12
There are a nauseatingly numerous amount of theories on what that illustriously ambiguous line could mean. It very well might have merely been indented by Dante to represent a sort of invocation (and legibility is not usually the most overwhelming of necessities when clucking one's lips on an Invocation). The chant most likely refers to the Triumph of Satan. ...
10
Dante was probably influenced and inspired by various Muslim sources, including the Kitab al-Miraj, but the similarities are not strong enough to claim plagiarism.
This conjecture dates from 1919 and was first proposed by Miguel Asín Palacios, a Spanish priest. His theories, published in La Escatología Musulmana en la Divina Comedia (Islamic Eschatology in ...
9
First, it's not true to assume that all foreign bits in Foucault's Pendulum were left untranslated in the English version:
However, Latin is more familiar to Italian, French, Spanish,
Portuguese, or Rumanian readers than to Britons or Americans. For
this reason, Weaver, with my approval, sometimes shortened some
long quotations and nonchalantly ...
7
It is a reference to the Tarquinian conspiracy. After the overthrow of Tarquinius, the last Roman King, and the founding of the Roman republic, a number of Romans, including two sons and two brothers-in-law of Lucius Junius Brutus, were found to be plotting to restore the kingdom and put Tarquinius back on the throne. The conspiracy was discovered, and the ...
6
I am working with John Ciardi's translation, New American Library, 1954.
There are seven stanzas before this one which give some context to the lines you're asking about.
No tortured wailing rose to greet us here
but sounds of sighing rose from every side,
sending a tremor through the timeless air,
a grief breathed out of untormented ...
answered Jan 15 '19 at 11:42
Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum
3,9912 gold badges10 silver badges28 bronze badges
6
Smiles copied his anecdote about Michelangelo from Charles Colton, who wrote:
That writer who aspires to immortality, should imitate the sculptor, if he would make the labours of the pen as durable as those of the chisel. Like the sculptor, he should arrive at ultimate perfection, not by what he adds, but by what he takes away; otherwise all his energy may ...
4
tl;dr
Depends on how and what you count, yo. Do non-sonnets count?
Background (can be safely skipped)
Petrarch worked on his sequence to Laura, variously referred to as Il Canzoniere ("The Songbook"), Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta ("Fragments of Common Things"), and Rime Sparse ("Scattered Rhymes"), throughout his poetic career. The ...
3
The following lines in Canto III of Paradiso appear to discuss this (quoted from the translation provided by WorldOfDante):
The essence of this blessed life consists
in keeping to the boundaries of God’s will,
through which our wills become one single will;
so that, as we are ranged from step to step
throughout this kingdom, all this kingdom wills
that ...
3
If the quote comes from Dante, its most likely origin would be the first part, Inferno, from the Divine Comedy. The Italian text of the Divine Comedy or Divina Commedia is available online (also in several editions on Archive.org).
Searching for "nero" (black) inside the text of Inferno results in only one instance of the word near "diavol" (or "diavolo"), ...
3
To read a poem like this you'll need:
A comprehensive dictionary, so that you can look up words like ‘argument’, ‘will’, ‘would’, ‘fact’, ‘gan’, ‘tofore’, etc, and find out what they meant in 1600. I use the online Oxford English Dictionary since my local library has a subscription, but a large one-volume dictionary like Chambers would also work. A ‘learner’...
2
The "[second] most translated book after the Bible" apparently depends on whom you ask.
According to Professor Alfredo Moro, the 17th-century noel “Don Quijote de la Mancha is the second most translated book after the Bible”.
In an interview from 2016, Moro said,
We are currently working on a project where we are assembling all the translations of Don ...
2
Now that I've finished reading an annotated translation of the Discourses on Livy (translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford University Press, 2008), I can answer my own question.
Livy's Ab Urbe Condita is Machiavelli's main source of citations and references, so there is a benefit in reading that book. However, Ab Urbe Condita is ...
2
The section that most resembles your description seems to be a portion of chapter XXXV and XXXVI, where Renzo finds Fra Cristoforo in the lazzeretto. There you can find a few descriptions of him and other Capuchin frias while they tend to the sick. For example:
Arrivò in quel punto un cappuccino con la barba bianchissima, portando due bambini strillanti, ...
1
In addition to the volume edited by Eric Bentley that Benjamin Godfrey's answer already mentioned (The Servant of Two Masters And Other Italian Classics. Republished by Rowman & Littlefield in 2000; ISBN 978-0-936839-20-2), I also found the following translations:
Ruzante: L'Anconitana. The Woman from Ancona. Translated with an introduction and notes by ...
1
This might be a remnant for Machiavelli's original goal of writing a running commentary of the first ten books in Livy's A Urbe Condita.
Several other passages in the book may also be remnants of this original goal, namely those where Machiavelli quotes a sentence from Livy at the start of a chapter, e.g. at the start of Book 2, chapter 2, and Book 2, ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
