Dark Side of the Horse by Samson for December 11, 2020

I don’t know about “great literature” being must-reads. I’ve barrelled through some classic literature (like Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) that were absolute SLOGS for me.

I’m one of many who can understand it when I read it, but can’t always think of the words to speak it well.

But at least Horace impresses observers.

As we have learned the past 4 years, it is only the impression that counts. Many people do not question that. They will even defend it with violence. Yup, gotta love the easily impressionable, especially those with prejudices and preconceived view points. They are the easiest to impress and to get to send you money.

I read it a few months ago in the translation by Longfellow with illustrations by Dore. My main interest was in seeing how, despite its total religiosity, it still reflected the growing worldly interests of the growing Renaissance culture which would lead up to the Enlightenment. One scientific surprise was that Dante had a concept of time-zones across the world. But a bigger surprise was that the Inferno (which simply meant underworld) was FROZEN! I don’t know how Hell eventually became a place of fire.

I thought the bilingual translation by Robert Pinsky was pretty good.

The Divine Comedy has inspired a lot of artwork

Maybe a picture book would be more entertaining

At times, Horace acts like a Stunad.

I know a little Italian. His name was Pasqualie and he was 4’ 11" tall.

Don’t look now Horace…..but you’ve got your book upside down!

wonder how long it will take Horace to reach page zzz …?

Well, small quibble, but just because he can’t speak it doesn’t mean he can’t read it—I can read a bit of Latin myself, but I’d imagine I’d be rather bad at trying to speak it, as I never quite got the pronunciations quite down as well as I should’ve when learning what Latin I know, and I’m less likely to recognize a Latin word spoken aloud than when in written form.

Going to hell is a comedy? They had a funny sense of humor in those days.

Hard to be convinced if you don’t understand it.

Thanks for all the funny comments, guys! I’m needing lots of laughs these days.

Gustaf Dore’ is best engraved plates for Dante, and Rhyme of Ancient Mariner. Massive amounts of space, light, darkness, fury of motion. The fairy tales also spectacular.

It loses something in the non-translation. I once tried to read “Don Quijote” in the original Spanish based on my high school/college language courses. It’s not even the same Spanish, as well as being written in an obscure historical tense we were never taught.

Read more than one translation, if you can.

Foreign literature is a very good way to see how others view the world. I recently bought a lot of Russian science fiction in translation. If it is good enough to be worth translating and publishing in another language, it usually means it has passed the first quality test.

Given that one of Dante’s jokes was writing each journey at 3 different forms of Italian (getting more refined as he went along), you might have to finish the whole thing before the punchline really kicks in.

What a disappointment. A Houyhnhnm are so “brain trained” they can pick up languages every fast.