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Diary

Tariq Ali: Libya during the Cartoon Controversy, 9 March 2006

... hell. Some European scholars maintain that a Latin translation of this work might have given Dante a few ideas. The stunning illustrations in this 15th-century copy were exquisitely calligraphed by Malik Bakshi of Herat (now in Afghanistan) in the Uighur script. There are 61 illustrations in all, created with great love for the Prophet. He is depicted ...

Like Dolls with Their Heads Cut Off

Laura Quinney: Louise Glück, 21 July 2005

October 
by Louise Glück.
Sarabande, 32 pp., $8.95, April 2004, 1 932511 00 8
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... all frame their ‘disclosures’ in relation to a literary model (the Odyssey in Meadowlands, Dante in Vita Nova and Shakespeare in The Seven Ages), thus signalling the contrived or artful character of these putatively expressive poems. To Glück, the ‘confessional’ mode is odious. In ‘Education of the Poet’, a brief literary ...

M for Merlin

Helen Cooper: Chrétien de Troyes, 25 November 1999

Perceval: The Story of the Grail 
by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by Burton Raffel.
Yale, 307 pp., £22.50, March 1999, 0 300 07586 3
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... his rescue of Guinevere, but it still allows her to name him. This prose Lancelot was part of Dante’s favourite reading; and it served him as a model both for the damnable (his Paolo and Francesca are seduced into adultery by reading it) and for the sublime, when Dante’s own name is first heard within the Divine ...

Sedan Chairs and Turtles

Leland de la Durantaye: Benjamin’s Baudelaire, 21 November 2013

Charles Baudelaire: Un poeta lirico nell’età del capitalismo avanzato 
by Walter Benjamin, edited by Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Chitussi and Clemens-Carl Härle.
Neri Pozza, 927 pp., €23, December 2012, 978 88 545 0623 7
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... understanding’, not merely as a literary mode. In it Benjamin discussed Spenser, Dante and the German dramatists but argued that allegory is present in any and all artful expression: that it constitutes ‘expression – just as language is expression, just as writing is’. Whatever the truth of Benjamin’s claim that ‘Baudelaire’s ...

Earthworm on Zither

Paul Grimstad: Raymond Roussel, 26 April 2012

Impressions of Africa 
by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Polizzotti.
Dalkey, 280 pp., £10.99, June 2011, 978 1 56478 624 1
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New Impressions of Africa 
by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Ford.
Princeton, 264 pp., £16.95, April 2011, 978 0 691 14459 7
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... floats in a Mardi Gras parade. He was convinced he had accomplished something comparable to Dante or Shakespeare, and kept his curtains closed while writing, believing the rays of brilliance flying from the pages would disturb the neighbours and might even reach as far as China. Devastated by the lack of attention La Doublure received on publication (he ...

Diary

Andrew Saint: Foscolo’s Grave, 20 September 2007

... the wicked Count Fosco of St John’s Wood. The travesty was probably relayed to Wilkie Collins by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose exiled father had met Foscolo once and did not get on with him at all. By the spring of 1824, with Floriana’s inheritance spent and the tradesmen-creditors massing, Digamma had to be abandoned. After that Foscolo’s life descended ...

A Little ‘Foreign’

P.N. Furbank: Iris Origo, 27 June 2002

Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Murray, 351 pp., £22, October 2000, 0 7195 5672 4
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... Origo’s account of Datini’s activities, one will learn more, and more that is important, from Dante. It follows from Origo’s vain assignment to recreate an ‘age’ that, paradoxically, she is eager to discern the ‘timeless’. Timeless, so it would appear, is something that she calls ‘the Tuscan mind’, but also more universal things. She remarks ...

With Slip and Slapdash

Frank Kermode: Auden’s Prose, 7 February 2008

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Vol. III: Prose, 1949-55 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 779 pp., £29.95, December 2007, 978 0 691 13326 3
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... poem, written quite soon after his arrival in New York, he imagines himself being judged by Dante, Blake, Rimbaud, Dryden, Catullus, Tennyson, Baudelaire, Rilke, Hardy ‘and many others’, and makes confession of his faults: Time and again have slubbered through With slip and slapdash what I do, Adopted what I would disown, The preacher’s loose ...

She Doesn’t Protest

Colin Burrow: The Untranslatable Decameron, 12 March 2009

Decameron 
by Giovanni Boccaccio, translated by J.G. Nichols.
Oneworld, 660 pp., £12.99, May 2008, 978 1 84749 057 5
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... in a variety of genres: French fabliaux, highfalutin romances, novellini or tiny tales, as well as Dante and Ovid. The stories rebuild the relationships, scams and interconnections – literary, economic, sexual – which hold the normal world together, and range in setting from the back streets of Florence to Constantinople and beyond. Boccaccio spent his ...

In Coleridge’s Bed

Ange Mlinko: Dead Poets Road Trip, 20 April 2017

Deaths of the Poets 
by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.
Cape, 414 pp., £14.99, February 2017, 978 0 224 09754 3
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... on to an anecdote about Coleridge, and stutters out with short meditations on Frost; Petrarch and Dante are shoehorned into the afterword). There are sexy deaths and dull deaths, early deaths and lingering ones, uncanny predictions, like Auden’s, and deaths where poets lost their words first, like Stevie Smith after her stroke. There are disappearing acts ...

At Tate Britain

Tom Crewe: Burne-Jones, 24 January 2019

... as he was. Burne-Jones, escaping to London, entered into a star-struck pseudo-apprenticeship under Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for whom, he later said, he would willingly have ‘been chopped up’. The oddness and severe limits of this artistic education, which Elizabeth Prettejohn emphasises in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s work at ...

Mortal, can these bones live?

Anne Enright: Marilynne Robinson’s Perfect Paradox, 22 October 2020

Jack 
by Marilynne Robinson.
Virago, 309 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 0 349 01181 3
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... book is littered with hopeful falsehoods. There is Lear’s bare forked animal, plenty of Milton, Dante (that proto-Catholic with his slightly confusing ideas about purgatory) and possibly Yeats (‘Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?’). Jack carries Robert Frost around in his pocket, finds ‘good old Leaves of Grass’ in a bookshop, misses Hart ...

Be like the Silkworm

Terry Eagleton: Marx’s Style, 29 June 2023

Marx’s Literary Style 
by Ludovico Silva, translated by Paco Brito Núñez.
Verso, 104 pp., £14.99, January, 978 1 83976 553 7
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... that few people had read as much and as intelligently. Marx learned Italian from reading Dante and Machiavelli, Spanish from studying Cervantes and Calderón, and Russian from reading Pushkin. He was thus one of the earliest practitioners of Goethe’s concept of world literature, an idea that has produced some of the finest critical writing of our ...

Boots the Bishop

Barbara Newman: Albert the Magnificent, 1 December 2022

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature 
by Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell.
Reaktion, 272 pp., £16.95, August 2022, 978 1 78914 513 7
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... and Corruption. In scholastic writings, Aristotle is called simply ‘the Philosopher’, while Dante honoured him as ‘the Master of Those Who Know’. In this context, Albert set himself the ambitious project of paraphrasing and commenting on every Aristotelian text he could find – an enterprise that occupied him from roughly 1250 to 1270 – to purge ...

What’s next?

James Wood: Afterlives, 14 April 2011

After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory 
by John Casey.
Oxford, 468 pp., £22.50, January 2010, 978 0 19 509295 0
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... Apocalypse of Peter, an apocryphal text from perhaps the early second century, the damned, as in Dante, receive bespoke punishments: blasphemers hang by their tongues, adulterers by their genitals and so on. The history of this iconography, Dante notwithstanding (and Casey is a subtle and admiring analyst of the ...

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