Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Freddie’s Inferno by Freddie Dredd

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freddie-dredd-freddies-inferno“The title of the album, Freddie’s Inferno, is a reference to Dante’s Inferno, a poem written by Dante Alighieri in the 1300s which describes the journey through hell. The tracklist also mirrors the poem as each track is named after a circle of hell.”    —Genius 

Freddie Dredd’s songs in this album share the same names as many of the sins present in Dante’s Inferno.

 

“Comin’ from the underworldMy body holds a demonHeard you screamin’ for a breakI don’t think anyone could takeI’m a beast, I’m a foe, I’m the one you saw beforeDon’t be greedy with your life”   –Freddie Dredd, “Greed”

Contributed by Nova Anastasia, Florida State University ’27

Purgatory Poetry Collection, Raúl Zurita Canessa (1979)

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purgatory-raul-zurita-cover

“Raúl Zurita Canessa (b.1950) is a prominent Chilean poet whose work Purgatory is the first of three works based on the poetry of Dante (the other two being Anteparadise [1982], and The New Life [1994]). The late poet C.D. Wright provided the foreword to this English translation from Spanish published by the University of California Press. Wright wrote, ‘Purgatorio is arguably the seminal literary text of Chile’s 9/11/1973, the date of the U.S.-backed military coup led by Augusto Pinochet which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. With his first published collection, the young Chilean poet began his Dantean trilogy, his long, arduous pilgrimage toward earthly redemption.'”     –Contributor Devin Shepherd

Contributed by Devin Shepherd (University of Arkansas, ’22)

Remembering young victims of mafia violence

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This poster on the window of a school in Bologna (Via Saragozza, 9), Italy, explains that the stars are the names and ages of young children who have been recently killed in mafia violence.  The quotation (“rivedere le stelle”) is from the last verse of Inferno.

Contributed by Kate McKee (Bowdoin, ’22)

Carlos Martínez Moreno, El Infierno (1981)

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“This last novel by Uruguayan writer and defense attorney Martínez Moreno, who died in exile in 1986, depicts the revolt of Uruguay’s Tupamaro urban guerillas and their suppression by the military in the early 1970s. Using true accounts of kidnapping, torture and murder from political detainees whom he defended while living in Uruguay, Martínez Moreno fashions a dreamlike yet brutally realistic story of a police state. His book borrows chiefly from The Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy. In this modern-day hell, wealthy Uruguayan bankers and prosecutors are kidnapped by the Tupamaros; army colonels and police officers learn more effective ways to torture political prisoners from the ‘cold, calculating’ North American ‘adviser.'”   —Publishers Weekly, 1988

For more on the novel and its relationship to Dante’s poem, see Efraín Kristal’s “What Is, Is Not: Dante in Tomas Eloy Martínez’s Purgatorio,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 31.4 (2012): 473-484 (accessible here).

Tomás Eloy Martínez, Purgatorio (2008)

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“It should be noted from the outset that unlike Dante’s Purgatorio, which explores the painful processes of self‐examination of those who sinned, repented before they died, and are preparing themselves to enter Paradise’s realm of bliss, Martínez’s Purgatorio is a meditation on a state of suffering by the innocent victims of Argentina’s dictatorial regimes of the 1970s. The notion of a ‘purgatory’ for repentant sinners in Dante, therefore, is creatively transformed in Martinez’s Purgatorio to suggest a shameful period of Argentina’s history plagued by repression and violence, but most importantly, by the pain it generated for decades to come in those who were affected by it.”   –Efrain Kristal, “What Is, Is Not: Dante in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatorio,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2012 (abstract publicly available; full text behind paywall)

The novel, originally published in Spanish in 2008, was translated into English by Frank Wynne (Bloomsbury, 2011).

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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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