I read all of Dante’s The Divine Comedy in nine days. I’m not trying to boast or anything, it’s mostly just that numerology is famously a central theme of the Comedy, and particularly the number three, and all that stuff about the nine circles of hell, and nine and three being intimately connected… yeah, it’s just funny to me that that’s how long it took me to read it.
This update is about that because I’m trying to make an excuse for why I’m not going to write an essay on the Comedy, despite me promising to write an essay on every classic work I read. There are several excuses actually, one of them being that I’m a little burnt-out. I had to quarantine because of a possible exposure (thankfully both of my tests came back negative). I’ve gotten a new job after being “asked to quit” from my last job as a bookseller—an essay in its own right, I may even make it into a bit of a memoir—so I’m feeling a bit strung out on interview questions and being asked to dress up in more than just jeans… not to mention the holidays being here. Life is always a lot to do.
The other reason I’m not going to write an essay on Dante is because I read the entire poem in nine days. That’s just not good enough to do this work justice. Seven-hundred pages of difficult literature in just over a week. See, the thing about reading epic poetry is that they’re all skinny and don’t take up too much of the page, so you really can just fly through them. The problem comes when you consider that your average epic poem probably took the author half of their life to compose, and that’s not because they were being lazy. Each line had far more than even a couple hours’ thought poured into it, and in order to decompress all that information, a reader may have to sink in a comparable amount of effort. I certainly didn’t.
I also probably didn’t get too much out of it because I don’t speak Italian. The translation I read was done by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and while it is considered a quite definitive translation, it does come with the very minor issue that it doesn’t rhyme. Dante invented the hendecasyllabic terza rima scheme specifically for the Comedy, and did it so well that it has still never been quite faithfully recreated by any other poet, past or present. I think it’s pretty damn important to read this poetry so that the cadence is alive in the way it was intended; without that, I know for a fact that I missed a lot of this poem’s… well… divinity.
Anyways, I read Dante, but I just don’t feel up to the task of unpacking it. I took a break and started reading a crap fantasy book, but gave up after a hundred pages, and so I started on my next read: The Canterbury Tales. I promise to write an essay on that one.
Alongside, I have another essay in the works on the last book I read, The Key of Solomon, which is shaping up to be one of my best analyses yet. I also think I should mention that, back when I started this, I gave a number of 284 works that I’d be reading, and I may have misled my readers in saying that they’d all be given an essay. That’s not really true: included in that selection is a whole bunch of literary theory that comes from the Norton Anthology. I don’t think it’s really necessary for me to write an essay about each essay that I read from that book, because they feel more like supplemental than substantial works. I’ll incorporate stuff from there in my other writings, if they fit. I hope they will, because I have really good fun reading those heady texts.
Thanks for reading, I hope your holidays are safe and relaxing. I’m planning to finish up my essay on Solomon by the beginning of the year.
Austin.