#clickbaitbooks and Dante

As you probably did if you were anywhere near the internet today, this afternoon I noticed the hashtag #clickbaitbooks trending on Twitter, and found it delightful. Here are a few of the Dante ones I found:

Somebody Told This Guy to Go to Hell, and He Did – You’ll Never Guess What He Found There! #clickbaitbookspic.twitter.com/MFqOcXthsu

— Penguin Classics (@PenguinClassics) April 30, 2015

A Man Gets Lost in the Woods and Faces Off with 3 Wild Beasts. What Happens Next Will Shock You! #clickbaitbooks#dante#danteat750

— Fydo Dogstoyevsky (@FDogstoyevsky) April 30, 2015

 

Ok, so, um, that last one might have been me, or, um, my dog, because, I, um, may or may not have a twitter account for my dog, but, er, moving on.

So anyways, in honor of this fun trend, I decided to write clickbait titles for some of the other Dante works in the Librivox catalog. 

First, the newest addition to the catalog, the Convivio:

This man set out to write the sum of philosophical knowledge into 14 odes. You’ll be amazed at what happens after number 4!

De Monarchia:

Medieval popes HATE this guy! Find out his one weird trick to maintaining your empire!

The New Life (La vita nuova):

The definitive ranking of the HOTTEST ladies in Florence. Number 9 will change how you see beauty forever!

The Rime/Canzoniere:

This man can’t stop writing poetry to his dead crush. The reason why will restore your faith in humanity!

Eclogues (bilingual audiobook):

Two men, four Latin poems. You won’t BELIEVE what we found when we translated them into English!

De vulgari eloquentia (in progress):

Which language should YOU be using for your poetry? Take this quiz to find out!

Epistolae (in progress):

These 13 letters have had scholars squabbling for CENTURIES! Click to find out why!

Dante in Space

As a token of my sincere apology for my long absence, allow me to share with you: Dante in space!

For non-italophones, this is a video of Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, first Italian woman in space, reading the first canto of the Paradiso in the International Space Station. The video was shown in Florence in honor of the sommo poeta‘s birthday and the anniversary of the beginning of Florence’s brief stint as capital of Italy (1865-1870). How cool is it to see someone reading these words with Earth floating in the distant background?

 The Glory of Him who moveth everything,
penetrates all the Universe, and shines
more brightly in one part, and elsewhere less.
Within the Heaven which most receives His Light
I was; and saw what he who thence descends
neither knows how, nor hath the power, to tell;
for as it draweth near to its Desire,
our intellect so deeply sinks therein,
that recollection cannot follow it.
As much, however, of the holy Realm
as in my memory I could treasure up,
shall now become the subject of my song.

Top 10 reasons you should claim a role in the Divine Comedy Dramatic Read TODAY

10. There are only 6 roles left. Get yours while you still can!

9. You could be a damned soul (Pier da Medicina) AND a saint (St. James)!

8. Be part of an incredibly international cast. Our Dante is Australian, our Virgil is English, our Beatrice (yours truly) is American, our Statius is Brazilian, and our Ugolino is Italian, just to name a few.

7. We have some pretty small, painless roles left (Soul #3 of the violent deaths, anyone?), perfect for getting your feet wet if this is your first Librivox recording or your first dramatic reading.

6. I think we might just be making Librivox history. I’m not sure I’ve heard of a dramatic reading of a poem on LV before.

5. Gender-neutral casting means you can claim ANY of the remaining roles you want. (But, well, there are only six of them, so there’s that.)

4. You can show it off to all your friends and they’ll think you’re super cultured and intellectual.

3. Participating in a dramatic reading is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with a dense and complex work of literature. Details that would float past you in a more casual reading stick out at you. In a work as layered as the Comedy, you’re bound to come out of it with a more nuanced understanding of your canto.

2. It’s not too late to be in Purgatorio V (as Jacopo del Cassero or as an unnamed soul), which is one of my personal favorites.

1. You get to be part of putting this beautiful poem into an even more accessible form. A long narrative poem like this could quite reasonably make for a difficult listen. There are hundreds of characters in the poem (I know—I counted when I started the project!). It would be easy to miss details that tell you who is speaking and who the characters are. Imagine how much smoother a dramatic reading will make the poem for a listener who’d rather not have a volume of commentary in his lap through the whole thing.

But also, it’s just going to sound really cool.
Check it out today!

The Story of Rimini

In between his dramatic and passionate recordings as Dante for our Divine Comedy dramatic reading, reader Peter Tucker has made another poetic contribution to the Librivox catalog, one that will surely interest readers of Dante: Leigh Hunt’s narrative poem, the Story of Rimini.

The 1816 poem in four cantos was inspired by perhaps the most famous of the one hundred cantos of the Comedy, Inferno V, in which Dante meets the adulterous, slain lovers Paolo and Francesca in the second circle of Hell (the circle of the lustful). There are numerous reasons why this canto has captured so many imaginations: Francesca’s riveting story of forbidden and ill-fated love; the meta-literary nature of the lovers’ sin, committed under the influence of a reading of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere; the at once sad and sensual suggestion in Francesca’s famous final line, “quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”; “No further in it did we read that day” (Langdon translation) (Hunt actually reuses this line almost verbatim to powerfully conclude his own Canto III).

But perhaps even more intriguing to centuries of readers and scholars is the strange event that follows this utterance: Dante faints in pity for the pair. The much-cited final verses of the canto, “io venni men così com’ io morisse / E caddi come corpo morto cade”, “I swooned away as though about to die, / and fell as falls a body that is dead”,  evoke a striking sympathy between Dante and the pitiful souls whose story he relates. He feels he has died and falls into unconsciousness just as they are blown about in the fog of the second circle. Dante the character cannot help grieving for the sinners even as Dante the writer condemns their crime as worthy of eternal punishment.

I can only speculate that this sympathy must have struck Hunt as it has struck so many others. His poem expands upon Francesca’s account to Dante and draws the reader (or listener) into what seems like her inevitable romance with Paolo, the brother of the grave and powerful man to whom she has been given in marriage. In Hunt’s poem, we watch their fall unfold and mourn the slain lovers from earth, almost as tragic heroes, much as Dante mourned for their fate as damned souls from the other world. Although the reader of Dante will know how Hunt’s poem ends before it begins, his added detail and poetic attention to the unhappy pair and their surroundings and back story will compel the lover of poetry nonetheless.

Tucker infuses his reading with the poem’s natural lyricism and emotion. His pacing, rhythm, emphasis, and pauses remind the listener of why we read and listen to poetry out loud. Having worked with Peter on other Librivox projects, I was thrilled when he volunteered to read the role of Dante in the Comedy. You will soon be able to hear even more of this talented reader as the title character in Pirandello’s Henry IV, now in editing and soon to be available for free download in the Librivox catalog.

At just under an hour and a half total running time, The Story of Rimini is perfect for even the most casual audiobook listener. You can download it for free from the Librivox catalog.

Le Rime in italiano!

Recently launched: Dante’s Rime in the original Italian! We have 109* (yes, you read that right) poems to read, so, if you speak Italian, come and record one or ten (or twenty…or thirty…)!

Nuovo progetto: Le Rime di Dante in italiano! Abbiamo 109** (sì, hai letto bene) poesie da leggere, e allora, se parli italiano, vieni a registrarne una o dieci (o venti…o trenta…)!

*This edition (from the Nineteenth Century) contains some poems that scholars no longer attribute to Dante. In order to maintain the integrity of the volume, we will include them, but with an explanatory note in the book description.

**Quest’edizione (dall’ottocento) contiene alcune poesie che gli studiosi non attribuiscono più a Dante. Per mantenere l’integrità del volume, le includiamo, ma con una spiegazone nella descrizione del libro.

The Lordship of Love

Sì lungiamente m’ha tenuto Amore
e costumato a la sua segnoria,
che sì com’elli m’era forte in pria,
così mi era soave ora nel core.
—La Vita nova

Love hath so long possessed me for his own
And made his lordship so familiar
That he, who at first irked me, is now grown
Unto my heart as its best secrets are.
—The New Life

So begins one of the sonnets of the Vita nova, expressing a common theme in this work: that of Love (often personified) as lord of the poet. Countless other writers before and after Dante describe the beloved as their ruler, but Dante answers directly to Love himself.

This doesn’t stop with Dante’s early work, either. Unlike Petrarch (who totally didn’t get it), Dante does not see love as a “youthful error” that led him away from the truth and from God, but rather as divine guiding light. Long after he finishes his poetic crying over Beatrice in the Vita nova, she appears again as his guide and salvation in the Comedy (it was she, after all, who sent Virgil to lead him from his dark wood, and she who guides him through heaven when Virgil’s damned soul can ascend no higher).

Now, Dante was not alone in elevating the love object to celestial heights (others of the dolce stilnovo  movement, including his BFF Guido Calvalcanti, were also representing their beloved as angels sent from God), but Dante takes it to a new extreme. So, she saves his soul and shows him God. Ok. But it’s not just Beatrice, the beloved, that saves Dante, but rather Love itself.

In the highest heaven, having seen the sublime image of God, Dante feels himself moved by the force that moves the universe.

A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle,
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
—Paradiso XXXIII

Here power failed my high imagining;
but, like a smoothly moving wheel, that Love
was now revolving my desire and will,
which moves the sun and all the other stars.
—Paradiso XXXIII

The power that moves the universe, God, is Love. Love is still Dante’s lord, but no longer because he is struck by Beatrice’s beauty. Love is now wider, deeper, and more sublime than the Dante that wrote the Vita nova could have expressed. Part of what Dante is doing here is just expressing the medieval worldview and explaining the functioning of the Aristotelian cosmos, but he’s also finishing a journey that began when he first saw Beatrice (when both were nine years old) and first began to seek the lordship of Love, not yet aware what that meant and where it would take him. The concept and meaning of love change dramatically from the youthful Vita nova to the mature Paradiso, but the word Love is a constant, in all its expanding layers of meaning and possibilities.

And so that’s how Dante ends one of the most famous works of literature in the world: with “the Love that moves the sun and other stars”.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

The Divine Comedy audiobook now available in Spanish!

Reader Tux has just completed a solo recording of the Comedy in Spanish! That makes the fourth language in which you can listen to this work on librivox, after English, Italian, and German. Download a recording in your language of choice today!

New Project Launched: De vulgari eloquentia

Leni’s just launched one of my favorites as a group project! De vulgari eloquentia is Dante’s linguistic treatise. In it, he defends the written use of what was then mostly a spoken language–the “volgare”, as it was then called. That’s right: what we now call Italian, aka the language of love aka the language of art and music aka the most beautiful language out there and the sexiest language on earth (not that I’m biased or anything), was then called the “vulgar” tongue. ‘Cause it wasn’t Latin. And everyone wrote in Latin. Now, Dante and some other poets from his native Tuscany as well as from Sicily had been writing poetry in their respective “vulgar” tongues for a few centuries, and so Dante saw no reason why writing in the vernacular shouldn’t be a regular thing. The De vulgari eloquentia takes us on something of a linguistic journey around Italy as Dante seeks to define the appropriate vernacular for literature. Now, what he came up with became a bit controversial when this treatise was discovered and published a few centuries later, but more about that in another post.

Dante wrote this treatise in Latin, but we’re reading it in English translation. We’re looking for readers AND a proof listener. If you’re interested in helping us out, check out the project thread.

De Monarchia now available for free download

Thanks to the hard work of a number of volunteers, especially Leni (book coordinator), Lucretia (lubee930, proof listener), and Ann (icequeen), Dante’s De Monarchia is now available (in English) for you to download and listen to for free! Dante’s political treatise clocks in at under four hours listening time, so, if you’re curious, check it out. See why Dante devotes an entire canto (canto VI) from each of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy to political rants–the dude had strong feelings, especially about the relationship between church and state. Want to learn more? Listen here!

New Project Launched: Epistolae

Readers now wanted for the newest project in this series, the Epistolae. This collection of 13 of Dante’s letters (the only of which copies exist today) spans 15 years, and is full of insight into Dante’s period and works. With the exception of the introduction, the sections are generally quite short, making this the perfect work for beginning readers or just busy readers.

Come help us out!