Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
Arcade Fire’s 2022 release WE includes a track entitled “End of the Empire IV—Sagittarius A,” which features the following lyrics:
Midway through life (unsubscribe)
Virgil said, “Let’s take a ride” (unsubscribe)
You’ll need a divine guide (ain’t no way of life)
‘Cause this inferno’s hyperdrive (don’t believe the hype)
And the dreams in your head
The algorithm prescribed
Do you feel alright?
View the video on Vevo (last accessed August 9, 2023).
Contributed by Leigh Howell
“There’s been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn’t also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this. Now, I do say, ‘It’s possible. You might be the first. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the odds are very much against you.’ All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.
“A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of The Inferno, The Divine Comedy, to help guide him through the underworld. And, in a way, that’s also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil’s text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that’s a model of the poet’s relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.” –Edward Hirsch, Interview in Big Think (2010)
Edward Hirsch is the current president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Watch his full interview for Big Think here.
“For the artist, the Divine Comedy represents a ‘theological’ allegory, where the literal level becomes a ‘beautiful lie’ conceived in order to convey a hidden truth. The historical characters that appear in Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are realistically determined and they provide a figural interpretation of history. From this starting point, the artist feels justified in introducing the viewer to her own reading of the Divine Comedy, in which she investigates histories mirroring Dante’s Inferno from the perspective of contemporary Africa. The work is composed of two opposite video screens, splitting the audience’s point of view between them, as the perception of two narratives occurs simultaneously. The central focus is a looped conversation between Beatrice and Virgil, where the feminine and masculine voices are superimposed by Dante’s presence, a poetical presence that weaves the two narratives together. While Beatrice’s character is dressed in Maputo clothes, surrounded by curious artifacts that together combine to make a coloured plot based on the dynamics of presence/absence and life/death, Virgil becomes a guide to one of the cities of Zimbabwe. No longer a storyteller of the epic on Trojan Wars, the Virgil constructed by the artist narrates the wars of colonial and postcolonial Africa, where the archival footage of Zimbabwe’s liberation war becomes the base for the narrative.”
From The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.
For more on the Zimbabwean artist Berry Bickle, see Wikipedia.
“The spectator is invited to enter, to move through this bright, white virginal structure and to slowly discover that on the surface of the sheets, printed in white on white, there are lines taken from the Cantos that make up Dante’s Paradiso. The ensemble of the elements is illuminated by a soft, pure light that serves as a guide: the transformation that the artist wishes to bring about does not focus on the path followed by Dante, but rather on the perennial and memorable presence of Beatrice, who according to the artist embodies the very sense of Dante’s Paradiso. The installation thus becomes a path on which the onlooker is enshrouded in words and light. A place where—just like in the Comedy itself—it is still possible to enter and be illuminated by the candour and potency of the very essence of love.”
From The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.
See also the images in Griot magazine, which describes the piece as it was presented in Njami’s I is An Other / Be the Other exhibit at the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM) in Rome: “Maurice Prefura’s The Silent Way stages La Divina Commedia, a sort of labyrinth made of white floating empty pages that form its walls and hold visitors prisoners. Crossing this labyrinth, however, one realizes that there are visible inscriptions on the pages which can only be seen from certain angles, ‘as if in a rite of initiation.’ Once out of the labyrinth, one meets Beatrice.” –Johanne Affricot, “Contemporary Art and Africa in Rome,” Griot (March 20, 2018)
“Nuruddin Farah’s ninth novel in English, Links, makes a mainly para-textual use of Dante’s Commedia, implicitly validating its canonical status both within Italian literary tradition and world literature as a whole. The epigraphs chosen for each part of the book come from Dante’s Inferno, except the first three exergues…
“Through the references to Dante’s Commedia, Jeebleh’s journey is configured from the beginning as a descent to hell, represented by the city of Mogadishu during the civil war.” [. . .] –Simone Brioni, Lorenzo Mari, Postcolonial Dante: Reading the Commedia in Mogadishu, 2019
Access Links by Nuruddin Farah here.
Contributed by Simone Brioni (Ph.D., Stony Brook University)
All submissions will be considered for posting. Bibliographic references and scholarly essays are also welcome for consideration.
Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.
