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Dante in Love: The World's Greatest Poem and How It Made History
Dante in Love is the story of the most famous journey in literature. Dante Alighieri, exiled from his home in Florence, a fugitive from justice, followed a road in 1302 that took him first to the labyrinths of hell then up the healing mountain of purgatory, and finally to paradise. He found a vision and a language that made him immortal. Author Harriet Rubin follows Dante's path along the old Jubilee routes that linked monasteries and all roads to Rome. It is a path followed by generations of seekers -- from T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Primo Levi, to Bruce Springsteen. After the poet fled Rome for Siena he walked along the upper Arno, past La Verna, to Bibiena, to Cesena, and to the Po plain. During his nineteen-year journey Dante wrote his "unfathomable heart song," as Thomas Carlyle called The Divine Comedy, a poem that explores the three states of the psyche. Eliot, a lifelong student of the Comedy, said, "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third." Dante in Love tells the story of the High Middle Ages, a time during which the artist Giotto was the first to paint the sky blue, Francis of Assisi discovered knowledge in humility and the great doctors of the church mapped the soul and stood back to admire their cathedrals. Dante's medieval world gave birth to the foundation of modern art, faith and commerce. Dante and his fellow artists were trying to decode God's art and in so doing unravel the double helix of creativity. We meet the painters, church builders and pilgrims from Florence to Rome to Venice and Verona who made the roads the center of the medieval world. Following Dante's route, we are inspired to undertake journeys of discovering ourselves. In the vein of Brunelleschi's Dome, Galileo's Daughter and Wittgenstein's Poker, Dante in Love is a worldly and spiritual travelogue of the poet's travels and the journey of creativity that produced the greatest poem ever written.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1000
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 18, 2023
If only you could give a book No Stars.
Rubin is not a Dante Scholar, and some of what she says is simply wrong or misinformed. While much of it is little more than a rehash of what others have said better, it's not entirely inaccurate, but when there are a few inaccuracies or distortions, it is difficult to trust the rest of a text, and Ms. Rubin's literary judgment tends toward sensationalism, not scholarship.
A good example of one of the many inaccuracies in her book is where she says the translation of the Divine Comedy by Lawrence Binyon is known as "the Madman's Dante," when no reputable scholar I know of calls it that, and Ms. Rubin has apparently manufactured this slur for no better reason than that Binyon, who was a friend of Ezra Pound, considered a series of critiques of his work that Pound sent him in the mail. (Look through reviews of the Binyon translation. I defy you to find one that calls it the work of a madman. Robert Fitzgerald thought it better than the Sayers translation. Nobody who knew his work said Binyon was mad.)
Was Pound an anti-semite? Unquestionably. Was he fascist? Yes. Was he mad? Perhaps- that depends on who's defining the word (and I would not be asking Ms. Rubin to do so, who has no qualifications in that department either), but plenty of poets were "mad" and... so what? Pound also had a very good ear, knew metrics better than most poets of his day and was, at times, an important critic of his friends' work. But to say that Binyon's translation is the "Madman's Dante" simply because he considered input from Pound- whose critiques were mostly spot on, had no political content, generally related to normalizing Binyon's syntax and meter, and almost invariably improved Binyon's translation (get the 2nd edition of his work in Modern Library, which incorporates hundreds of line edits from Pound)- this is nothing more than guilt by association.
Should we call Ms. Rubin a opportunist hack because she has written some best sellers and is a media consultant on the editorial board of USA Today? That seems unfair too, though one would be hard put to establish just what her qualifications to write this book actually were.
However, in terms of content, her book is shallow, poorly researched, at times biased, and overall, not very helpful. If you want to better understand Dante's work, try Dante: The Poet, the Thinker, the Man, by Barbara Reynolds (who helped complete the Dorothy Sayers translation) or Dante: Poet of the Secular World, by Erich Auerbach (a brilliant analysis of Dante's place in renaissance literature). Ms. Rubin's book does not even make my list of great, or even good, books about Dante.
Rubin is not a Dante Scholar, and some of what she says is simply wrong or misinformed. While much of it is little more than a rehash of what others have said better, it's not entirely inaccurate, but when there are a few inaccuracies or distortions, it is difficult to trust the rest of a text, and Ms. Rubin's literary judgment tends toward sensationalism, not scholarship.
A good example of one of the many inaccuracies in her book is where she says the translation of the Divine Comedy by Lawrence Binyon is known as "the Madman's Dante," when no reputable scholar I know of calls it that, and Ms. Rubin has apparently manufactured this slur for no better reason than that Binyon, who was a friend of Ezra Pound, considered a series of critiques of his work that Pound sent him in the mail. (Look through reviews of the Binyon translation. I defy you to find one that calls it the work of a madman. Robert Fitzgerald thought it better than the Sayers translation. Nobody who knew his work said Binyon was mad.)
Was Pound an anti-semite? Unquestionably. Was he fascist? Yes. Was he mad? Perhaps- that depends on who's defining the word (and I would not be asking Ms. Rubin to do so, who has no qualifications in that department either), but plenty of poets were "mad" and... so what? Pound also had a very good ear, knew metrics better than most poets of his day and was, at times, an important critic of his friends' work. But to say that Binyon's translation is the "Madman's Dante" simply because he considered input from Pound- whose critiques were mostly spot on, had no political content, generally related to normalizing Binyon's syntax and meter, and almost invariably improved Binyon's translation (get the 2nd edition of his work in Modern Library, which incorporates hundreds of line edits from Pound)- this is nothing more than guilt by association.
Should we call Ms. Rubin a opportunist hack because she has written some best sellers and is a media consultant on the editorial board of USA Today? That seems unfair too, though one would be hard put to establish just what her qualifications to write this book actually were.
However, in terms of content, her book is shallow, poorly researched, at times biased, and overall, not very helpful. If you want to better understand Dante's work, try Dante: The Poet, the Thinker, the Man, by Barbara Reynolds (who helped complete the Dorothy Sayers translation) or Dante: Poet of the Secular World, by Erich Auerbach (a brilliant analysis of Dante's place in renaissance literature). Ms. Rubin's book does not even make my list of great, or even good, books about Dante.
January 5, 2018
This book didn't focus as much as I would have liked on Dante and his work as it did on Italy's history and footnotes from other works. Don't get me wrong I'm glad Ms. Rubin cited her work but it just felt like it was too much of the book. It's an okay book but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to fellow history buffs. Think I'll check out a biography on Dante to answer some questions I still have on him and his work.
June 23, 2008
This book is absolutely beautiful. She wrote it intending to write a guide to the divine comedy, but it is so beautiful on it's own- I am still yet to read Dante himself! It has pieces of Dante's life- focusing on his romance- as well as bits of his writings.
April 14, 2009
A meandering book, filled with mostly unfootnoted quotes from other authors on Dante, or love, or Florence, or the middle ages. Filled nevertheless with inaccuracies and overstatements on the part of the author. She says she consulted with a number of the most prominent Dante scholars of our time; but I noticed that none of them provided a blurb. Almost any other introduction to Dante would be preferable.
June 6, 2024
A wide-ranging introduction to Dante and the Divine Comedy, covering Italian history, Catholic theology, medieval Europe, the reception of Dante by modern poets and other writers, and various interpretations. It doesn't get very deep into any of these topics – it's very much an easy to read skim over the topic for general readers, not an academic thesis – but does a very good job at being what it is.
June 25, 2018
Interesting book but it would have helped to have read the whole Comedy first. I have only read Inferno. Lots of anecdotes about contemporaries of Dante which was pretty interesting but it is not a light read.
July 12, 2019
I read this book as an introduction to the Divine Comedy itself. It covers a lot of ground without getting bogged down along the way. It served it’s purpose quite well.
Now I’m ready to for the next segment of the journey.
Now I’m ready to for the next segment of the journey.
January 11, 2008
The historical context is helpful. It's hard to argue with an author whose goal is to popularize Dante. But I found her prone to aphorisms, and the idea of the poem as a self-help book for creative types is something I never quite got my head around. If I could do it again, I'd just pick up the Divine Comedy (with footnotes).
April 29, 2019
One of my favorite books of all time, this is a thoughtfully-written description of the historical, cultural, and literary background of Dante's masterpiece; and while I do not regard it as a substitute for reading and studying the Divine Comedy itself, I do recommend it to anyone who wants to become familiar with the Comedy, but either lacks the time to do so or finds it too intimidating.
Read
December 28, 2015i was looking for a different book and came across this one....this is a pure research book on Dante's life and events co relating to his book.....it was a journey through a man's life..well remembered...
September 8, 2008
I would have enjoyed this book more had it focused on Dante and The Inferno and not so much on the history of Italy.
April 17, 2009
A fun read; gives lay persons perspective to Dante's Commedia, can read while reading one or all of the 3 canticles...facts and insights not found in more scholarly reads.
Want to read
May 15, 2009Really helps understand/appreciate the divine comedy.
February 5, 2011
Found several good quotes in this.
December 3, 2011
2.5 stars - review to come...it's still "percolating" ;)
April 6, 2012
Read like a doctoral dissertation.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews