/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15905847]

Plebs like the Inferno best
Patricians like the Purgatorio best
The Enlightened like the Paradiso best

[Anonymous No.15905857]

>>15905847
Paradiso is a very beautiful part of the Comedy, and it's strange to me that Inferno is so much more beloved.

[Anonymous No.15905869]

>>15905857
Because of edgy retards who love all the dark and disturbing shit in Hell.

[Anonymous No.15905900]

books to read to fully enjoy dante's la commedia:

illiad, odyssey, aeneid, metamorphoses, fasti, OT/NT, St Augustine, St Aquinas, La Vita Nuova, as well as a general comprehension of Catholic medieval thought and the basic political situation of Dante's florence

i'm sure there's more. one of the great things about taking Dante seriously is you are more or less tracing the most powerful roots of western civilization in doing so.

[Anonymous No.15905909]

>>15905847
Sorry I don't read people who plagiarized the arabs.

[Anonymous No.15905926]

>diritta via era smarrita

[Anonymous No.15905928]

>>15905909
Info on this?

[Anonymous No.15905937]

>>15905900
This is what I've always loved the most about the Comedy. Dante is basically taking all major literature and all major philosophy and all major theology up to his own time and putting it all in one work. It's essentially taking every single substantial /lit/ achievement prior to it and funneling it all into one current, a current that is directed upwards for the glory of God.

I honestly think Dante should be canonized for writing it, it's the greatest artistic glorification of God that has ever been created.

[Anonymous No.15905949]

>>15905847
Can I feel superior too? I found most of Kafka's works humorous compared to most readers, as Kafka intended!

[Anonymous No.15905958]

>>15905857
Because vices of men disturb us more than virtues.

[Anonymous No.15905964]

>>15905900
>a mosque in hell

dropped

[Anonymous No.15905989]

>>15905857
Because you can easily make stuff disturbing and undesirable to the reader. But making something very desirable is pretty hard.

[Anonymous No.15906004]

>>15905847
wtf based

[Anonymous No.15906006]

>>15905989
frankly, I think it's because the casual reader can barely make it through the inferno, much less another interval on the way to paradiso

[Anonymous No.15906019]

>>15905857
Descending into a pit and climbing a mountain are easy to understand.

Ascending through crystalline spheres is more abstract.

[Anonymous No.15906261]

>>15905847
Almost finished with Purgatorio and I think I've enjoyed it more than Inferno. There's something beautiful about the striving of man towards final perfection with the assurance that suffering will end. The way Dante describes the angels at the end of each cornice, and the Whips of various sins have been some of my favorite imagery. And of course Dante confronting his own greatest sin is a highlight of the book.
Virgil leaving is a really powerful scene.

[Anonymous No.15906269]

>>15906261
Nice. Yeah, Virgil's departure is a very arresting scene. What translation are you reading?

[Anonymous No.15906431]

>>15905847

Purgatorio is the best canticle. t.heathen

[Anonymous No.15906441]

>>15905847
>The Enlightened like the Paradiso best
And the truly Enlightened like The Aeneid the best.

[Anonymous No.15906485]

>>15905857
because it's the first part, just like everyone talks about the mills on Don Quixote.

[Anonymous No.15906496]

>>15905847
>I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the Divine Commedia. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The Purgatorio and Paradiso, especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that Purgatorio, "Mountain of Purification;" an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell' onde, that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and reprobate is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna; "I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that winding steep, "bent down like corbels of a building," some of them,—crushed together so "for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.

- Carlyle

[Anonymous No.15906509]

>>15906269
Ciardi. First time reading so it seemed like a good choice for ease of reading. His notes are excellent

[Anonymous No.15907368]

>>15906496
Based.

I honestly think the fact that the Inferno is the popular choice reflects our degradation as a civilization. We can no longer conceive of anything good or valuable about penance or benediction, we just get fixated on damnation.

[Anonymous No.15907461]

>>15907368
Mmm, it is more than that. By focusing on the eternal punishment alone, we lose it's meaning to ourselves. To look at the eternal light, we grow bitter. It is reminding of too much, of all that much. Purifying, and we do not want to even focus the question of purification. We can live in hell and be content when there is no heaven, and as commonly would be said I also feel the need to say just out of writing quality, sometimes ignore it too.

It is an utter lovelessness, an egoism, whereby every outer is just a dishevelled form of our own thereby we "love" them.

[Anonymous No.15908404]

>>15906509
ciardi is good, but mandelbaum should be read too

>>15907368
>>15907461
it's actually a lot more pedestrian than that, purgatorio is quite simply too catholic. it's much easier for the general reader to comprehend the gorgeously gore-y punishments of hell than to comprehend the very catholic purgatory with its hades' like punishments and hopeful arias addressed to the Virgin

[Anonymous No.15908424]

>>15906261
I agree with all of this. The feeling of earnest, diligent striving for salvation that permeates the whole Purgatory makes it a breeze to read.

[Anonymous No.15908434]

>>15906496
This is what I would have liked to said if I were as eloquent as Carlyle. Purgatorio >> all.

[Anonymous No.15908442]

>>15905847
Purgatorio > Paradiso > Inferno

[Anonymous No.15908450]

I guess /lit/ doesn't like paradiso because they don't know any of the saints

[Anonymous No.15908463]

>>15908450
I really like Paradiso, it also has many recognizable figures even for people today such as roman emperor or king David or the Virgin Mary.

[Anonymous No.15908468]

>>15908463
ah yes, i love roman emperor too

[Anonymous No.15908510]

>>15908404
>it's actually a lot more pedestrian than that, purgatorio is quite simply too catholic. it's much easier for the general reader to comprehend the gorgeously gore-y punishments of hell than to comprehend the very catholic purgatory with its hades' like punishments and hopeful arias addressed to the Virgin
Very true, one would say it is a modern languidness, a lack of faith, a lack of earnestness.

[Anonymous No.15908522]

>>15908434
Carlyle sure is fantastic.

[Anonymous No.15908532]

>>15905847
It's people who read translations. The Inferno has more immediately interesting characters and stories, so it translates better.
Also, big influence of Romanticism and their fascination with the satanic and the sublime.

In the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, we start to slowly ascend to the level of the transcendental, and then Dante's poetry becomes eminently verbal, less focused
on stories and "dramatic" events, it becomes the highest poetry - the highest writing, indeed the highest art (higher than Bach, and I strongly suspect higher than Homer - though I've read him in translation) - ever created by a human.

I suppose the Paradiso is better, but I prefer the Purgatorio.

If I were to write a history of Painting, I'd put Dante in it, because the visual stimulation I receive from some parts of the Purgatorio - specially the Paradiso Terrestre - is higher than the one I receive from most painters.

[Anonymous No.15908554]

>>15906496
At first I was surprised of an a*glo having a soul but then I learned, shout out to early life wiki, that he was Scottish.

[Anonymous No.15908569]

>>15908532
Would you consider Bach the greatest musician? But I can see your comparison because of the overt Christian symbolism of Bach and his art, a closeness to the immediate "diatonic" or "poetically unconscious" Christian core, of which such music arose. Where in contrast a Wagner believed he was espousing the innermost core of Christendom but in shedding its overt symbolism, it was better able to capture the exact essence of it; an overextended consciousness perhaps, within this Christian framework.

And the poetic metaphors of terms of the psyche like conscious and unconscious, were done so in the symbolico-mythic sense of a development and as a result utterly not a representation of our a psyche, and not a psychology.

[Anonymous No.15908579]

>>15908554
He was after all, also a Germanophile anon. Liking much Hegel and Fichte and the likes. You have read Sartor Resartus right, where all this is shown???

[Anonymous No.15908612]

>>15908579
I will now.

[Anonymous No.15908642]

>>15908569
Yes. Not only in his metaphysical ideal, but also in skill. I say this despite my favorite musician being Beethoven, who is closer to my own personality than Bach is - but, objectively, Bach erected musical monuments which will be almost impossible to ever surpass.

Dante is similar in both aspects . People who read Dante in translation often fail to realize his deep skill. He was not only the greatest poet, but also a more skillful *verse maker* than either Shakespeare, Milton, or Pope - or Racine, for that matter. He even plays with language many times throughout the Commedia, and seems to hold an almost mystical relationship to words, in a time when it was still possible for a deeply intellectual mind to behold numbers and words as if there was some supernatural element in them, some hidden meaning - we can see this with the invented words in the Commedia, which sound almost like magic spells. Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe.
His rhythms also vary a lot, and he uses accentuation in the most surprising ways. It's no wonder that his greatest influences were Virgil and the troubadours, and that two of the biggest presences in the Commedia are Bertrand de Born and Arnaut. Dante even abandons his native language in order to hommage Arnaut.

[Anonymous No.15908668]

>>15908612
Start off with On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, then Sartor Resartus and his other works like the monumental history of Frederick the II. He was one of the most famous thinkers of the world, especially in Germany and the Anlosphere before WW2, but many of his ideas which culminated in Fascism, including his Germanophile nature, obviously became quite unpopular after that point and a classic author was forgotten. On the other hand no one influenced Dickens more stylistically. Read at least the first three chapters of Hero Worship, and then watch the Jonathan Bowden video on him which tries to put him in more of a context than is possible in a 4chan post, and though I think Bowden is wrong about a few things, and sometimes factually, it's still a very good introduction to him of course after reading a bit of him first.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1091/1091-h/1091-h.htm

>Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a difference between true Poetry and true Speech not poetical: what is the difference? On this point many things have been written, especially by late German Critics, some of which are not very intelligible at first. They say, for example, that the Poet has an infinitude in him; communicates an Unendlichkeit, a certain character of "infinitude," to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not very precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remembering: if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of Poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a Song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one might say this as soon as anything else: If your delineation be authentically musical, musical not in word only, but in heart and substance, in all the thoughts and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, then it will be poetical; if not, not.—Musical: how much lies in that! A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!

cont

[Anonymous No.15908671]

>>15908612
>>15908668
>Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has something of song in it: not a parish in the world but has its parish-accent;—the rhythm or tune to which the people there sing what they have to say! Accent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of their own,—though they only notice that of others. Observe too how all passionate language does of itself become musical,—with a finer music than the mere accent; the speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.

[Anonymous No.15908694]

>>15908642
>e even plays with language many times throughout the Commedia, and seems to hold an almost mystical relationship to words, in a time when it was still possible for a deeply intellectual mind to behold numbers and words as if there was some supernatural element in them, some hidden meaning - we can see this with the invented words in the Commedia, which sound almost like magic spells. Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe.
Yes, something expressed famously in the Greeks(Pythagoras, Plato, under there religico-mythological dome of the stars), which mainly persisted under Christendom in the occult and esoteric, hermeticism for example.

Out of curiosity as someone who has not read Goethe, how would you relate the two in value. And I'ma ware that's quite a broad question.

[Anonymous No.15908754]

>>15905847
Paradiso is boring. Simple as that.

[Anonymous No.15908859]

>>15905847
Honestly, Virgil not being able to enter Heaven with Dante was one of the saddest moments in literature for me

[Anonymous No.15908902]

>>15908859
It's masterfully done, because in only a handful of lines of verse Dante manages to fill us with bitterness. We have already been prepared for the fact that Virgil, a pagan, cannot enter into Heaven. But the way it actually happens fills us with sadness and despair.

[Anonymous No.15909083]

>>15906496
Based, FUCK Byron.

[Anonymous No.15909102]

should i read divine comedy or don quixote next

[Anonymous No.15909905]

>>15908463
>recognizable figures even for people today such as roman emperor

Kek

[Anonymous No.15910034]

purgatorio > inferno > paradiso
my impression after reading the heavily annotated german prose translation by kurt flasch

[Anonymous No.15910074]

>>15910034
>not the one by Philalethes or even the Ida & Walther von Wartburg one

NGMI.

[Anonymous No.15910317]

>>15905857
It's because of two main reasons:
1. People only read it as it's the first part
2. It's the easiest to understand.

[Anonymous No.15910359]

>>15906496
I will never be able to write this good and it feels bad

[Anonymous No.15910963]

>>15906496
One of the few based British men ever.

[Anonymous No.15911604]

Real men stay in Forest.

[Anonymous No.15912391]

>>15905909
Based