Divina Commedia

just finished this and holy shit Dante is a fucking genius. I always mocked the Italians for only having one relevant work of literature (inb4 Eco) but what a work it is. I probably only got 33% of what Dante was trying to express here and I guess you can devote your entire life studying this epic. It so dense and packed with theology/scholaticism/philosophy/astrology/ethics/politics/history and what not.
I enjoyed Inferno and Purgatorio most, I thought Paradiso was a little to heavy on the theology/astrology.

Anyways have you read it? Thoughts ? What would you recommend reading as a follow up/secondary literature?

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More Aristotle, Bible, and Virgil

>33%

dont overestimate yourself bucko

but yes it's excellent. read the complete notes in the singleton and hollander editions

this basically. read these and re-read, preferaby with notes

>What is the decameron.

If you didn't read it in italian you have lost all the poetical beauty of it

brainlet detected

this
pleb anglo detected
did you read it in italian?

>I always mocked the Italians for only having one relevant work of literature
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Paradise Lost, Bible

Don't forget Aquinas, Augustine and Ovid,

B R A I N L E T

yes I know I will probably never be able to appreciate at it's full potential :<
have read those
have read Ovid, do you like Aquinas or Augustine better? which work would you recommend?
I now read a prose version with tons of notes and similar a blank verse version to at least catch some of it's aesthetic beauty
read Bible and Virgil, which Aristotle would you recommend ?

>singleton

This.

This is absolutely disgusting to me, that Americans will defy the artistic intentions of Dante-san by reading translations unaccompanied by a recording of the Italian. The only authentic way to experience La Commedia is to play a recording of the poem being read in Italian and reading along in English, like subtitles. This is the only authentic experience. No, I cannot understand Italian, but I get a lot out of the intonation of the reader. Italy is a dignified culture, and Dante-san would be shocked that fat American stranieri were experiencing his work this way. It is an insult, and you should all be ashamed.

This, I had just started reading it when I listened to a Borges conference on it, and he read some verses in the original and it was so extreamly better than the translation that I just couldn't keep reading without feeling I was reading the shit tier version, almost felt scammed.

>not actually moving to Italy and sitting where Dante took a crap.

Found the pleb.

I don't know why that picture is so fucking funny

>read Bible and Virgil
Including the Eclogues and Georgics?

>which Aristotle would you recommend ?
Aristotle's corpus is sizable and varied, On the Soul and Metaphysics are a must for Dante and I'm positive they equip the reader better for the purposes of understanding Paradiso.

If you want the whole package of the corpus aristotelicum: Ethics>Politics>On Poetry>The Organon>Physics>On the Soul>Metaphysics>Rhetoric

English translation-wise, the standard is the two volume Revised Oxford.

Other philosophical works for Dante are:
Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae
Cicero's De Amicitia

>have read Ovid, do you like Aquinas or Augustine better? which work would you recommend?
Augustine's Confessions and City of God
Aquinas's Shorter Summa: Saint Thomas's Own Concise Version of His Summa Theologica
because the Summa Theologica is immensely long.

Then there's Dante's own philosophical work and introduction to philosophy, the Convivio.

Dante basically read all the Latin writers he could get his hands on, so if want to read Dante and already started with the Greeks, do continue with the Romans.

More Dante:
La Vita Nuova
Eclogues
Le Rime
De Monarchia, which is his treatise on political philosophy

I would never recommend De vulgari eloquentia to anybody who doesn't speak or study Italian, as it is the foundational text of the scholarly project that we now call the Italian language.

QUESTION IS
Will i be able to read it after year of daily Duolingo and Memrise or should i not bother?

youtube.com/watch?v=aBGq11ODudA

Obviously I won't learn a language as useless as Italian to appreciate this book is it true that I must read it in Italian? Srs answers plz.

Well, it depends on the translation, but most don't even attempt the terza rima, which is.... extremely important.

Well, since you probably know only english, it would be nice of you to get at least on the level of the european posters in this thread, by learning a second one.

And yes, it's harder and less used than english, but you'll be able to save your ass from a mob that decides to kill you by pretending you're related or something, and in the meantime score mad latina punani. Profit!

>Lui non parla quattre lingue
Lol pleb.

I do want to learn another language but I'm going to learn either Farsi or Mandarin.

is itallian similiar to french?

Italian fag here.
I'm studying french and it seems pretty easy to learn. So yes, it's very similar.

>it's real
holy... i want more

>fellow Italian fag, how'd you end up in this cesspool?

also french and spanish are pretty easy for italian speakers, and german is somewhat manageable if you already know english and studied latin or greco antico in school like we do.

A lot of people have regretted learning the chinks' language, but Farsi is beautiful as fuck. Go for that senpai.

Fuck off crypto-anglo.

>Italians for only having one relevant work of literature
t. doesn't know jack shit about literary history

I will probably never be able to read the Holy Comedy. I bought the book about a year and a half ago and I'm still on the Greeks. After wads comes a shit ton of Romans I haven't read yet and reading posts like this just adds more and more shit for me to read in order to properly appreciate Dantes work.

yea, for what I have read, dante didn't read that many greeks, but he was strongly influenced by aquinas, which had as main study topic aristotle. so sure, studying aristotle is very important, not to understand dante, but to understand aquinas and consequently dante.

user, you don't have to read every single book from homer to dante, thats impossible. read the most important works and/or works that interest you.

my recommendation: read the divine comedy now. seriously. don't wait until you have read all books in your list, read it now.

Divine comedy was the first Veeky Forums book I read, I had no philosophy, literature, theology or historical background, seriously, I didn't know who odysseus was. Still, I enjoyed it a lot and it inspired me (almost forced me) to start reading literature and philosophy seriously, and now, couple years later, I am re-reading after reading homer, hesiod, the greek playwrights, joyce, the bible, and it is magnificent. its very nice to re-read a work after some time, you will be able to notice how much you evolved since you read it
, you will get much more references and will get more out of it

and yea, I am still finishing the greek playwrights, next I will read herodotus and thucydides, then some greek mathematicians like euclid, apollonius, archimedes and nichomachus to finally make it to plato and aristotle, so tldr, I am reading it the second time not even half-way throught the greeks, and I am being able to enjoy it a lot. don't wait months/years to read something you would like to read now, that you discourage you and you might give up

plus, its always important to re-read books, specially one like divine comedy, so read it now, the next time you read it with more background, you will get even more out of it

>the butthurt is strong among anglos in this thread

You're better off just reading a couple major works of each movement than exhaustively studying the canon before Dante. After that you can come back to more ancient stuff with the Comedy fresh in your mind.

>t. buttmad italiano

jk petrarch is a baller