Word: latini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...encounters three giants, 30 monsters, dozens of demons, and 128 spirits he can call by name-among them Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ulysses, Mahomet, Brutus and Judas Iscariot. He also meets some of his best friends, but finds them leniently dealt with: his old teacher, for instance, the famous Brunette Latini, is only slightly singed for his sodomy. Dante's personal enemies are more numerous and less fortunate; their agonies are described with grisly glee...
...hedges of the burghers of Juvissy, France, little Gabrielle Renaudot, a spindling girl with legs like matches, hempen ringlets and immense brown eyes peering from the wan mask of her face, would pause, with furtive admiration, to watch the famed astronomer meditating in his kitchen-garden. Her mother, Maria Latini, the original of Henri Regnault's famed painting, Salome, was a friend of Flammarion's. When she died, little Gabrielle went to the great man for advice and counsel. Was she fond of Science ? That was what he wanted to know. Ah, she would give her life...