Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

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eat-pray-love“The Italian we speak today, therefore, is not Roman or Venetian (though these were the powerful military and merchant cities) nor even really entirely Florentine. Essentially, it is Dantean. No other European language has such an artistic pedigree. And perhaps no language was ever more perfectly ordained to express human emotions than this fourteenth-century Florentine Italian, as embellished by one of Western civilization’s greatest poets. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in terza rima, triple rhyme, a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating three times every five lines, giving his pretty Florentine vernacular what scholars call a ‘cascading rhythm’ –a rhythm which still lives in the tumbling, poetic cadences spoken by Italian cabdrivers and butchers and government administrators even today. The last line of the Divine Comedy, in which Dante is faced with the vision of God Himself, is a sentiment that is still easily understandable by anyone familiar with so-called modern Italian. Dante writes that God is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, l’amor che move sole e l’altre stelle. . .

“‘The love that moves the sun and the other stars.’

“So it’s really no wonder that I want so desperately to learn this language.”

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

Max Hastings, Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers (2003)

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max-hastings-editor-a-memoir“We’re taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we’re all ultimately ridiculous.”  —Max Hastings, Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers

Read more about Max Hastings’s memoir, covering his editorship of The Telegraph from 1985 to 2002, in The Guardian (“The view from Hastings,” October 12, 2002).

Catherine Cho, Inferno (2020)

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inferno-a-memoir-of-motherhood-and-madness“How could any sane woman kill her kids? A better question, and the one explored in Catherine Cho’s captivating first book, Inferno, would inquire about the factors (biological, cultural and environmental) that make some women vulnerable to episodes of acute, severe mental illness in the period after they become mothers.

“Cho’s title refers to the perceived hell in which the author finds herself a couple of months after her son is born, a hell that the reader quickly learns is the inpatient unit of a mental hospital. The book begins just as Cho is starting to recover from psychosis, struggling to remember who she is: “I write the words I can call myself. I am a daughter. A sister. A wife. Those words come easily. I can remember them. I stare at the page. And then I write MOTHER. The word looks strange. Next to the others, it stands separate.

“Inferno is a disturbing and masterfully told memoir, but it’s also an important one that pushes back against powerful taboos. We still don’t like to talk about postpartum mental illness, or the fact that, when a mother becomes ill and doesn’t have a support system or access to mental health care, the emotional damage to both her and her children can reverberate across generations.” [. . .]    –Kim Brooks, The New York Times, August 4 2020

“Empty Nester In ‘The Woods’: A Modern Dantean Journey”

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“Allowing for translation, those are the immortal opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Here, some seven centuries later, are some of Lynn Darling’s opening lines from her new memoir, Out of the Woods: ‘The summer my only child left home for college, I moved from an apartment in New York City, to live alone in a small house at the end of a dirt road in the woods of central Vermont.'”    —Maureen Corrigan, Connecticut Public Radio, January 9, 2014

Learn more about Lynn Darling’s 2014 book Out of the Woods here.

Out of the Woods can be found on Amazon.

Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars (2019)

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Once-More-We-Saw-Stars-2019Once More We Saw Stars (Knopf, 2019) is a memoir by Jayson Greene, about the tragic loss of his 2-year-old daughter Greta and his path through grief to healing.

A review in the Washington Post notes, “The book’s title, from Dante’s Inferno, tips us off that Greta’s bereft parents will, in the poet’s words, ‘get back up to the shining world.’ But Once More We Saw Stars, an outgrowth of a journal Greene began shortly after the accident, is a chronological account, which means there’s unthinkable pain before the arduous ‘path toward healing.’

“Like Virgil, Greene makes for a good guide on this journey to hell and back. He’s a Brooklyn-based journalist and editor who met his wife, Stacy, a cellist by training, at the classical-music nonprofit where they both worked. After Greta’s birth, Stacy switched tracks to become a lactation consultant and nutritionist. Their story is not just of loss, but of their remarkable love, which helps them through this tragedy.” [. . .] — Review by Heller McAlpin in the Washington Post (May 8, 2019)

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How to Cite

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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