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lookhome 's review for:
The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Hell
by Dante Alighieri
Sayers' synopsis are fantastic and definitely worth reading at the start of every chapter.
Her translation provides for a relatively modern english though there is something lacking, in my personal opinion, as to the line breaks, it feels very heavy, like a soldier's marching beat and forced in its rhyme scheme, but I honestly have no clue as to what it sounded like originally in Italian, that's a youtube listen at a later date.
The story is a wondrous one and it is exceptionally hard not to imagine the surreal response this deep dive into the pits of hell must have brought out in its readers upon publication. This is definitely Fan Fiction brought to its emotionally charged extremes.
Side Note, At the end of the first book, Sayers explains the difference in how Dante would have viewed the world in comparison to today and I feel it could easily apply to magic and even our emotional responses as a human pre-scientific rational breakdown. It's worth a read and I've included a fragment below:
'The Ptolemaic universe is the universe we recognize, as we recognize a photograph or picture of the house in which we live. It is inferior to the Copernican in that its mathematics, even when corrected by modern knowledge, would be too complicated for ready calculation; but it is superior as a description of what the Heavens have to show us, because it is a direct transcript of the observed phenomena" (295)
Her translation provides for a relatively modern english though there is something lacking, in my personal opinion, as to the line breaks, it feels very heavy, like a soldier's marching beat and forced in its rhyme scheme, but I honestly have no clue as to what it sounded like originally in Italian, that's a youtube listen at a later date.
The story is a wondrous one and it is exceptionally hard not to imagine the surreal response this deep dive into the pits of hell must have brought out in its readers upon publication. This is definitely Fan Fiction brought to its emotionally charged extremes.
Side Note, At the end of the first book, Sayers explains the difference in how Dante would have viewed the world in comparison to today and I feel it could easily apply to magic and even our emotional responses as a human pre-scientific rational breakdown. It's worth a read and I've included a fragment below:
'The Ptolemaic universe is the universe we recognize, as we recognize a photograph or picture of the house in which we live. It is inferior to the Copernican in that its mathematics, even when corrected by modern knowledge, would be too complicated for ready calculation; but it is superior as a description of what the Heavens have to show us, because it is a direct transcript of the observed phenomena" (295)