ink illustrations of Dante's travels through an urban, Los-Angelesque landscape. The B&N has 16. Dante seems to be something of a minor publication industry.

In the last couple days, Heaven stopped being a struggle, to my surprise. Last weekend, I wrote in my notes: "The narrator's easiest journey is the reader's hardest. To give Dante his due, he does try to maintain interest by varying the setting. The problem is, nothing changes there, which gives him very little scope, and the pallet of colors ranges from very bright to incomprehensibly bright. And one can't help feeling a little resentful that he doesn't have to take a single step the whole canticle." BUT, if you look at the canticle as shifting not from adventure to (endless) theological discussions, but from variety of incident to variety of imagery, it helps enormously. It also gives the vision of the Eagle Collective* in Jupiter a lot of power. After which, the Jacob's Ladder of Saturn gains even more resonance.

In short, Dante is spending the canticle accumulating a superstructure of symbology, which releases its stored tension with (as I remember) a bang in the vision of the Mystic Rose.

Speaking of powerful language, English lost a fair amount of expressiveness when it dropped the second person familiar form. It's quite striking when Dante meets his great-great-grandfather the Crusader and shifts from "thou" of equality to the respectful "you" (as this translation does).


* Insert medieval Borg joke here.

---L.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I was in Palmer (MA) with gerisullivan yesterday, looking through the windows of a store that sold -- or perhaps merely hoarded -- antique musical instruments. Lots of square pianos. Near one door was an alabaster bust. It was Dante.

Sure, he inspired a couple of compositions (let's see; two by Liszt, one by Tchaikovsky, and there must be others), but I don't really see the connection.

[larryhammer]

I can't see Dante being quite as inspiring for musical works as, say, Ariosto or Ovid -- how many operas have those two inspired? -- or even Chaucer. Literary works, sure, especially modernized Infernos, but ... nope, not hearing the music.

(Two by Liszt? What's the other?)

---L.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Besides the Dante Sonata, he wrote a Dante Symphony for orchestra and chorus (which I have in his version for two pianos and chorus).

[larryhammer]

Huh -- I hadn't heard of the symphony. Any good?

---L.