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