Posts

Dante’s Dogs

Image
  Dante’s Dogs Alberto Manguel Angry, greedy, savage, mad, cruel: these are the qualities that Dante seems to see in dogs and applies to the inhabitants of Hell. March 10, 2015 Tate, London William Blake: Cerberus ; from his illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy , 1824-1827 Of all the insults and derogatory comparisons Dante uses in the Commedia on both lost souls and evil demons, one recurs throughout. The wrathful, according to Virgil, are all “dogs.” From then on, in his travel notes through the kingdom of the dead, Dante echoes his master’s ancient vocabulary. Thus, Dante tells us that the wasteful in the seventh circle are pursued by “famished and fast black bitches”; the burning usurers running under the rain of fire behave “like dogs who in the summer fight off fleas and flies with their paws and maw”; a demon who pursues a barrater is like “a mastiff let loose,” and other demons are like “dogs hunting a poor beggar” and crueler than “the dog with the hare it has caught.” ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Conversations with the Dead

Image
Conversations with the Dead Alberto Manguel Reading has always been for me a sort of practical cartography. Like other readers, I have an absolute trust in the capability that reading has to map my world. I know that on a page somewhere on my shelves, staring down at me now, is the question I’m struggling with today, put into words long ago, perhaps, by someone who could not have known of my existence. August 15, 2014 Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: La Petite Liseuse , circa 1855-1861 Reading has always been for me a sort of practical cartography. Like other readers, I have an absolute trust in the capability that reading has to map my world. I know that on a page somewhere on my shelves, staring down at me now, is the question I’m struggling with today, put into words long ago, perhaps, by someone who could not have known of my existence. The relationship between a reader and a book is one that eliminates the barriers of time and space a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Songs Beyond Mankind

Image
My Account Logout Site logo Politics Collapse Literature Collapse Arts Collapse Ideas Collapse Current Issue Current Issue More from the Review Events All Issues About Us Shop Literary Gifts Shop NYRB Classics Songs Beyond Mankind Adam Kirsch June 23, 2016 issue Reviewed: Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry by Paul Celan, translated from the German and with commentary by Pierre Joris Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 654 pp., $40.00 On July 25, 1967, postwar Germany’s greatest poet paid a call on its greatest philosopher. Such a meeting would be historically significant no matter what else was at stake; but the encounter of Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger was also haunted by the ghosts of Germany’s terrible recent history. Heidegger was a well-known early supporter of Nazism, who as rector of Freiburg University eagerly sought to align the academy with the new values of Hitlerism. Though he later retreated from this public position, he never came out with the open apology an...
Post a Comment
Read more