Nothing New Under the Sun

Everything old is new again.

History repeats itself.

I'm sure you have your own favorite aphorism or bumper sticker for the cyclical nature of time.

I'm reading Dante's Divine Comedy for the third (I think?) time, pencil in hand as usual. Today I read Canto XVII in Purgatory. It turns out you can't climb the mountain of Purgatory at night, but Dante and Virgil aren't sleepy yet. Virgil takes the opportunity to explain the sins of Purgatory to Dante so their time isn't wasted.

Apropos of nothing and no one in particular, certainly, here is a passage from the Dorothy Sayers's 1955 translation that I ended up reading several times this afternoon:

Some hope their neighbor's ruin may divert
His glory to themselves, and this sole hope
Prompts them to drag his greatness in the dirt;

Some, in their fear to lose fame, favour, scope,
And honour, should another rise to power,
Wishing the worst, sit glumly there and mope;

And some there are whose wrongs have turned them sour,
So that they thirst for vengeance, and this passion
Fits them to plot some mischief any hour.

(lines 115-123)

For what it's worth, I like this translation for being complete—all three books of the Divine Comedy, not just Inferno. I also like that Sayers made the effort to do the entire thing in terza rima, that intertwined poetic structure that you can see above. They rhyme scheme is ABA BCB CDC ... etc. for a hundred cantos. Challenging enough in vernacular 14th-century Italian, ridiculously difficult in English, a language that has always like alliteration far more than it likes rhyme.

Get the Wingback Workshop RSS feed here: https://wingbackworkshop.com/rss

Follow the Wingback Workshop on the Fediverse (including Mastodon): @khg@wingbackworkshop.com

Buy KHG's books on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/shop/khg

Sign up for the Wingback Workshop email newsletter using the Subscribe button in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.