Word: brunetto
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...consider first the second half of the book, including the version of Juvenal, three Horatian odes, the Brunetto Latini canto from Dante (Inferno XV),and four sonnets by the sixteenth century Spanish poets Gongora and Quevedo. I say versions because I do not think these poems belong in the class which Lowell described as imitations in the preface to his 1961 volume. There he concentrated on the transmission of tone, quoting Boris Pasternak's remark about the usual translator's sacrifice of tone to literal meaning. He then cautioned us to read Imitations as a book of original poems, with...
...TIME'S otherwise brilliant and stimulating article on Dante perpetuates some 19th century misunderstanding of the poet. The most debatable point is that Dante used the Inferno for personal vindictiveness, to damn his political enemies, while demonstrating extreme lenience toward old friends like Brunetto Latini. Dante's work is primarily an inward journey into the soul of everyman and an exposure of the possibilities of evil therein. The figures that Dante encounters, therefore, symbolize evils that the poet condemns in himself as well as in others...
...most demonic sins, for Dante, are the sins of the spirit. Hence Brunetto Latini, since he embodies a sensual sin, does not merit punishment so severe as that meted out to the spiritually corrupt...
...absorbed as must the whole spirit of Greek and Roman civilization. Petrarch assumes the Roman point of view and speaks of the barbarians, meaning the French and Germans. These were the nations who had founded great Universities, had developed Gothic architecture and had produced the models of Dante and Brunetto Lotini...
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