Inferno – Page 128

Dino Di Durante, “Dante’s Inferno Animated” (2012)

March 5, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“Dante’s Inferno Animated is a film created with children in mind to give them the opportunity to learn Dante’s teachings about life while they grow up. The images are as compelling as the story itself.
The film tells Dante Alighieri’s journey through the first part of the afterlife, Inferno. It is organized circle by circle and recited in primitive Italian in Dante’s own words. Dante is guided by his hero Virgil through each circle of Hell and their subdivisions until they reach the center of the Earth and emerged to the other hemisphere into Purgatory.
It features over 50 original color illustrations from the upcoming Dante’s Inferno comic book and magazine series, put together in a series of animation clips that will delight a young as well as an older audience. All the images used in this animation film were originally created byDino Di Durante with the collaboration of Awik Balaian and Riccardo Patesi, under the artistic direction of Boris Acosta. It is worth clarifying that this film is not a cartoon, but an ‘animation’ that is recited, instead of spoken by the animated characters. In other words, there are no speaking characters, but only their motion with the recitation that accompanies the action seen in the film.” —Dante’s Inferno Animated

Contributed by Sam Woodworth

Sand Sculptures of Dante’s Inferno

February 24, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“These particular sand sculptures are actually inspired depictions of the circles of hell, as presented in Dante’s Inferno. The sculptures were created in Italy by a team of 18 of the world’s greatest sand sculpture artists. The result, as you can see in this Flickr stream by user Htmarcos, is simply breathtaking.” –Jill Harness, Mental Floss, February 24, 2010

See more photos on Flickr and Love These Pics.

Seth Steinzor, To Join the Lost (2010)

February 7, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“Dante’s Divine Comedy — that poetic tour of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise written in the 14th century — never seems to get old. The latest proof is the new video game by Electronic Arts, Dante’s Inferno. As in the poem, the game’s Dante character and his guide, Virgil, travel down through the nine circles of Hell, hearing sinners’ stories and witnessing their horrifying punishments. But — this being a video game — Dante is armored like a Greek warrior and can choose to absolve the shades or slash them to bits.

“If that raises your literary hackles, you’ll appreciate another, rather different, Dante-inspired release: the book-length poem To Join the Lost, by Seth Steinzor of South Burlington. This achingly personal, contemporary version of the Inferno is both truer to its prototype and more daring.

“Preserving Dante’s structure of 34 cantos, Steinzor’s unrhymed but rhythmical poem is spoken by a poet named Seth. (It takes some guts to invite comparisons between the Tuscan bard’s poetic voice and one’s own.) Like Dante’s character-self, the middle-aged Seth finds himself lost in a murky, obstructed landscape at the poem’s opening. All is despair until out of the gloom steps Dante — the Florentine poet, that is — who, 700 years after penning his own tour of Hell, has become a guide.” [. . .] –Amy Lilly, Seven Days, May 19, 2010

Aidan Harte, Inferno Sculptures (2009)

January 16, 2010 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“I’ve been working on this collection since I came back from Italy, and thinking about it for a lot longer. For what I want to do, combine realism with imaginative expressionism, sculpture is the perfect medium. In print and TV, we’re pepper-sprayed with visuals every hour of every day these days. It’s become very easy to tune it out as visual noise – somehow, for me at least, sculpture isn’t like that. Maybe it’s because it’s not an image of something but (seemingly) the thing itself – with mass and dimension, that it still demands our undivided attention. And maybe that’s why bad sculpture is so offensive, and great sculpture so sublime.
I’ve worked hard to try to make these pieces capture the imagination in the way Dante captured mine.” —Aidan Harte, July 7, 2009

“Dante obsessed me when I studied sculpture in Italy. The Inferno contains a world of characters, but I chose to sculpt only those which spoke to my life. Each piece relates to a verse, recreating Dante’s journey in Hell….” —Aidan Harte (retrieved on January 16, 2010)

See more sculptures by Aidan Harte at Sol Art Gallery, Dublin, Ireland.

Contributed by Guy Raffa

Vladimir Nabokov, “The Original Laura” (1977, 2009)

December 3, 2009 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“In the late fall of 1976, the year before he died, The New York Times Book Review asked Vladimir Nabokov (along with a number of other writers, including John Dean) what he’d been reading lately. He reported that while in a Lausanne hospital that summer, he’d read Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ William H. Howe’s ‘Butterflies of North America’ and ‘The Original of Laura,’ ‘the not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind.’ In his delirium, he continued, he ‘kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly published.’ I can take a hint: who’d want to pan Nabokov and end up among the ‘mediocrities’ on his enemies list, to which he might still be adding over on the other side?” [. . .] –David Gates, The New York Times, November 11, 2009

Dino Di Durante, “Dante’s Inferno Animated” (2012)

Sand Sculptures of Dante’s Inferno

Seth Steinzor, To Join the Lost (2010)

Aidan Harte, Inferno Sculptures (2009)

Vladimir Nabokov, “The Original Laura” (1977, 2009)

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