Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“Dante Is the Elephant in the Room” Church Life Journal Article

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elephant-image“Anyone familiar with the Western Literary Canon knows that the list of writers whose work has been informed by Dante is practically endless. My students cannot adequately understand most books from the past—as well as many books written in our own time—without knowing Dante. As a professor, I cannot teach a course in literature without frequent discussion of Dante, even if he is not on the syllabus. Dante is the elephant in the room.”

[. . .]

“It is safe to conclude that without Dante, these few works of fiction and poetry (along with many others) written over the past seven centuries would not exist—certainly not in the ingenious, artful forms they exist in currently. Though it may be impossible to state with any accuracy or completeness the enormous debt art and literature of the past and present owes to Dante, it is necessary to try.”    –Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Church Life Journal 

Read the article here.

 

Danielius Sodeika “Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life…”

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“Artworks of Danielius Sodeika are self-purposed. He doesn‘t make them for himself nor others. They appear to be more like questions leaning towards, like the way to check up if the impulse of the vector has continuance.”

“Small-scale sculptural objects from wood, metal, household elements or findings. With their form they remind religious, cultural or archetypal symbols. Storyline is more than in the objects themselves, but also in the spaces between – as signs of invisible power – that tightens chain and breaks the log. Probably it is artist’s way to speak about finality and inevitable entropy – because when it comes – it dominates over all demolishes all other meanings.”

Explore Danielius Sodeika’s exhibit here.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”    -Dante Alighieri

 

Berenice Josephine Bickle, film stills (2013)

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“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.

Dante: A Life, Alessandro Barbero (2021)

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dante_a_life_barbero_cover“So the biographer must ultimately choose: Either hew to the evidence and ferret out whatever rare nugget about Dante’s life remains uncovered, or surrender to the genius of the work he called his Comedìa and try to broker a fragile peace between literary interpretation and life writing.

“In a new biography timed (in its original Italian publication) to the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death in 1321 and translated fluidly by Allan Cameron, the Italian historian and novelist Alessandro Barbero chooses the first option. His vita, or life, of Dante, revisits some of the perennial riddles in Dante studies: Did the poet make it to Paris during his exile? (Barbero believes yes, contrary to most.) What was Dante’s socioeconomic class? (In Barbero’s view, higher than many think.) While still in Florence before his exile, did Dante conceive the project that would later become his Comedy? (Perhaps so, Barbero argues, once again against the grain.)

“We can be grateful to Barbero for this richly informative biography of a man who can seem so reticent and aloof that at times it feels as if he’s hiding behind the 14,233 verses of “The Divine Comedy” rather than revealing himself. But for those who are looking to learn more about the Dante in us, a biography has to do more than deliver the plausible facts. And so the quest for a vita of Dante in English will likely lead us right back to where Emerson suggested: the poetry from Dante’s own hand.” [. . .]    — Joseph Luzzi, The New York Times, January 4, 2022 (retrieved January 17, 2022)

See our other post relating to Barbero and the 700th Anniversary here.

Cinema Dante, Asmara, Eritrea

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cinema-dante-asmara-eritrea-image-credit-clay-gilliland“Cinema Dante is Asmara’s oldest cinema and has recently been renovated. It stands as testament to the size and scale of the cinemas in Asmara before the boom in the late 1930s, when the larger cinemas were constructed.” [. . .]     —Shabait, August 27, 2020

“During the last quarter of the last Century, the Italian colonial masters’ plan was to build a little Roma at the very heart of Midri Bahri. Following are the main schools, stadium, cinemas and opera houses called after the names of their artists, statesmen and poets: [. . .]

“Dante Alighieri, the Florentin was one of canonized men-of-letters who refined the Italian language to majestic height. The Cinema Dante, like Odeon and Cinema Asmara, were originally opera houses or reading and symphony arenas where the upper-class Italians used to entertain in their exclusive social world located at Campo Restrittivo (restricted camp or the later corrupted word Kombishtato).” [. . .]    –Haile Bokure, Eritrea Madote

Image credit Clay Gilliland

Contributed by Sephora Affa (Florida State University ’24)

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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