With the new game coming out based on Dante's Inferno, I've really been wanting to read it...has anyone ever read it? What's it like? How difficult is it to read?
Got through the first few pages. After that couldn't be stuffed as I had better things to do.
Fairly heavy stuff in the translation I had. Pretty engaging though.
Fairly heavy stuff in the translation I had. Pretty engaging though.
Whoa... Can't believe these forums are still kicking.
I'm reading it for English class right now. It's fairly insane. For example, heretics are layed in a metal coffin over the hottest fire in hell for eternity.
Read it in english, liked it very much.
However, there are alot of allusions and things that I would have not understood without my teacher. Without this information, probably wouldnt have been as good
However, there are alot of allusions and things that I would have not understood without my teacher. Without this information, probably wouldnt have been as good
ITT: we condense hours of boredom into 16 minutes of metal.
Last edited by N00bkilla55404 (2009-03-03 22:11:48)
See sig.Poseidon wrote:
With the new game coming out based on Dante's Inferno, I've really been wanting to read it...has anyone ever read it? What's it like? How difficult is it to read?
It's intensely difficult to read.
libertarian benefit collector - anti-academic super-intellectual. http://mixlr.com/the-little-phrase/
What, so it's in Medieval/Middle age Tuscan dialect?Uzique wrote:
See sig.Poseidon wrote:
With the new game coming out based on Dante's Inferno, I've really been wanting to read it...has anyone ever read it? What's it like? How difficult is it to read?
It's intensely difficult to read.
D'uh, of course, Dante was a poet of the Middle-Ages, and he pretty much invented much of the world/European poetic tradition. If you read his works in translation then you're losing much of the point of his poetry (depending on the quality of the translation)- it's pretty hard to replace the wonderful Tuscan terza rima. Few English translations/poets have managed to capture the same beauty, mainly because the metre is so adapted for the sounds and polysyllabic nature of Italian/Tuscan dialects. Doesn't work in the more Saxon-gutteral English language.Mekstizzle wrote:
What, so it's in Medieval/Middle age Tuscan dialect?Uzique wrote:
See sig.Poseidon wrote:
With the new game coming out based on Dante's Inferno, I've really been wanting to read it...has anyone ever read it? What's it like? How difficult is it to read?
It's intensely difficult to read.
It's a great story though, one of the best. Almost every area of drama and literature since then, from the 1400's right up until today and now, have alluded and made passing reference to the poem. The Divina Commedia and other epic poems such as Milton's Paradise Lost are massively influential-- the Dante quote in my sig taken from the Purgatorio canto of the Divina Commedia was used as an epigraph to one of T.S. Eliot's greatest poems. Reading or at least comprehending/understanding these poems are pretty much essential when it comes to really appreciating any literature that was published after it.
Last edited by Uzique (2009-03-04 08:01:30)
libertarian benefit collector - anti-academic super-intellectual. http://mixlr.com/the-little-phrase/
Sounds good I might get a hold of some of his poems!Uzique wrote:
D'uh, of course, Dante was a poet of the Middle-Ages, and he pretty much invented much of the world/European poetic tradition. If you read his works in translation then you're losing much of the point of his poetry (depending on the quality of the translation)- it's pretty hard to replace the wonderful Tuscan terza rima. Few English translations/poets have managed to capture the same beauty, mainly because the metre is so adapted for the sounds and polysyllabic nature of Italian/Tuscan dialects. Doesn't work in the more Saxon-gutteral English language.Mekstizzle wrote:
What, so it's in Medieval/Middle age Tuscan dialect?Uzique wrote:
See sig.
It's intensely difficult to read.
It's a great story though, one of the best. Almost every area of drama and literature since then, from the 1400's right up until today and now, have alluded and made passing reference to the poem. The Divina Commedia and other epic poems such as Milton's Paradise Lost are massively influential-- the Dante quote in my sig taken from the Purgatorio canto of the Divina Commedia was used as an epigraph to one of T.S. Eliot's greatest poems. Reading or at least comprehending/understanding these poems are pretty much essential when it comes to really appreciating any literature that was published after it.
You're telling me you're reading an original/unadulterated version of it written in its original dialect from the time and you fully understand it? What is this shit, how fuckin clever is this bitch
But seriously, you actually have a grasp of the language? Or are you just working it out as you read it. Surely you'd have to at least have a good understanding/fluency of Modern Italian before you went and read this in its middle aged Tuscan glory... basically, this shit is clearly over my head. Let me go back to reading Lord of the rings why don't you.
I had no idea that so many people on bf2s could understand middle aged tuscan
But seriously, you actually have a grasp of the language? Or are you just working it out as you read it. Surely you'd have to at least have a good understanding/fluency of Modern Italian before you went and read this in its middle aged Tuscan glory... basically, this shit is clearly over my head. Let me go back to reading Lord of the rings why don't you.
I had no idea that so many people on bf2s could understand middle aged tuscan
Do it.
The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova. While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).
Dante wrote the Comedy in a new language he called "Italian", based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, with some elements of Latin and of the other regional dialects. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin (the languages of liturgy, history, and scholarship in general). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.
Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be more trivial in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, the progression of Dante's pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.
No Mek, I'm not fluent in Middle-Age Tuscan, but I am translating parts of the 'Hell' canto in study, yes. I've spent a lot of time translating and working with Old/Middle-English texts, popular ones you may of heard of such as Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight etc. so I now basically speak yarggh-Viking and Tolkien-Elvish & Dwarvish (he invented these fictional languages after being a Prof. of Medieval literature/language). Tuscan is much much harder but my tutor is quite possibly one of the best Dante scholars around at the moment, it's very slow and very tedious but SO much better than working with some soul-less academic translation. I mean just look at that quote from above and read it out in an (embarassingly bad) Italian dialect: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa". The rhythm and sound of that line are utterly gorgeous in comparison to the bland English verse version: 'at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe'. Also bearing in mind the political and cultural importance of a poet writing an epic poem on Christian theology and the afterlife, and opting to do so by being one of the first writers of the common people's language, rather than the expected-"Holy" liturgical language, Latin... just have to get your head around at least a few of the passages in the original version.
The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova. While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).
Dante wrote the Comedy in a new language he called "Italian", based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, with some elements of Latin and of the other regional dialects. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin (the languages of liturgy, history, and scholarship in general). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.
Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be more trivial in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, the progression of Dante's pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.
No Mek, I'm not fluent in Middle-Age Tuscan, but I am translating parts of the 'Hell' canto in study, yes. I've spent a lot of time translating and working with Old/Middle-English texts, popular ones you may of heard of such as Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight etc. so I now basically speak yarggh-Viking and Tolkien-Elvish & Dwarvish (he invented these fictional languages after being a Prof. of Medieval literature/language). Tuscan is much much harder but my tutor is quite possibly one of the best Dante scholars around at the moment, it's very slow and very tedious but SO much better than working with some soul-less academic translation. I mean just look at that quote from above and read it out in an (embarassingly bad) Italian dialect: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa". The rhythm and sound of that line are utterly gorgeous in comparison to the bland English verse version: 'at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe'. Also bearing in mind the political and cultural importance of a poet writing an epic poem on Christian theology and the afterlife, and opting to do so by being one of the first writers of the common people's language, rather than the expected-"Holy" liturgical language, Latin... just have to get your head around at least a few of the passages in the original version.
Last edited by Uzique (2009-03-04 08:16:05)
libertarian benefit collector - anti-academic super-intellectual. http://mixlr.com/the-little-phrase/
it's a great story, one of my favorites!!
make sure you get a copy that has footnotes
make sure you get a copy that has footnotes