Sunday, December 6, 2009

Fun with Dante























There are several multimedia sites devoted to the Divine Comedy, but The World of Dante** is far and away the best I've seen. In addition to the full text and translation, it has comprehensive notes, a wealth of images, and best of all, recordings of the chants mentioned in "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso." It takes a little time and patience to get to all the material embedded each canto, but loitering on the site is part of the pleasure.

In one of those slightly disturbing instances of synchronicity, I went to Facebook right after visiting the World of Dante, and came across a comment on a friend's post that mentioned Dante's Inferno, a 2007 film that sends paper puppets through a Hell that looks like contemporary America. Dermot Mulroney, of all people, is the voice of Dante. The trailer below is very alluring. If any of you have seen it, let me know if it's worth hunting down the DVD.



**At noon today (Sunday), portions of the site were down for maintenance. Drat. Everything's been fine for the past few days, though, so I trust they'll be back up shortly.

Antaeus from Canto XXXI of Inferno by Gustave Doré, 1857

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