Dante’s divine autofiction

Dante’s Commedia (or Divine Comedy, written in the opening decades of the 14th century) is already a heavily and explicitly political text, in which the poet at times exhibits a positively Trumpian relish in imagining the defeat and torment of his enemies. But its long-term reception is about a great deal more than politics. Rowan Williams, The New Statesman

che Dante continui a essere letto e discusso non solo dai dantisti ci fa molto piacere. L'articolo di Williams parla del recentemente uscito: Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, di Joseph Luzzi (Princeton University Press)

There’s a Word for That

Kummerspeck: a German word for weight that one puts on due to stress eating. Age-otori: a Japanese word for the particular way one sometimes looks worse after a haircut. Shemomedjamo: a Georgian word meaning “to accidentally eat the whole thing.” Tingo: a Rapa Nui word meaning “to eventually steal all of your neighbor’s possessions by borrowing and never returning them.” Aspaldiko: Basque. The joy that comes from catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Mondegreen: English, coined in the twentieth century to describe the mistaken lyrics one habitually attributes to a misheard song (and which one sometimes prefers to the real lyrics).

Lists like this are easy to find. The internet is full of them because—regardless of their factual accuracy—people love learning that other languages name things that they didn’t know had names, or distinguish things they had never distinguished before, or connect things they never saw as connected. The lists bear witness to the fact that there is a small but profound joy in discovering new words for our experiences. James D. Reich, Boston Review

questo articolo interessante si riferisce al libro pubblicato nel 2022: Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India, di Maria Heim (Princeton University Press)

Comunicare

There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” Nicholas Carr, The New Atlantis

questo il sottotitolo di un bell'articolo dal titolo "The Tyrrany of Now". Forse è più facile comunicare con gli animali o con le piante. Da leggere anche questo articolo "A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter", di Sally Adee, Noema. Eccone l'incipit:

From a snarl of roots that grip dry, shallow soil, the knobbly trunk of an ancient olive tree twisted into a surprisingly lush crown of dense, silvery-green leaves. Far above, the retrofuturistic pattern of a geodesic dome framed the blue sky outside. Dan Ryan considered the tree: “It’s probably close to 1,800 years old.” When it was still a shoot, the Roman Empire was at the height of its influence. Ptolemy was drawing epicycles in a doomed effort to model the paths of the planets and the sun as they revolved around the Earth. For nearly two millennia, this tree managed to evade death by drought or predation or pestilence, forging alliances with alien species in the soil below and the air above.

Literature in translation

Since its founding a decade ago, Tilted Axis has gained a reputation for bringing out a wide range of groundbreaking, genre-defying literature in translation. 

With only eight employees working part-time on a tight budget, it has published 42 books translated from 18 languages, including Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Eastern Armenian, Kazakh, Kannada, Bengali, Uzbek and Turkish. Alexandra Alter, NYTimes

On translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The term Ovid uses for the stones that Deucalion and Pyrrha are instructed to throw behind their backs is lapis, distinct from the saxum of Themis’s holy space. But as the episode unfolds, he uses lapis and saxum interchangeably. The ambiguity established between bones and stones — the fact that one can be read for, and also become, the other — is central to Ovid’s poetics in The Metamorphoses, a work in which change serves as plot, and pretty much anything can become something else. In the end, after Pyrrha is persuaded, she and Deucalion obey the oracle, and the earth is repopulated with other human beings. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Dial

Joan Didion’s ‘astonishingly intimate’ diary

A journal found in Joan Didion’s home is to be published in April.

Discovered in a filing cabinet next to the American writer’s desk after her death in 2021, Notes to John is addressed to Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. Its entries begin in December 1999, and recount sessions Didion was having with a psychiatrist at the time. Lucy Knight, The Guardian

What Not to Wear

Chevreul died in 1889, 121 years before Instagram was invented, but had the platform been available to him, I think he would have done very well on it. There, and elsewhere on the social web, millions of people are still trying to figure out which shades look best on them. They are doing it via seasonal-color analysis, a quasi-scientific, quasi-philosophical discipline that holds that we all have a set of colors that naturally suit us, and a set that do not—that wash us out, make us look ruddy or green, emphasize our flaws, and minimize our beauty. Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic

BLACK IN BLUES

National Book Award winner Perry offers surprising revelations about the connection between the color blue and Black identity as she explores myth and literature, art and music, folklore and film. “Blues are our sensibility,” she writes. Kirkus Reviews

il libro di cui si parla è Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My Peopl, di Imani Perry (Ecco/HarperCollins)

The Grammar of Angels

Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. [...] An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels. [...]

Once he had mastered the orthodox disciplines, Pico found himself hungry for more. He sought out Jewish scholars to teach him Hebrew and Arabic, and became convinced that there were secrets in the ancient texts of the east, accessible only only to those who knew how to interpret them. Writing excitedly to a friend, he declared that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible contained “the entire knowledge of all arts and wisdom both divine and human”. Unfortunately there was a catch: “This knowledge is hidden and concealed.” Dennis Duncan, The Guardian

recensione alla nuova biografia di Pico della Mirandola di Edward Wilson-Lee dal titolo affascinante, The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language (William Collins).

Apocalypse, Constantly

But the fact that Eliot was already fantasizing about the end of the world a century ago suggests that the dread of extinction has always been with us; only the mechanism changes. Thirty years before “The Hollow Men,” H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine imagined the ultimate extinction of life on Earth, as the universe settles into entropy and heat death. Nearly 70 years before that, Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man imagined the destruction of the human race in an epidemic. And even then, the subject was considered old hat. One reason The Last Man failed to make the same impression as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lynskey shows, is that two other works titled “The Last Man” were published in Britain the same year, as well as a poem called “The Death of the World.”

In these modern fables, human extinction is imagined in scientific terms, as the result of natural causes. But the fears they express are much older than science. Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic

Why 2024 was the year of the audiobook

Audiobooks aren’t new: the American Foundation for the Blind pressed recordings of books on to vinyl records in 1932. Later, books became popular on cassette tape and then CDs. But the smartphone era has given the format a new lease of life, and data from the Publishers Association (PA) shows that UK audiobook downloads increased by 17% in the year between 2022 and 2023.

The official statistics for 2024 won’t be released until the spring, but it’s already clear that “2024 has been another record year for audiobooks [...] Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Guardian

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan

Starnone’s prose captures the feverishness and weird juxtapositions of a child’s inner life. “Coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up,” he writes [...] Now he tries to cement his experiences in words: “The problem, if there is one, is that the pleasure of writing is fragile, it has a hard time making it up the slippery slope of real life.” The New Yorker

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa).

 

The books to look forward to in 2025

 

David Shariatmadari, The Guardian

BUON ANNO!