#allen mandelbaum

[reverie-quotes]

Is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is it that each man's relentless longing becomes a god to him?

— Virgil, The Aeneid (tr. Mandelbaum)

[the-ancient-comedy]

This is how my brain processed the scene for some reason.

Virgil: You got sum b*tches worried sick for you in Heaven. Get it together, man.

Or he's just jealous.

[grandhotelabyss]

Hi, hope this isn't a dumb question, but which translation of the divine comedy would you recomend? I would just google it, but fear if reddit would just recomend the most "reddit"-y one for a lack of a better descriptor

I favor the Mandelbaum. He doesn't try for terza rima the way Binyon or Sayers do, which leads to strained rhythms and word choices, but also doesn't settle for a prosaic quasi-blank verse like Musa or Ciardi. Instead he writes a tight poetic line that exploits the genuine sonic resources of English—based not on rhyme but on alliteration—to capture Dante's rich texture in the Italian. (Not that I'm fluent, but I have looked into Dante's Italian.) Plus, Mandelbaum was a brilliant literary thinker in his own right, neither flighty poet nor dry-as-dust scholar; his introductions are superb as are the notes, which I think other scholars contributed. (I read his translation in the three-volume Bantam Classics edition with the Italian on the facing pages, not the big expensive one-volume Everyman's Library.)

Caveat: some people revere the Hollanders' version, which I've never read. It supposedly has the best notes, and, for what it's worth, it appears to be the "Reddit" choice.

[archivist-dragonfly]

Book 396

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno

Verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum / illustrated by Barry Moser

University of California Press 1980

Published in 1980, the California Dante is an absolutely gorgeous set of books. Each volume is beautifully laid out in parallel with Mandelbaum’s verse translation on the verso facing the original Italian. Each book is also printed in two colors—red for Inferno, green for Purgatorio, and blue for Paradiso—highlighting the captions of the illustrations, and each is typeset in an elegant monotype Dante, a typeface designed in 1957 by Giovanni Mardersteig. In total, there are 96 pen and wash drawings in the books, and amazingly Moser began the illustrations for Inferno as late as 1979. However, he states that “most of those which appear in [Inferno] were, in fact, done during a single violently productive month—July, 1979.”

[blogdemocratesjr]

Marcus Claudius Marcellus (neveu d'Auguste) Rome, Fondation Sorgente Group

The morion and the dragonassa by Giovan Francesco Gonzaga

Matthew Dennison, Livia, Empress of Rome (p.135)

The Aeneid: Book VI by Virgil (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)

[rye-views]

The Odyssey of Homer translated by Allen Mandelbaum. 7.6/10

I never knew much about Greek mythology. Is is a mythology? Did people ever actually look up to these gods and goddesses or are these stories? How did we come across this author or Homer and why we can’t tell if he really wrote this and if he is one person and so on.

Are all guests treated so well? WHOMST. Can I be a guest? LOL. This must be for the elite, right? Or like if you just happen to look kindly to a beggar?

Interesting to think about gods and goddesses so into human affairs.

Hearing the word Ithaca triggers me hah.

Memorable Quotes: “But I must – for now – submit and suffer: I’ve no choice.” “at times I ease my heart with tears, but then again, I stop – the chill of endless sadness is too much.” “gave this gift: consummate art and understanding hearts.” “no thing he finds can be more sweet than what he left behind.” “–a bright calm.” “Nothing’s harder for a mortal than roaming” “I do not hold with telling over what has been well told.” “all that is low has gained the upper hand” “when they’re without a master, servants lose the will to work.”

Spoiler: [About Odysseus being away from home for 20 years because of the anger of Poseidon preventing him from coming back. Athena getting approval from Zeus to get him back. Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, waits patiently for his return while suitors are wasting away his wealth and resources as they court her. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, going to Pylos to see if anyone has any word of if his father is alive or not. Odysseus and his men had defeated the Trojans in Troy, Odysseus confined by Calypso because she wants him, Odysseus being taken care of in Nausicaa, being prisoners in the cave of the Cyclops, Odysseus destroying on of the Cyclops’s eye and escaping, constant turmoils on the sea including a bag of winds being unleashed by his shipmates, Laestrygonians eating men, Circe turning the men into swine, travelling to Hades’ hall, Tiresias prophesying Odysseus’s return home, metting his mother’s, and others’, shade, the death of all his comrades due to their greed, Phaeacians and their well built ships helping Odysseus home, his return to Ithaca, and Athena helping disguise him as a beggar. In Ithaca, Odysseus visits his loyal swineherd, Eumaeus, fabricating his life story, testing Eumaeus’s loyalty, Athena telling Telemachus to come home, planning revenge on the suitors, Odysseus revealing himself to only his son, heaing home, all the suitors trashing on Odysseus being a beggar, Penelope welcoming the disguised Odysseus and wanting to know what he knows of Odysseus, learning of disloyal handmaids who consorted with the suitors, Odysseus winning a fight against a beggar named Irus, Eurycleia, Odysseus’s old maid, washing his feet and discovering his scar and recognizing him, keeping it all a secret from his wife, Penelope setting up an archery test to whoever is allowed to win over her, Odysseus being the only one able to string his bow, and the beginning of the killings of the suitors by Odysseus, Telemachus, Eumaeus, and Philoetius. All the suitors killed, the disloyal handmaids hung, mutilated Melanthius, cleansing the halls with fire, Penelope waking and hearing the news, Penelope testing Odysseus to know if he is really him, Odysseus talking about how their bed was made by him and it checks out, them catching up, Odysseus going off to see his father, revealing himself to his father and a joyous reunion, going back hom as rumors fill the town, everyone wants revenge, and a peace and pact is made by Athena and Zeus shutting everyone down.]

[romanticmaterialism]

Those who are here can place no hope in death, and their blind life is so abject that they are envious of every other fate. The world will let no fame of theirs endure; both justice and compassion must disdain them; let us not talk of them, but look and pass.

Virgil to Dante at the Gate of Hell, The Divine Comedy, “Inferno: Canto III”

[reverie-quotes]

As long as I still have some breath of life, I'll try—and try again.

— Ovid, The Metamorphoses