/lit/ - Literature

It's more fun to read about people tortured than people being happy.

People don't give it a bad rap. They're just boring normies who like titillating torture and have short attention spans, and so get stuck on the first part.

>bad rap
Like 6ix9ine bad?

Because they read the Divine Comedy as entertainment, recreation. Inferno, and to some extent Purgatorio, work for this well enough, but without a sense for metaphysical and theological depth, Paradiso loses all of its appeal. This is not found in many modern readers.

>>15998139
What is the pre-eminent translation of the Divine Comedy? I’ve never read it

>>15998139
>I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the Inferno to the two other parts of the Divine Commedia. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The Purgatorio and Paradiso, especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that Purgatorio, "Mountain of Purification;" an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The tremolar dell' onde, that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and reprobate is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna; "I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that winding steep, "bent down like corbels of a building," some of them,—crushed together so "for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.

- Carlyle

>>16000286
I've heard Longfellow is good.

>>15998139
>he thinks people actually read

>>16000422
What a beautiful description. Thanks for sharing, Anon.