Poetry Thursday - discovering Dante's Inferno

(via, which gives parallel text)

Dante's Inferno recently came my way via a randomly-selected episode of The Essay (I get it as a podcast), which turned out to be one of Ian Samson's letters to dead authors: Dear Dante.

He starts with quoting (from memory) the opening lines:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vitami ritrovai per una selva oscura,ché la diritta via era smarrita.

and in the next 12 minutes has a little conversation with Dante. Good fun, though it sounds a bit aggressive at times. I'm currently reading "yet another Donna Leon", this one concerning theft of rare books from an old-style library - and bringing in many aspects of Italian and Venetian life and culture, sad failings and scandals - so coming across a bit of Dante was serendipitous - and tantalising.

Most of us have a passing acquaintance with Dante Alighieri (c1265-1321), if only through his infatuation with Beatrice, or perhaps because he was instrumental in establishing the literature of Italy. As Wikipedia points out:

his depictions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven provided inspiration for the larger body of Western art. He is cited as an influence on John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer and Alfred Tennyson, among many others. In addition, the first use of the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme, or the terza rima, is attributed to him. 

Sansom says that TS Eliot said that the last cantos of Paradiso are as great as poetry ever gets, so it's a shame that most of us never get there because we get bogged down in the infernal torments, which are, let's face it, "sometimes boring."

Project Gutenberg makes the Divine Comedy available as a free e-book, and many versions, eg illustrated by Dore, can be found for a pittance online. William Blake did some illustrations; goodness, who didn't, over the years?

Hear the accompanying passage on the Tate website

Canto I of the Inferno starts thus -

Midway upon the journey of our life
  I found myself within a forest dark,
  For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
  What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
  Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
  But of the good to treat, which there I found,
  Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

Read it all here (or elsewhere) in English or Italian (here, for example); many translations are available, eg tthat by Longfellow in the 1870s is online, as is John Ciardi's (1954). If your Italian needs refreshing, parallel text or bilingual versions are available; if you know Dante's work well, you may want to go for some intertextual enlightenment.

The Divina Commedia has been the source of  much academic research over the ages (eg Princeton Dante Project, 1999) and of  digital enhancement in the past few decades (eg Intertextual Dante, 2013, or the mapping of places mentioned in the Commedia. 

Places mentioned by Dante (via)

Poetry Thursday - Lavinia Greenlaw, The Messenger God

"Broad-hatted, heel-winged god of all going-between"
Mercury by Giovanni da Bologna

How do you know?
He is ahead and to the quick.

What impression?
Grave, fissile.

Easily divided?
In that he responds.

His message?
His presence. No other message.

To what purpose?
Glass in a city of water and sky.

What need of him?
I must enter the city.

To what purpose?
Water and sky.

- Lavinia Greenlaw

Found in Ali Smith's "Artful", part novel, part essays on art and literature. The net of the book has caught some interesting poems (or perhaps fragments), of which I hope to find out more. 

In the book, the poem is in a section on reflection, involving and evoking both Narcissus and Hermes/Mercury.

Quicksilver is another word for Mercury, is another word for a planet that looks like a grey boulder in space, another word for an element which is both fluid and solid, can change its shape yet still hold its form, is another word for Hermes, Greek god of art, artfulness, thievery, changeability, swiftness of thought and of communication, language, the alphabet, speechmaking, emails, texts, tweets; god of bartering, trade, liaison, roads and crossroads, travellers, the stock exchange, wages, dreams; guide between the surface world and the underworld, guide between the living and the dead, stealer of unbreakable nets for catching pretty virgins, god of free association, god of freedom of movement, fluidity, mutability of form, broad-hatted heel-winged god of all going-between, the deliverer.

Of the poem, Smith says:

In this series of ritualized, gnomic questions and responses, Greenlaw discusses the nature of how we know anything. Because of this messenger going ahead of us, whose quickness is a reminder that alive and very fast both sometimes mean the same thing, we are able not just to know but to see where we are and where we're living. With this mercurial god, division comes to mean response. His presence allows transparency, protection, a seeing through something and an act of seeing something through. 

Poetry Thursday - Poetry House Live

"To a human being a house is not just a house, it is also a place of meanings, associations and memories. This is even more true of the houses where great poets have lived, the settings for their lives and their stories. Poetry House Live uses physical theatre to bring to life these meanings and these stories, in a show that is by turns funny, trai and surreal" (Graham Henderson, chief Executive, The Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation)

"An original production featuring seven stories about seven famous European poets and exploring the places they called home at key moments in their lives. Each story has been adapted from new writing by some of Europe's leading playwrights."

The hall had four banks of chairs, each facing in to a central square. In the middle of the front row of each was a performers' chair. Performers, the GoodDog Theatre Co, were Louise-Clare Henry, Julien Nguyen Kinh, Nouch Papazian and Simon Gleave. Minimal props and maximal versatility.

Incomplete (Luis Munoz) - a one-act drama about the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, set inside the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid around 1926, just as Lorca is embarking on his career. (Props: top hat and cane)

Croquis Nocturne (Adam Gordon) - offers a window into Rimbaud and Verlaine's visionary relationship while they lived in Camden at 8 Royal College Street in 1873. (Props: an imaginary key, imaginary wine bottle and glasses)

Les Lesbiennes (Richard Dalla Rosa) - invites us behind the closed doors of a bedroom at the Hotel Pimodan and explores where the French poet Charles Baudelaire may have found his inspiration. (Props: maids' aprons, a bedsheet)

Decent People (Sigurbjorg Thrastardottir) - tells the story of Icelandic celebrity poet Halldor K Laxness in an imagined encounter between him and two joiners fixing a window in his 1960's home. (Props: rectangular frame, tool belt, wooden mallet, large notebook)

Salute (Gabriele Labanauskaite Diena) - set in present-day Lithuania, the spirit of the controversial but greatly appreciated poet Salomeja Neris returns to the home where she lived in the 1930s and is confronted by objects from her past (Props: print dress)

The Ivy Door (Maria Manolescu) - set in the home of Gellu Naum and his life's love near Bucharest, where they look back on the story of his best-loved creation, the children's character, and penguin, Apolodor. (Props: wagon loaded with a few bricks, false beard, fluffy stuffed penguin)

John's Last Dream (Roberta Calandra) - a poignant drama about the poetry and worldview of the English poet John Keats, struggling agains crippling illness while living in Rome.

8 Royal College Street, Camden, before purchase and rescue in 2006  (via)
Michael Corby said he bought the house to save it from being stripped of its history

Gljúfrasteinn, the 1960s house of Halldor Laxness, is now a museum (via)

Salomeja Neris's house, Palemonas, in Kanaus, built in 1937 (via)

Gellu Naum with his life's love Lyggia at home in Bucharest (via)

Keats House, Hampstead (via)