Word: commedia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...screen treatments, including one with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., a long-running road-company revival with the Lunts, and a Broadway musical adaptation (Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate). Zeffirelli has refurbished the oft-told tale by styling it with the brio of the 16th century commedia dell'arte. Moreover, his casting seems to be a case of art's imitating life: Elizabeth Taylor as the sharp-tongued tigress, Kate, and Richard Burton as her hard-nosed trainer, Petruchio...
...Last Masterpiece. "Under these white locks," he bellowed when he was 73, "there is an Aetna!" And Aetna erupted to the end. At 82, three months before his death, Goethe summoned his last forces and completed the drama that, after La Commedia of Dante Alighieri, must be accounted the greatest single poem of the Western world: Faust...
...Shame! How can you list "the superior translations of La Commedia" and omit the verse rendering by John Ciardi...
...Commedia is composed of three colossal canticles: I'lnferno, il Purgatorio, il Paradiso. Each canticle, if the first canto of I'lnferno is counted as a prologue, contains 33 cantos, and each canto contains about 142 lines composed in terza rima, a rhyme scheme (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, and so on) so cruelly intricate that only Dante ever mastered its hazards...
...Dorothy L. Sayers, Geoffrey L. Bickersteth and Laurence Binyon have severally translated La Commedia into rhyming tercets, and translated it amazingly well. John D. Sinclair has prepared an excellent edition of La Commedia that offers the original Italian and a faithful prose translation on opposite pages. But for the reader without Italian, the most satisfactory versions are those in blank verse. Lawrence Grant White is both accurate and musical, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, though his diction is at times antique, presents passages of stunning power and precision. Unfortunately, neither of these is readily available at this writing. In preparing...