Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Sakura Park” by Rachel Wetzsteon appeared first on The American Scholar.

I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me these were the foundational figures who would sustain us. Reason and a lifetime of reading have confirmed my faith. I think of them as formulating the cultural oxygen that sustains the Western world and beyond – our languages, values and literary forms, and who we are, whether or not we have read them.  My first Dante was John Ciardi’s Inferno, assigned, remarkably, by our English teacher in tenth grade. This was an American public high school in 1967, when things were already falling apart. On our own, several of us read and discussed the other two-thirds of Ciardi’s Divine Comedy. I’ve since read the Dante translations by Longfellow, Christopher Singleton, Robert and Jean Hollander, Clive James and, most devotedly of late, C.H. Sisson’s blank-verse version. In his review of Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, the American poet Andrew Frisardi notes the poem's continued popularity among common readers and translators: “Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be. . . . Dante's poem is many things, but first of all it is a gripping read. It pulls the reader in with its lively language and rhythms.” That has been my experience.   In a post from December 2009, I described my middle son’s first acquaintance with Dante. He’s now twenty-four, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and is visiting Italy with his younger brother for the first time. On Monday in Florence they toured the Dante Museum:      I know from my life and from my son’s that literary interests can enter dormant periods, all the while evolving and storing energy for future returns. About a decade ago I first read Sisson’s translation of The Divine Comedy, published by Carcanet in 1980. As a poem in English, it is the most successful and has become my default-mode Dante. In his introduction, “On Translating Dante,” Sisson writes:   “. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.”   Dante seems eternally housed in our memory and imagination. Think of Lear and the Fool on the heath or the fight between Achilles and Hector.   Frisardi is a translator of Italian poetry, including Dante’s Vita Nova and the first fully annotated translation of his Convivio. In his 2020 poetry collection, The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press), Frisardi includes a beautiful Dantean sonnet originally a part of Vita Nova:   “You pilgrims walking by oblivious, Your minds, it seems, on something not at hand, Can you have come from such a distant land— The way you look suggests as much to us— That you’re not weeping, even as you pass Right through the suffering city, like that band Of people who, it seems, don’t understand A thing about the measure of its loss?   “If you’ll just stop, because you want to hear About it all—so says my sighing heart— Your eyes will fill with tears before you leave. For she who blessed the city is nowhere In sight: what words about her we impart Have force enough to make a stranger grieve.”   Frisardi adds a note: “Dante places this sonnet in the penultimate episode of his prosimetrum the Vita Nova, where not long after Beatrice’s death he sees pilgrims passing through Florence on the way to Rome. ‘She who blessed the city’ translates lowercase beatrice, which means she who blesses.’” [Photos by David Kurp.]

Preserving family history The post Stephanie Santana appeared first on The American Scholar.

Self-knowledge is fine but some things are best left unexamined. “Why do you read so many books?” a reader asks. His assumption, never directly articulated, is that reading is compensation for the absence of something far more important. I suppose people have been facing such suspicions at least since Freud’s arrival on the scene. Busybodies flatter themselves by uncovering previously unsuspected motives in others. Think of it as amateur psychology practiced as a self-congratulating hobby. One of my favorites among Clive James’ books is Late Readings, published in 2015, four years before his death from cancer. “Late” is redolent of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing.” James writes about the books he knows will be among the last he ever reads, including those by Joseph Conrad, Dr. Johnson, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning – all superb choices. A line in his introduction comes to mind: “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.” That almost sounds like a pep talk. If something has worked for more than six decades, reliably supplying pleasure and learning, why stop now? James continues: “Piled up, the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge any further, but it brought us this far.”