Arrears blogging: September 14 -- Orals

When you click on the online Reading Guide for this date, you get Cantos 24 and 25 of Dante's Inferno, filled with monsters and curses and people being turned into snakes and forced to meld with each other. Sick, right? But it turns out that's not the actual reading. The actual reading is Cantos 24 and 25 of the Paradiso, and instead of mindbending creatures, we get scholastic philosophy:

Rightly hast thou deem’d,”
Was answer’d; “if thou well discern, why first
He hath defined it substance, and then proof.”

Will Dante answer the questions correctly? Or will he screw up and assume that which he's supposed to define? The answers will be found in Divine Comedy III: Enter The Logician I suppose in those 13th-century days anyone who could read the Inferno also had his fill of Aquinas and the like, so it was a more relatable test, but still, this shows you why it's so hard for sequels to work, especially the third one. (The translation doesn't help, either, and I'm without my own Virgil -- Pinsky's version -- which got me through the Inferno excerpts.)

The super-theological content of this reading also reminds me that, considering the American intellectual climate of 1908, the Harvard Classics isn't really all that Christian. I think this is a good thing because education is supposed to be broadening -- stuff you didn't know, by definition -- and people talking about Christianity you can find on AM radio. Or the House of Representatives.

November 2: The Audacity of Audacity

One of the things that characterizes really great people in any field, I think, is that they're conscious of their greatness. They have to be, or how would they dare to do what only the great can do?

The problem is that one of the things that characterizes crazy people is that they're also conscious of their greatness. And, speaking for myself anyway, I have a default setting of preferring false modesty to no modesty at all. Dante, however, doesn't agree, as we find in this moment in the Inferno. Dante is hanging out in Limbo with Virgil and Homer and Horace -- you know, famous classical poets whose names are now given to the kids of eccentric parents at your preschool:

When they together short discourse had held,
They turn’d to me, with salutation kind
Beckoning me; at the which my master smiled:
Nor was this all; but greater honour still
They gave me, for they made me of their tribe;
And I was sixth amid so learn’d a band.

In other words, is Dante the equal of Virgil and Homer? Sure he is -- just ask him! He's a mouthy entertainer, like Terrell Owens or Shaq or someone like that. Or John Lennon, although Dante takes pains to let you know he's less popular than Jesus.

Limbo smees like a nice place, by the way. The only drawback, according to Virgil, is "that we live/Desiring without hope." It's just like Hollywood! (And so many people think Hollywood's close to Hell already.)

September 15: Well, I tried

Maybe my problem is reading Dante in shirt & tie. I should try something more comfortable like this.

I've complained about the Dante translation before; the past couple of times the reading's been from the Inferno, so I can just turn to my Pinsky and figure it out. But what happens when it's Canto XXIV of the as-yet-untranslated-or-if-it-is-translated-unowned-by-me "Paradiso"? Nothing, that's what. (Note: long compound adjective probably one word in German.) I can't make head or tail of it. It doesn't help that our text appears to be a theological discussion:

“The deep things,” I replied, “which here I scan
Distinctly, are below from mortal eye
So hidden, they have in belief alone
Their being; on which credence, hope sublime
Is built: and, therefore substance, it intends.

As Dante did not say, Oy.

So....how was everyone's weekend? The wife and I saw "Burn After Reading," which we enjoyed very much. It's really too small a movie to have a summarizable theme, but if it did it would be that Americans are too dumb to be the proprietors of a giant national security establishment. I'd go along with that. But maybe that's for tomorrow, which is the Farewell Address.

May 15: A few more notes on Dante

Today we have Cantos XXV, XXVI, and XXVII. (How did Dante get the idea, way back in the 1200s, of naming his Cantos after Super Bowls?) (I apologize for the previous parenthesis. It's a volume business, this jokemaking.) It has been a busy day with writing and stuff so I will bulletpoint:

• Everything I said in this post I stand by -- I can't make sense of this without turning to my Pinsky.

• Hell, for Dante, is a place where there are a lot of Italians. I'm not sure this is the conclusion he meant me to draw.

• What's Ulysses (Canto XXVI) in for, anyway? It appears to be the Trojan Horse:

...as erewhile to wrath
These in the flame with ceaseless groans deplore
The ambush of the horse

But that doesn't seem so terrible, to me. It always seemed like the Trojans were idiots for taking it (on the other hand, I may be basing my knowledge on a "Simpsons.") Why does Ulysses, who was after all frightfully clever, get the same punishment as Guido da Montefeltro (Italians again!), who advised the pope to promise much and deliver little, which seems obvious? Why is Ulysses even in Hell? It's not his fault he didn't know about Jesus. Is Ulysses a punishment for all the Italians, who think hanging out with Greeks is an infernal punishment?

So many questions. Perhaps this is what makes the Inferno the boundless work of art that it is.

Apr 16: In which I need the translation to help with the translation

First of all, it's my mom's birthday today, and I know she reads this, so, "Hi, Mom!"

Secondly, it's unfitting that today's reading is from The Inferno (Cantos VIII and IX for you Dante-heads). It might be fitting if my Mom's name was Beatrice, but it isn't. And, also unlike my mom, the translation is antique and hard to follow:

Mine eyes he loosed, and spake: “And now direct
Thy visual nerve along that ancient foam,
There, thickest where the smoke ascends.”

I mean, if you squint you can figure out what's going on, somewhat, but it's difficult. Fortunately, I have Pinsky's translation in my bookshelves (its smooth spine betraying the fact that I've hardly opened it), and he has retranslated it into modern:

Taking his hands from my eyes, he said, "Now look:
There where the very harshest fumes abound,
Across the ancient scum."

Was that so hard? Pity the poor translator: if the past is another country, and translation is by definition another country, then old translations are very far away from us indeed. And it's worth noting that, despite the terrible lowfalutin times in which we live in, one can still translate the "Inferno" and get it published as a nice trade paperback. Somebody should do the same for "Faust." Also, Juvenal.

About the content itself, there's not much to say, but I am amused by the way the Daily Reading Guide sets it up:

The city of Dis, within the gates of Hell, was guarded by monsters and surrounded by a moat filled with the tormented. Dante, protected by Virgil, entered the forbidden city, and viewed sights never before seen by living man.

Never before seen by living man? He made it up! When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, he saw sights never before seen by living man. If I write a scene in which my enemy is in a pit of muck, and is descended upon by unholy demons, and starts biting himself, that's not a "sight" at all. It' s just a fantasy -- or Canto VIII. The "Inferno" must be one of the all-time great monuments to "Oh, they'll pay. They'll all pay" in Western literature.

Jan 27: Purgatory Hath No Fury

Today we're promised "Dante and Beatrice in Paradise." And what better day to celebrate this great love than this – the 706th anniversary of “Dante victim of political persecution in Florence”? Just on one day?

Anyway, it’s canto XXX (like on a likker jug) of the Purgatorio, for you highbrows. Today’s translation is by a Henry F. Cary about whom little is discovered, except that he finished his translation in time for it to be in the public domain by 1910. (And if they re-did the HC now, what fights they’d have about the translations!)

Our canto has an “argument” (“Beatrice descends from Heaven, and rebukes the Poet”), and that is something I miss in modern-day literature, as little as I know of it – the italicized stuff that summarizes the chapter for you. (E.g. “A conversation -- Yet Mary has different plans – A dinner of rabbit.”) They have executive summaries everywhere else, why not in literature?

This also has footnotes, whereas Burns, or the Odyssey, doesn’t. The inconsistency is a little maddening. I suppose if you read it volume by volume like you’re supposed to you don’t notice it so much.

This is going to be tough sledding:

SOON as that polar light, 1 fair ornament
Of the first Heaven, which hath never known
Setting nor rising, nor the shadowy veil
Of other cloud than sin, to duty there
Each one convoying, as that lower doth
The steersman to his port, stood firmly fix’d;

I think it's supposed to mean “morning”.

-- Hey, this is the canto where Dante has to leave Virgil behind. I think I would have spent a little more time lamenting the end of this now-classic buddy movie, but no time -- Beatrice is talking. (“I am, in sooth, I am/Beatrice.” -- just like any MC would.)

-- This thing is goddamn replete with epic similes. As a Denny’s, where the Grand Slam breakfast is placed before you, and you think, “Must I consume this entire grease-coated meal? Surely it can’t be that good for me” – so larded is the plate of the Divine Comedy with the epic simile.

-- Beatrice tears him a new one:

Soon as I had reach’d
The threshold of my second age, and changed
My mortal for immortal; then he left me,
And gave himself to others. When from flesh
To spirit I had risen, and increase
Of beauty and of virtue circled me,
I was less dear to him, and valued less.

She’s jealous. Even in heaven. It’s kind of cute. Actually, I think Dante intends for us to be on her side, but what the purgatory is he supposed to do? He's not dead. And he's still Italian.

-- Now to Canto XXXI. Here’s the summary (or, “Next week -- on Purgatorio”):

Beatrice continues her reprehension of Dante, who confesses his error, and falls to the ground; coming to himself again, he is by Matilda drawn through the waters of Lethe, and presented first to the four virgins who figure the cardinal virtues; these in their turn lead him to the Gryphon, a symbol of our Saviour; and the three virgins, representing the evangelical virtues, intercede for him with Beatrice, that she would display to him her second beauty.

And that’s exactly what happens in this Canto. I feel like an undergraduate again – the kind that doesn’t understand a single word of what’s going on, and falls upon the Cliffs’ Notes like a drowning man. Or – “as an sophomore, taking classics of world literature, does sometimes feel beset…” Ah, screw it. ("Display to him her second beauty," though -- that's a summation from more innocent times.)

-- I have nothing to say about XXXII either. The symbolism is the kind that’s immediately explained in the footnotes (plumes=donation of Constantine), so what’s to be beguiled by? Except that it’s nice he thinks so well of Beatrice that she gets such special attention in Heaven. But overall -- and I blame the translation -- it's as soporific as a similarly Roman-numeraled Super Bowl.