Lit Soc: Why The Hell Should We Still Read Dante?

This week, PGS Literary Society marked the 700th anniversary of the death of the 'somma poeta', Dante Alighieri, with a talk by James Burkinshaw on Dante's complex cultural legacy.  

Further Reading

Dante, Inferno (original Italian, with verse translation by Robert Pinsky), (Noonday, 1994)

Dante, Purgatorio (original Italian, with prose translation by John D Sinclair), (OUP, 1939)

Dante, Paradiso (original Italian, with prose translation by John D Sinclair), (OUP, 1939)

Dante, Vita Nuova (original Italian, with prose/verse translations by Dino Cervigni and Edward Vasta (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995)

Ezra Pound, 'Arnaut Daniel' (in The Spirit of Romance, 1910)

T.S. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919)

T.S. Eliot, 'The Waste Land' (Faber, 1922)

Samuel Beckett, 'Dante and the Lobster' (Faber, 1934)

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton University Press, 1946) 

Primo Levi, If This Is A Man (translated by Stuart Woolf), (Abacus, 1947)

William Empson, Milton's God (New Directions, 1961)

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (OUP, 1973)