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The world of Dante's Divine Comedy
Go to the poetry section of any reasonably well-stocked bookstore, and you will find Dante’s Divine Comedy represented in a number of translations of widely varying vintages and styles. Over the l…
The social mobility of our society, on which we pride ourselves with varying degrees of justification, was extremely rare; the patterns of most people’s entire lives could have been confidently predicted from the moment of birth, and Dante found rising from one’s origins a phenomenon noteworthy enough to be commented on: “a Bernardin / di Fosco in Faenza sprouting high / from low seed” ( Purgatorio, Canto XIV). In the earlier work, which dates in all likelihood from his late twenties, Dante describes an intense love sustained on the slightest and most occasional of contacts, which gradually deepened and transformed itself as the lover came to terms with defects in his own nature, and which led to a resolve, after the death of his beloved, not to write of her again until he could do so in a way that would be worthy of her. [Dante] is holding out for adherence to the highest possible standards, no matter what the cost, in a world in which hypocrisy, expediency, and self-serving seem to be the surest roads to success.These tensions flared into open strife in 1215, when a Florentine nobleman was murdered to avenge the insult of his having broken his engagement to the daughter of another powerful family—an incident alluded to several times in the Comedy, and one whose implications reverberate throughout the text.
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