Essays on The Divine Comedy

I like to believe everything happens for a reason. Many people like to believe in fate because they think they can just sit back and let everything fall into place. Fortune is mostly associated with good luck. But, when something bad happens in one's life, fate automatically is out of the picture. A few hundred years ago, your fate was in the hands of the patriarchy. In The Burning Times, the role of fate were not in the hands of…

Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Inferno are both classic works of literature concerned with Christian salvation. Both offer frameworks for how to be righteous—how to lead a life that is free from transgression and sin. Knowledge of classical figures—essential to a formal education in the eras of both authors—feature prominently in both works. However, each author has a very different opinion on how to reconcile the ideals and achievements of their pagan heroes with their own Christian beliefs. Augustine comes to…

Through the entire comedy Dante shows signs of personal growth and development, conquering challenges that he would not have been able to face before. “Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path”(Alighieri 1053). This shows halfway through Dantes life, he realizes that he was being lead astray from God's light. Dante found himself alone in the woods and he became scared for his…

Shakespeare wrote 38 plays, 2 narrative poems, 154 sonnets, and a series of additional poems. He had touched the hearts of others to the point where a group of actors preserved his works so they will live beyond the sixteenth-century (“Shakespeare 1). Partially why he was popular was because his plays were not exclusive to high society, but also the common people. They found similarities to enjoy (Forster 1). WIthin the cities that sat near the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers,…

It is right to honor those who have positively contributed to society, for they have shaped the future and given us a model to follow. Therefore, I will praise Dante Alighieri for his poetry that descended from the heavens. (Hyperbole) Dante is generally considered the most important poet of the middle ages, a period of conflict leading into the age of discovery. (Chronographia) Dante’s Divine Comedy was the most important poem of his time. He was the first poet to…

World Literature has a rich and diverse history, dating back to the era preceding Christ's death. Its origins lie in oral traditions, where stories were transmitted verbally. Over time, written forms, initially pictographic, emerged. Interestingly, writing did not initially serve literary purposes but rather administrative and political needs. One of the earliest literary masterpieces, the heroic narrative Gilgamesh, faced the risk of fading into oblivion until it found translation into alphabets. The Ancient Greek Contributions The ancient Greeks made significant…

One may ask whether or not the scriptwriters or directors of the movies to be mentioned in this paper were able to actually read the Divine comedy; or perhaps the depiction of Heaven, hell, and the purgatory made my Dante was simply so vivid that it has become a staple of the mainstream literary views (in all its modes). Let us begin with the scenery comparison of Heaven and hell as depicted in the “What Dreams May Come” (1998) and…

Abstract On a sunny Sunday in April of 1478, assassins from the Pazzi family attacked Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano. Giuliano lay bleeding on the cathedral floor, and later bled to death. Lorenzo, however managed to get to safety—not a good thing for the Pazzi family. Up to this point the Pazzi clan had been considered one of the most noble and well-respected clans. They were financiers who “feared and resented the Medici’s swaggering new role as political…

Introduction Thomas Merton went through a significant conversion in his youth and turned into a prominent Catholic author and spiritualist. His autobiography “The Seven Storey Mountain” discusses his life from childhood to adult and the conversion to Roman Catholicism and entry into a monastery.  The title and the sequence of this book were enthused by Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”. Merton’s autobiography is divided into three parts: The first describes his life without God (“Hell”); the second, the beginning of his…

This essay is to accompany In between Fortune and Providence: Astrology and deep space in Dante's Divine Funny. What follows is the introduction and timeline I want I had when I first started reading the Divine Comedy. Lots of commentaries of the Divine Funny provide background historic information, usually including a basic introduction and short descriptions when specific characters and events show up within the poem. Here I will proceed sequentially, starting centuries before Dante's birth and concluding in the…

A naive view of literal translation might be that it consists in the one for one substitution of the word forms of the target language for the word forms of the source language. This is what normally meant by the term "literal translation". Yet, this view is unrealistic. Literal translation, also known as direct translation, is the rendering of text from one language to another "word-for-word" (Latin: "verbum pro verbo") rather than conveying the sense of the original. Literal translations…

"Midway through the journey of our life, I found/myself in a dark wood, for I had strayed/from the straight pathway to this tangled ground." These famous lines from Dante's Inferno signify the themes of religion and personal salvation in the poem. Often when one embarks on a journey of self-discovery, they travel to places which astound one by their strangeness. Expecting to see what is straightforward and acceptable, one is suddenly presented with exceptions. Just as such self-examiners might encounter…