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The 10 Essential Penguin Classics, According to Penguin

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oneofmurphysbiscuits	Posted: Nov 3 2009, 04:00 PM
marmalade modernist Group: Members Posts: 5,319 Member No.: 381 Joined: 15-April 07	and i've juat bought a new copy of the Musa, so it's all good.

John Gargo	Posted: Nov 3 2009, 05:15 PM
Literary lunatic Group: Members Posts: 284 Member No.: 1,996 Joined: 20-May 08	Certainly an interesting aspect about the Inferno being the only one most people bother with... it could be that a more general population is only interested (as general as you can get with interest in a 14th century text at least) in the darker aspect of Dante's work and perhaps the second and third parts are of less interest in a secular age? I can't speak of this particular translation, but I found an online lecture of the Comedy at Yale and the edition that they use is John D. Sinclair's (Oxford University Press, 1968). The professor himself is Italian, so perhaps a higher fidelity to the original language? I haven't watched these lectures myself but I'm interested (youtube search "Yale Open Courses Dante"). EDIT: The Musa translation is the one I've read. What I need to read more of is some scholarship. I've got Stanley Fish's Surprised By Sin on my shelf.

nnyhav

Posted: Nov 3 2009, 05:37 PM

itinerant kibitzer

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QUOTE (johnnywalkitoff @ Nov 3 2009, 02:31 PM)

perhaps the only place where adiscussion of some of the most important pieces of western civilizaation literature (midatlantic) turns into dicks and clits as long as dick perhaps with balls attached...

... as I slowly slid the bookmark between the sheets spread so invitingly before me, softly brushing either side of the foolscap arched in anticipation, sensing a faint swish as the rigid bookmark passed roughly over the silken page inducing an indescribable tingle of the spine, I suddenly turned it towards the recto and slammed the splayed sides of the book together, tightening the pressure on the now fully ensconced bookmark ...

oneofmurphysbiscuits

Posted: Nov 3 2009, 06:32 PM

marmalade modernist

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QUOTE (John Gargo @ Nov 3 2009, 05:15 PM)

Certainly an interesting aspect about the Inferno being the only one most people bother with... it could be that a more general population is only interested (as general as you can get with interest in a 14th century text at least) in the darker aspect of Dante's work and perhaps the second and third parts are of less interest in a secular age?

I can't speak of this particular translation, but I found an online lecture of the Comedy at Yale and the edition that they use is John D. Sinclair's (Oxford University Press, 1968). The professor himself is Italian, so perhaps a higher fidelity to the original language? I haven't watched these lectures myself but I'm interested (youtube search "Yale Open Courses Dante").

EDIT: The Musa translation is the one I've read. What I need to read more of is some scholarship. I've got Stanley Fish's Surprised By Sin on my shelf.

John Freccero's Dante: the poetics of conversion, a brilliant Augustinian reading, at least i thought so when i read it and i'm about to again soon, since it will tie in with etc etc

Robert Hollander's written on Dante and Boccaccio,

Erich Auerbach on Dante in both "Mimesis" and Dante: poet of the secular world. I've still to read the latter, likewise

Dante's Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Figurae: Reading Mediaeval Culture) (Paperback)

Dante for the New Millennium (Fordham Series in Medieval Studies) (Paperback)
by Teodolinda Barolini

neither have i read any of Rachel Jacoff's work

and saying again

http://dante.dartmouth.edu/

Canox

Posted: Nov 3 2009, 06:57 PM

bleh

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QUOTE (oneofmurphysbiscuits @ Nov 3 2009, 09:42 PM)

i love the Robert and Jean Hollander best, granted Jean is a poet, but if anything that was likely to make me the more wary and critical. I shall go back to Musa, Mandelbaum, Durling?and i've never read Pinsky, but i love the Hollanders' rendering of Dante's visual, psychological structures.theyre staggering in their generosities and distilled in such a music and it made me weep, but to be clear this is my favourite, i'm not arguing the merits of a versus b, nor will i

xxxxx

The Mandelbaum is wonderful. It's the one I use and it certainly beats most German translations I know (apart from Borchardt's, which is singularly strange)

oneofmurphysbiscuits

Posted: Nov 3 2009, 07:23 PM

marmalade modernist

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QUOTE (John Gargo @ Nov 3 2009, 05:15 PM)

think how filmic is "the inferno", re Dante in a secular age, John.It was filmed, featured Spencer Tracy, i wonder what it looked like. Purgatorio is Dante's celebration of the life of the mind and it's the part of the poem that i fell in love with, and afterwards i thought how predictable of me that turned out to be, given Sam

Now i'll have to reread Mandelbaum and Musa again soon , and then likely Virgil, thanks guys

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