Have you read "The divine comedy"?

Have you read "The divine comedy"?


  • Total voters
    19
I've read it through multiple times, as a matter of fact. Not to contemporary tastes, thus explaining all of the other responses you've got. But undoubtedly a masterpiece.
 
I have a question for anyone who read the cosmological story involving Beatrice(?). Is there a description of Dante approaching hell or heaven and does he refer to a red river?
 
Your question confuses me.

Dante crosses each of the classical rivers of the underworld as he traverses the Christian afterlifeworld, most of them in Hell, but Lethe at the top of Purgatory.

In canto 12 of the Inferno, he meets the violent, mass murderers. They are in Phlegethon, which is a river of boiling blood (so that would presumably be red) (You're in deeper depending on how many people you've killed. Atilla is in up to his eyeballs, if I remember right).

It's shortly after he crosses Lethe (forgetting the sins of his earthly existence, so that he can enter the pure space of heaven) that he meets Beatrice. So she's associated with a river, too, but not a red one.
 
I have, a long time ago (6th-form?), but only in translation — don't ask me which edition, whichever one was on my Mum's bookshelf — and (if I'm honest) pretty much only so that, if anyone asked, late-teenage me would be able to say that I had, thus clearly demonstrating my intellectual superiority *hollow laughter*

(And my cunning plan has finally borne fruit, only 25-ish years later!)


Don't remember much about it either, TBH, likely because most of the Classical and Judeo-Christian references went swooshing a looong way over my head at the time (never studied Greek/Latin, raised atheist). Though The Seven Basic Plots, which I just finished wading through (that's a book which was in dire need of a ruthless editor — even more so than Order of the Phoenix) helpfully provided a synopsis of it (several times :rolleyes: ).

Do also vaguely remember starting Milton's Paradise Lost a year or two afterward (possibly after having encountered Neil Gaiman's Sandman comix at college), but don't remember ever finishing that one...
 
Back
Top Bottom