/lit/ - Literature

>>21892666

>>21892666
Is Shakespeare worth reading?

>>21892666
Appropriate get

>>21892770
When you're a teenager

If The Divine Comedy were a movie as famous as the work of literature, you watched it by now or not instead of asking if it’s worth watching. The Divine Comedy is one of the ten works of western literature in which it is indisputably worth reading and essential for anyone serious about literature

>>21892994
which other works do you have on that list mr. pirate

>>21892992
One starts Shakespeare in their teens, with the comedies, but one stays with him throughout their lives.

With Dante one knows the Catholic mind. Shakespeare, our fellow man's mind

>>21893065
>their

>>21892666
Yes

>>21893004
The New Testament (OT is not technically western), The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses, Don Quixote, Shakespeare (plays are very short and his corpus can be assembled in one volume), Paradise Lost, Eugene Onegin,

>>21892666
read Canto I of the Divine Comedy and decide for yourself. will take you less than 10 mins

>>21892757
Dante does praise himself a bit in the Divine Comedy, but he's far from a Chad. The book is him needing to be rescued from a mid-life crisis and then constantly being terrified and overwhelmed by what he sees.

>>21893065
Are you quoting anyone here anon? If not, thanks for being thoughtful and making lit a better place. What is your favorite work by Shakespeare?

>>21893106
>nothing postmodern
trash list, add white noise and I'll consider

>>21893436
Stfu faggot

>>21893436
Western literature has existed for three-thousand years, it would be demanding a lot to suggest books from the last few decades can quality to be the most influential and crucial masterpieces of that period.

>>21893494
>>21893495
>filtered by white noise

>>21893069
>One starts Shakespeare in they're teens
>One starts Shakespeare in there teens
You one of those sex scolds? You think we need to go back to exclusively male actors for Shakespearian plays?

>>21893540
one's, retard

Does the Hollander editions help you deepen your appreciation of the poem or is it more of an encyclopaedic thing full of facts?

>>21893494
>>21893495
>Western literature has existed for 3,000 years
>... but that 3,000 year timeframe doesn't include the last 50 years ... somehow

I finished his comedy recently and my answer is absolutely. Inferno and Purgatorio helped wean me off suicidal ideation because of the power with which they portrayed the depths of human suffering and remorse. I've read books that touched me in my heart before, but never until The Divine Comedy had one reached my soul, and held it too for almost the entirety of those two books.
Paradiso is the odd one out unfortunately if you aren't religious or interest in theology, but it's still incredibly well written, having some of the best scenes in the trilogy.
There's really no reason not to read Dante unless you're allergic to all of the translations.

>>21893683
Which translation do you recommend? All the ones I've encountered were lackluster in some way

>>21893548
That would not be grammatically correct and you know it.

>>21893708
I got Hollanders' going off of this chart and I enjoyed it greatly.

>>21893555
The Hollander edition is the best translation, while it begins in a sort of sluggish free verse, early into Inferno it definitely starts reflecting the rhythm of Dante. As for the notes deepening your appreciation versus being and encyclopedia, they’re both. There are thousands of details in the poem they will clue you in one that might not notice otherwise and present various interpretations of scholars who authorities on Dante from Dante’s own son Jacobo who wrote a commentary, all the way until present day scholarship. Here for an example is from notes on when Dante encounters Belacqua in Purgatory

>The tenzone-like tone (see note to Inf. VIII.31–39) of jesting rivalry that marks the rest of this scene may have been previously set in real life. A tale has come down to us, first found in Benvenuto’s commentary (1380), yet almost always cited by later commentators only from the Anonimo Fiorentino’s more pleasing account (1400). According to him, Dante frequently reproached Belacqua for his sloth. One day Belacqua quoted Aristotle (the seventh chapter of the Physics, a passage also found in Monarchia I.iv.2): “The soul becomes wise when one is seated and quiet.” To this Dante supposedly replied: “If sitting can make a man wise, no one is wiser than you.”

Or another note from this area

>For a moment we feel drawn out of the moralizing concerns and serious tones of the two poets. Manica (Mani.2000.1), p. 35, calls attention to the great importance of Dante’s Belacqua to Samuel Beckett’s fiction. According to him, Belacqua becomes a contemporary myth of irony rather than a depiction of the loss of will; however, he may not sense how much of the Beckettian view of Belacqua is already present in Dante. Much of Beckett’s work is a kind of rewriting of the Dantean universe from the point of view of Belacqua alone, a universe of waiting, boredom, question, and frustration, as in the early short story “Belacqua and the Lobster” and certainly including the rock-snuggled hoboes of Waiting for Godot.

>>21893712
retard

Do I have to read Bible beforehand to understand it?

>>21892994
You say this but no one reads Purgatorio or Paradiso...

>>21895075
I fear you are new here if you believe that

>>21893572
50 is a 60th part of 3000. You would need a 60 books list to 100% include one made in a specific period of time of 50 years

>>21894651
you should
you should also read as much of the Greeks, Romans and early Latins as possible
Don Alighieri was a historian and scholar of his time, and thus makes literally thousands of references to those who came before

>>21893106
>No Faust
ngmi

>>21894651
You have to read the Bible to understand most of western literature and if you don't think so it's because you don't understand most of what you read.

>>21895950
Faust is on my list of eleven in the thread on I did. I was constrained to ten here

>>21895989
Accepted

>>21893540
sex scolds were always correct.

>>21893106
Is there a reason you'd put the Aeneid there? I really don't think it deserves that slot, either on the quality of the verse or the essential structure of the plot.

I'd rather take one of the plays of Eurypides, or one of Pliny's writings in that slot.

>>21893106
>Bible
Garbage, and you can get way more from every one of its derivatives. I'd tell zoomers to read the Divine Comedy far before they read the Bible, because even *it* questions the absurdly stupid theological paradoxes arising from the censored mysticism of Jewish farmers. The OT is complete garbage (especially if you read the KJV), but the NT doesn't stay far behind.
>The Illiad, The Aeneid
Meh. Requirements, of sorts, but only midwits feel the need to be bound by those.
>The Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Don Quixote
These are good. The rest feels like the type of meme answer someone with "le canon" as a backlog would blabber mindlessly, the kind of retard that instead of reading is instead in love with the idea of appearing erudite in spite of his intellectual laziness and possible retardation. Shakespeare has his ups and downs and suffers mostly from his debt to theater, and out of his canonized list Hamlet is the perfect bubble displaying all his qualities and none of his failures. Pushkin and Milton, though? Yuck.

>>21896108
>Illiad

>>21896108
Posts like this are always great because the midwittery speaks for itself. I agree that if you're worried about le epic theological paradoxes you should keep your greasy little hands off the Bible.

>>21896108
>midwit
>le
>>21896122
>midwittery
>le
I can't tell who's right; they both argumentwinningwords.

>>21896074
I put the Aeneid in there because of the magnitude of its influence. Both Dante and Milton considered it the finest poem ever written and it held great sway on their own work. If you differ with them that is fine but objectively it is a crucial work to read

>>21896108
>I'd tell zoomers to read the Divine Comedy far before they read the Bible, because even *it* questions the absurdly stupid theological paradoxes arising from the censored mysticism of Jewish farmers.

In terms of poetic beauty The Book of Job is superior to anything in the Comedy.

Not that I am religious or feel a need to defend the Bible. Most of Dante is greater than what one finds in the Bible (as literature). But when it comes down to poetry some few moments of the Pslams and the Prophets, and most of The Book of Job, not to mention the main monologues of Job and those of God from inside the bowels of the storm are superior as poetry.

>>21896108
I never feel the need to take seriously he opines of those who like cartoon porn

>>21896158
This relies heavily on what you value in poetry. The simplicity and universality of Purgatorio is by far the Comedy's greatest strength. The Book of Job has some great passages, but it requires the modern reader to adapt it to their values for efficient reading.

>>21896108
Anon, you objectively get much less from reading future western works without the grounding in christian motifs from the Bible.

[also same for reading the Odyssey without the Illiad]

>>21896152
Fair enough.

>>21896200
Most based namefag

>>21892757
Funny enough "pettiness" is the criticism Tolkien had about The Divine Comedy and why he disliked it.

>>21896241
>you objectively get much less from reading future western works without the grounding in christian motifs from the Bible.
Not really? Okay, let's unpack this for future reference. Most Christian motifs present everywhere in literature are so canonized they're also in every face of culture and ingrained at the very basis of most European languages including English. This means everyone is well-versed in its beliefs and philosophical questions and revelations and symbols: even the crackhead gas station attendant, even the soulless Walmart drone, even the most ignorant and internet-addicted of thots know the gist of Christian myth, from Genesis to Revelation, its theological questions and numerology, and will develop their own spirituality taking this, and the ever-evolving beast that's God, as basis. What you're ultimately getting from scripture in the 21st, post-Christian century is a handful of trivia ranging from the already known to the completely irrelevant, gained after a month or so of religiously trudging through an old, dusty, thick, badly translated and thoroughly worthless book, while simultaneously ignoring the cries of the new God evolving right in front of you.
The relationship between writers and scripture isn't so different. Take your classics: Moby Dick, Brothers Karamazov, etc.; their relationships with God are in themselves constructs and philosophical deconstructions of the time they were written in and the God they knew, which is an ever-changing universal image grounded in the type of lexical evolution that also makes this figure very familiar to any modern readers. This has been the case from even before the birth of the English language or its translations of the books. Your understanding of Dante or T.S. Eliot or whoever else you feel like you SHOULD read will be the same whether you've engaged in spiritual torture or not. The point then becomes: why bother? This would be different if the Bible had any supplemental worth to it (like Metamorphoses, for example), but it doesn't. It's outdated belief. It's dead word. It's non-existent culture. Poetry's ultimate relationship with God isn't through scripture and a few verbatim quotes so canonized they've become their own symbols isn't worth the effort. It's ironic that the Bible has become its own cultural vacuum, and a quite damaging one at that, but it is. To pretend and insist otherwise is a ground ripe for intellectual dishonesty and projected stupidity.
>>21896200
lol

^ don't feed the troll it wants attention

>>21893106
>these popular books /lit/ told me to read are the 10 best books in the entirety of Western literature.

such basic taste, you're no better than normies who read Harry Potter and ASOIaF.

>>21896470
It might help your reading comprehension.

>>21896470
there aren't that many truly great books

>>21896470
If you had to choose 10 essential works of Western literature, what would they be?

>cope about unable to choose just 10
Ok, out of your selections choose any 10 as examples.

>>21893106
Agree with the rest but explain these:
>Milton before Faust
>Pushkin

>>21896619
Based fellow faust bro

>>21896619
I agree with that. 'Eugene' might be essential to Russian literature, but in no way is it essential to Western literature as a whole. Not sure what to replace it with, however.

>>21893683
Yeah Paradise it's definitely the weak one, I almost couldn't stand the constant flattery towards anyone Dante deemed good, I could swear it felt like 50% of the contents in this part. But it's weird, I didn't mind the spiteful remarks about the people in hell.

>>21896619
Milton before Faust is someone arbitrary, Milton being more important to English and Faust to continental.

>>21896645
When I listed eleven in a thread and their translations, Faust was the eleventh

Eugene Onegin while not directly influencing literature outside Russia, exerted such and an intense and direct influence on Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky and all Russian writers that most of the ideas of Russian literature which held such power to minds like Nietzsche and Kafka, come from Eugene Onegin in some form in the same way that Homer exerted a major influence on, say, Dante even though he never read him but read Latin literature. Eugene Onegin was a prototype for characters as diverse as Pechorin and the Underground Man and Oblomov (and each of the characters has a romantic arc built on similar tension of self-sabotage). Eugene Onegin took the concept of the Byronic Hero and from it created the motif into the Superfluous Man which embodied the individual unable to belong because he can suddenly look at society from a different vantage without all his engrained perspectives and what he sees leaves him no longer feeling familiar with what should feel familiar to him, instead it feels strange and foreign and unfamiliar, the condition of what Heidegger called the modern sense of homelessness which would increasingly define humanity’s place in the world.

>>21898000
If you think Pushkin is more important to western culture than Goethe then you’re an idiot. If you think the superfluous man archetype is more essential to western culture than the faustian bargain trope then you’re an idiot. You mention Pushkin’s influence but fail to enunerate Goethe’s. It’s clear you’re letting your personal taste cloud an otherwise objective (as much as an exercise like this can be) your judgment.

Just admit you’re wrong, I’m like the third person on here that agrees with all your choices except Pushkin over Goethe. It’s so egregious I don’t even want to agree with you on the others because I doubt your taste so much.

>>21892666
Yes!

>>21898049
I don't know whether you're attacking my taste or idea of influence, as those are separate questions. To say that Pushkin is a better poet than Goethe is just as valid as saying Shakespeare or Dante is better than Goethe; Shakespeare and Dante and Pushkin were so influential in their literature that they basically singlehanded established the baseline of the form for their language that endures to this day. Goethe did not accomplish anything like this in German, the Luther Bible would be the analogue. As a textual accomplishment, I also consider Eugene Onegin as pushing the metatextual in strikingly new ways and giving an unparalleled portrait of life imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life and how blurred and difficult it is to truly distinguish between them

>>21892965
Wtf how... that's demonic

>>21896446
so much words to say absolutely nothing. None of those books give you full context without foundation. Keep dilating though tranime faggot.

>>21892666
Start reading, stop if you feel like stopping.

>>21897766

The Great Courses has a really good course on the Comedia by two Dante scholars. They note that of all the groups they teach Dante to, regular university students tend to like Inferno the most. Convicts are drawn to Purgatorio, and monks are some of the only people with both the education and time to fully appreciate Paradisio.

>>21892666
Yes, you know how english critics think that Shakespeare is somewhat important and good? Well they are right only when they observe english stuff, if you look a little outside your little house of leaves you shall see that this man build a giant temple of incredible stone that reaches the sky.
It's worth reading, it's formative, it's basically worth being in the Bible.
No don't ask me for translations I've read it in my own language.
Buona giornata estimati utenti anonimi della mia ceppa di minchia.

>>21892666
Yes, you know how chinese critics think that Cao Xueqin is somewhat important and good? Well they are right only when they observe chinese stuff, if they look a little outside their little house of tea leaves they shall see that this man build a giant temple of incredible stone that reaches the sky.
It's worth reading, it's formative, it's basically worth being in the Bible.
No don't ask me for translations I've read it in my own conlang.
दासमासळीसंगनदीनोरोस्त्रीदासालसबिणीदिगोबाडी

>>21896446
The last based post on /lit/.

>>21893106
Yusuf, I always liked your posts in the poetry threads; you seemed so knowledgable, but now…