Divina Commedia : Dante’s epic written (c.1310-14); the Divina was added by a later generation of his admirers. Divided into three major sections – Inferno, Purgatorio, & Paradiso – symbolising the journey from darkness & error to the revelation of the divine light culminating in the Beatific Vision of God.
... reached me. I don't think I can resist replying to it. I have already started writing but before I send the reply I should like to post you my "transcreation" of the last canto of Dante's Divina Commedia. It is bound to please you more than my letter. Yours sincerely, K. D. SETHNA 27.11.83 Dear Father Griffiths, I feel somewhat concerned about you. Is your health all... Page 193 and I am not carrying on with you merely an academic debate. Behind the debate there is on the one side the man who wrote The Secret Splendour and "The Close of Dante's Divina Commedia" and on the other the man who has responded both profoundly and acutely to these works and who has penned that little personal masterpiece of religio-spiritual seeking, The Golden String, ...
... Overhead Poetry THE CLOSE OF DANTE'S "DIVINA COMMEDIA" ("PARADISO", Canto 33) St. Bernard Supplicates on Behalf of Dante "O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son! Life's pinnacle of shadowless sanctity, Yet, with the lustre of God-union, Outshining all in chaste humility— Extreme fore-fixed by the supernal Mind, Unto... Then vigour failed the towering fantasy— for Dante's All' altafantasia qui manco possa, has been taken bodily from Carey's 19th -century translation of the complete Divina Commedia in semi-Miltonic blank verse. Carey's expression here seemed impossible to better and so any attempt to be original would have been a betrayal of poetry. We may realise the neces sity of the ...
... On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA TWO LETTERS 1 The thesis you have passed on to me cannot stand as it is. Although the research is excellent its foundation is rather unfortunate and needs some modification. If left without a shift in perspective, it will blur the truth of... Aurobindonian symphony. And the chord would be all the more authentic because Sri Aurobindo, as the author of the thesis should know, was familiar with Italian sufficiently to read the Divina Commedia in the original. But nothing really links up Savitri with this mighty product of the Middle Ages of Europe in an organic and inevitable manner. I go to the length of asserting that even if ...
... unit. C. Day Lewis represents them by: To tell of the war and the hero who first from Troy's frontier, Displaced by destiny, came to the Lavinian shores, To Italy.... Dante's Divina Commedia runs its start into a trio of lines setting the terza rima moving. In Dorothy Sayers's version we have: Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark... not such a succession of long vowels mostly driven home by strong stresses as in Sri Aurobindo's picture _______________ 1[Amal Kiran, The Secret Splendour, 'Dante on the Eve of the Divina Commedia', p. 34.] 2 [Ibid., 'No Mortal Breath', p. 162.] Page 262 -a picture supported grandly, after a one-line interval, by the vision of the verse which is concerned directly ...
... A voyager upon uncharted routes Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown, Adventuring across enormous realms, He broke into another Space and Time. 38 After a divina-commedia-like. journey covering the world-stair - Ascending and descending twixt life's poles The seried kingdoms of the graded Law - 39 Aswapathy dares yet another ascent of aspiration... understanding for the mind or soul. Likewise, the ikon - be it verbal or a projection in colour or form - can leap to significance only if the soul within clicks to attention and re-enacts the divina commedia of the death of Death and the return to absolute sovereignty of the Soul that is Truth as well as Love. Later still, on 18 January 1968, the Mother commenced another sādhanā: reading ...
... s's Strife, Nature's disintegrating disheartening movement). From Lucretius to Dante the transition is from naturalism to supematuralism which finds its sublimest expression in his Divina Commedia. A great poem, it strangely unifies romance, epic, drama, lyric; it grows on a scale that is grander even than the Iliad, in that it is based, philosophically, on the Scholastic system of... motion, by the love impelled That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars. The poet had arrived at a general sense of sublimity in existence. We can now see Savitri and The Divina Commedia together. One is symbolic, the other mainly allegoric, — and that makes a difference. Beatrice is love in man leading to personal salvation; Savitri is the grace on earth working for transformation... the speech of the spiritual and not the glimmering beauty of a mystical experience, it is not the sybil who speaks here but the seer." 18 Goethe's Faust, accounted after Dante' s Divina Commedia as the greatest single poem of the Western world, is the work of "a high poetic intelligence, written with a great skill and inspired subtlety of language and effective genius." But there is ...
... skilfully managed, has not the same value as the Homeric, the English alexandrine does not render the French; terza rima in Latinised Saxon sounds entirely different from the noble movement of the Divina Commedia, the stiff German blank verse of Goethe & Schiller is not the golden Shakespearian harmony. It is not only that there are mechanical differences, a strongly accentuated language hopelessly varying... sublimities it lends itself admirably, but I should doubt whether it could even Page 247 in the strongest hands sustain the burden of a long & noble epic of the soul & mind like the Divina Commedia. But it is not true that it cannot be made in English a perfectly natural, effective & musical form. It is certainly surprising that Shelley with his instinct for melody, did not perceive the ...
... 566 Dante Approaches the Beatific Vision 193 Dante at the Tomb of Beatrice 703 Dante meets Beatrice in Purgatory 384 Dante on the Eve of the 'Divina Commedia' 34 Dawn 51 Day nor Night 24 Daybreak 611 De Profundis 454 Death's Hour 533 December 5, 1950 556 Deeps 110 Deluge... Thank God... 184 The Absolute Dream 348 The Adventure of the Apocalypse 295 The Blind Bellow 310 The Call 506 The Close of Dante's Divina Commedia' ('Paradiso', Canto 33) 192 The Crescent of Beauty 428 The Crowning Vision of Dante 194 The Dead 416 The Death of Vivekananda 534 ...
... seem to suggest that they are hiding somewhere. The vision of an exercise-book provides the clue most probably. I am reminded of a very important historical case. The last few cantos of Dante's Divina Commedia were missing. At least the very last is absolutely the ne plus ultra of poetry, I have made a translation or rather a transcreation of it. It is included in "Overhead Poetry": Poems with... complete poem published to the immense benefit of the world's aesthetico-religious mind. Before I came to know of this incident I had written a short story involving the manuscript of the Divina Commedia. There Page 282 the pile of the poet's writing is saved from being destroyed by a fire. Around this point a dramatic sequence of events is woven, posing an intense moral-aesthetic ...
... Inspiration and Effort SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA TWO LETTERS 1 The thesis you have passed on to me cannot stand as it is. Although the research is excellent its foundation is rather unfortunate and needs some modification. If left without a shift in perspective, it will blur the truth of the... Aurobindonian symphony. And the chord would be all the more authentic because Sri Aurobindo, as the author of the thesis should know, was familiar with Italian sufficiently to read the Divina Commedia in the original. But nothing really links up Savitri with this mighty product of the Middle Ages of Europe in an organic and inevitable manner. I go to the length of asserting that even if ...
... The Secret Splendour THE CLOSE OF DANTE'S "DIVINA COMMEDIA" ("PARADINO", Canto 33) St. Bernard Supplicates on Behalf of Dante "O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son! Life's pinnacle of shadowless sanctity, Yet, with the lustre of God-union, Outshining all in chaste humility— Extreme fore-fixed by the supernal Mind, Unto... that the line— Then vigour failed the towering fantasy— for Dante's All' alta fantasia qui manco possa, has been taken bodily from Carey's 19th-century translation of the complete Divina Commedia in semi-Miltonic blank verse. Carey's expression here seemed impossible to better and so any attempt to be original would have been a betrayal of poetry. We may realise the necessity of the plagiarism ...
... compares himself with the nightingale. This is perhaps the most unexpected comparison an epic poet could have made. We hardly conceive of Homer's Iliad or Vyasa's Mah ā bh ā rata or Dante's Divina Commedia as a nightingale's song. Least of all would we normally associate this song with Paradise Lost. The nightingale reminds us of Catullus and Campion, Sappho and Sarojini Naidu. It is a symbol... upon his story: once only he breaks out into a personal cry, a glorious passage all Latinists have by heart: "Fortunati ambo!..." 5 Dante is more felt in his work and that is because the Divina Commedia is in the first person, a kind of autobiography: it tells of the poet's own journey through Page 44 Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. But Dante fills his poem with so much ...
... not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost . The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end and ...
... not the merely emotion-flushed heart but the heart in which, as Sophocles puts it, are engraved those eternal laws whose home is the high ether. By the way, the famous last line of Dante's Divina Commedia, which we once translated with a slight freedom at the end— The love that moves the sun and all the stars— is Aristotelian and not Romantico-mystic. It is not the doctrine that God is ...
... there, rather the very opposite, an anti-religious thought based on the theories of Democritus and Epicurus, also the story-element which plays through La Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost is absent. Dante is distin-guished by a severe and concise and clear-cut force of intellect with a strong intuitive drive which affects ...
... Lewis represents them by: To tell of the war and the hero who first from Troy's frontier, Displaced by destiny, came to the Lavinian shores, To Italy... Dante's Divina Commedia runs its start into a trio of lines setting the terza rima moving. In Dorothy Sayers's version we have: Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark ...
... The Secret Splendour (An adaptation and fusion of two famous speeches of Beatrice to Virgil in the Divina Commedia ) "O courteous soul of Mantuar poesy, Whose fame for ever on God's earth endures - A friend not of my fortune but of me Roves through a desert, driven from his course By obstacles so grave my I heart has fear Lest ...
... over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece ...
... dozen greatest; it is Page 22 Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost. The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end ...
... A voyager upon uncharted routes Fronting the viewless danger of the Unknown, Adventuring across enormous realms, He broke into another Space and Time. 30 After a Divina-Commedia-like journey covering the world-stair — Ascending and descending twixt life's poles The seried kingdoms of the graded Law — 31 Aswapati dares yet another ascent of aspiration ...
... Purani, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: An Approach and a Study, p. 25. in it. While in the Iliad we have a great historic fight recounted in simple style, there is no story in Dante's Divina Commedia in that sense. Then, it comes out that the story need not be a historical fact; only it must have a poetic reality. Further, the authentic epic tells the story in a grand manner. One of its ...
... Aeschylus is audacious in colour and image, Dante burdened with beauty and significance in the midst of his forcefully cut conciseness. We may add, with Sri Aurobindo - especially apropos of Dante's Divina Commedia but also to some extent in relation to Milton's Paradise Lost - that "austerity... is not incompatible with a certain fineness and sweetness". 17 Notes and References ...
... not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost . The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end ...
... Odysseus, the mission of Hanuman to Lanka in the Ramayana, or Gilgamesh's voyage through Darkness, follow the peregrination motif as it found expression in the epics of later times, notably in the Divina Commedia, mark its variation in Satan's voyage across Chaos in Paradise Lost, and observe how the motif is treated in Savitri, first in the description of Aswapati's Yoga, apparently (though not really) ...
... forms; as Kenner puts it, "a slight change in the angle of cut will reveal a wholly new surface". 39 Kenner's own analyses are very rewarding, especially the 'volitional' cut that reveals a Divina Commedia in the Cantos —with its own Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradise 40 Nevertheless, the Cantos remain, on a first or second or even third reading, a maddening work. It is an important ...
... SAVITRI: ITS ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN On a first view it cannot be denied that the original scheme of Savitri in two parts had a neat simplicity, even as the scheme of the Divina Commedia (Hell: Purgatory: Paradise) has an obvious rounded completeness. However, a closer view will show that the revised Savitri too is not lacking in a firm architectural design. The poem begins ...
... style in poetry. For example, Milton's Fall'n cherub! to be weak is miserable (Paradise Lost, Book I, 1. 157) Or Dante's E'n La sua volontade è nostra pace...¹ (La Divina Commedia 'Paradiso', III. 85) What could be easier or more natural, more common and colloquial than such expression? Milton's line may be taken as an exception to his usual style, but the entire ...
... dream-dialect of delight. O Absolute, O vivid Infinite. 129 Revelatory, epiphanic, these pointer-readings in the interior occult countries the world-stair are the prelude airs to the Divina Commedia that is Savitri. Page 652 ...
... Deshpande, Keshavrao G., 47,55,56,57,64, 189,193 Deuskar, Sakharam Ganesh, 190 Dev, Radhakanta, 14 Dharma, 50, 201, 335, 336, 344ff, 359,361, 368, 370, 399,449 Divina Commedia ("The Divine Comedy'), 92, 663-64 Diwakar, R. R., 66 Donnelly, Morwenna, 736 Dream of Surreal Science, A, 160, 650-51 Drewett, The Rev. William, 29ff Drewett ...
... vast philosophical prose epic...on the spiritual evolution of the universe" and describes Sri Aurobindo as "a self-exiled and self-imprisoned Dante" and The Life Divine as, "a philosophical Divina Commedia having its Inferno in the Spirit's descent into the ignorance of mind, life and matter, its Purgatorio in the ascent to the true knowledge of the so-called Supermind and its Paradiso in the ineffable ...
... nectarean, and it was as the Mother of Love that she manifested a power of 'the The Divine Shakti not hitherto witnessed - or witnessed to an equal degree - in the world. The symphonic Divina Commedia of Dante concludes with a peal in of praise of "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars". Love is indeed the heart-beat that sustains and gives rapture to the phenomenal world. "Love ...
... he cites in the course of it two or three stanzas from his own rendering of Page 91 the Meghaduta, the otherwise lost Cloud-Messenger in terza rima, the metre of Dante's Divina Commedia. We have now perforce to be satisfied with these significant samples of the translator's art: "Dark like the cloudy foot of highest God When starting from the dwarf-shape world-immense ...
... Poetry is often supposed to be born perfect at one stroke, a flawless uninterrupted outburst. The result of striving and straining is declared to be no poetry. But what does Dante say about his Divina Commedia? "Si che m'ha fatto per piu anni macro" -which means that his poem made him "lean through many a Page 1 year." If even a master-singer found that climbing Parnassian heights ...
... fellow-poet's masterpiece at the sacrifice of his own mother's life though not necessarily as a deliberate act of callousness towards her — the point is also that the masterpiece saved is the Divina Commedia of Dante. If you enter imaginatively into the importance felt of this poem by Page 182 all who read poetry with their deepest soul as well as with their living entrails and ...
... The Secret Splendour Dante on the Eve of the 'Divina Commedia' Gloom-bird they call me—for I brood apart. One with night's incommunicable mind, All human frenzy quenched within my heart By the haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind That blows, star-fragrant, from eternity. Drunk with the Unknown, I wander mute and blind; ...
... the human spirit, if not the greatest. Indeed, when compared with the most brilliant passages of the Gilgamesh epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey , the works of the Greek tragedians, Dante’s Divina Commedia or the best of Shakespeare, the Gita soars above them all because of its philosophical and spiritual depth, its representative significance for the human condition, and the tragic though glorious ...
... to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri . And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of mind marked by a high seriousness, a cosmic outlook on life in general and a weaving together of many strains of knowledge. Then there ...
... the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri. And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of mind marked by a high seriousness, a cosmic outlook on life in general and a weaving together of many strains of knowledge. Then ...
... Florence a few weeks before, initiating God-knows-what new era of inner history and soul-development. It needs a never-forgetting Florentine like Dante to plumb with the triple rhymes of his Divina Commedia the profound cadence of this unexpected movement from vertical through Page 25 slanting to horizontal. Corresponding to his terza rima, there is his threefold adventure in the ...
... "the final outburst of inexplicable joy" is one of the world's master-movements of it. Among European achievements 1 would incline to couple with it the whole last canto of "Paradiso" in Dante's Divina Commedia, closing on that unforgettable note which one may venture to English, a little freely, thus: Then vigour failed the towering fantasy; Yet, like a wheel whose speed no tremble mars. ...
... to be not so precious as that which we misread by taking the line in vacuo. Sometimes the popular interpretation, though inaccurate, is not inferior to the poet's original drift. Dante's Divina Commedia closes with the line: L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle, which may be Englished: The love that moves the sun and the other stars. Christendom has been haunted for centuries ...
... —over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittendy and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece ...
... goddess, daughter of heaven. From the artistic viewpoint the Odyssey is a particularly difficult poem to translate; for, has not Sri Aurobindo spoken of "the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions" to the fact that all the great epics achieve greatness in spite of "deficiencies if not failures" in them? 1 The proper form to keep the needed inspiration winging ...
... Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will give ending. Dante also is no mean master of the same art; and Milton of Paradise Lost can match the poets of both the Aeneid and La Divina Commedia. Indeed Milton demonstrates most Page 244 impressively how Melopoeia could be not only lyrical but also epical, a stupendous music in which a grandiose meaning finds organic r ...
... Truth's opulent limb-gesture and robe-undulation. Intuition is at work behind the revealing reticence that is the Dantesque utterance: only, the style of the decisive sparing stroke in the Divina Commedia mostly converts into a mental incisiveness the sheer piercing Truth-touch. Even in that touch, however, the direct knowledge is not complete; the whole sense of the divine being and becoming ...
... Confucius, 222 Copernicus, 308 Cordelia, 185n Corneille, 197 Crete, 214 Cyrus, 240 Czechoslovakia, 100 DANTE, 39, 79, 197 . - Divina Commedia, 39 Darshallas, the, 344 Das, Prof. A. C., 336-9 Dasarathi, 91 De Broglie, Louis, 319 -La Physique Nouvelle et les Quanta, 319n Democritus, 326 ...
... "Sleep of Light", Sun-Blossoms , p. 46. × "E'n la sua volontade è nostra pace", La Divina Commedia , "Paradiso", canto 3, 85. ...
... 189, 191,209, 243, 283, 317 Christianity, 192 Chronos, 226 Colbert, 209, 411 Congo, 323-4 Curie, 428 Cyclops, 99 DAITYA, 46 Danege1d, 117 Dante, l8ln., 203, 209 – Divina Commedia, 181n. – Irifemo, 181n. Danton, 94 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 210 Debussy, 427 Devas, 253 Dhammapada , the, 9n., 159 Dionysus, 47 Dirghatamas, 44 Page 431 ...
... denouement of an unrolling of God's play of creation and world manifestation. Dante ends his vision of the play in a single line of summation – indeed in a single word – the last line of the "Divina Commedia" : "Love moved me... Love that moves the sun and all the stars." Page 59 ...
... between the highest and the lowest, he descended from the very highest into the very lowest, demanding nothing, asking for no condition whatsoever from the soul in Ignorance, from ¹ Dante: Divina Commedia, Inferno, Canto III. 4 "Justice moved my great maker" Page 181 the earth under the grip of evil. Thus it was that Life lodged itself in the home of death, Light found its ...
... Savitri is an epic of the soul with a range that is truly cosmic, and that, while it recalls for one or another reason many ot the epics of the past and of the present-day world, still the Divina Commedia comes nearest to it in its scope and depth and quality of its poetic utterance. The essence of the celebrated Gayatri (or Savitri) mantra is that by meditating on Savitri the adorable Supreme ...
... compositions, on the other, of a later day. Among the former are the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Song of Roland, Beowulf and the Asiatic Gilgamesh; and among the latter, the Aeneid, the Divina Commedia (if it could be called an epic), Camoens' Os Lusiadas, Paradise Lost, and Mah ā k ā vyas in Sanskrit like the Raghuvamsa of Kalidasa. Something is lost, and something is gained. The change ...
... philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas filled his mental horizon; Page 410 in the fullness of time there was a fusion of these with his poetic aesthesis, and the result was the Divina Commedia. Were there comparable circumstances in Sri Aurobindo's life so that we may legitimately look for a repetition of the great miracle? Highet and Murry, starting from different premises, come n ...
... IV Song of Myself and Savitri While it is natural to see Savitri as a sort of continuation and fulfilment of the two earlier 'cosmic' epic narratives— the Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost —there were other formative influences as well, and some of these too deserve mention and even some scrutiny. The primary inspiration flowed no doubt from the fount of his ...
... worlds, Sri Aurobindo had not only such mystic or occult stairs or ladders or slopes in view, but he had also examples such as Dante's progress through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in his Divina Commedia, Hanuman's passage through Brahmaloka, Rajatalaya, Shakralaya, Brahmashiras, Vahnyalaya, Vaishravanalaya, Suryaprabha-Suryanibhandana, Brahmalaya and Vrisha in the Ramayana, 113 and ...
... but with a weight of thought and edges of articulation unattempted ever before. The poem with- its 23,000 lines, spans earth and heaven, comprises life, death, and immortality. It is a modem Divina Commedia, in which paradise is lost and won. Man learns to exceed himself and Savitri, the girl-wife, becomes mother-might and vanquisher of death and also the Creatrix of life divine on this terrestrial ...
... that she wages, both as a human and as a cosmic power, and the resulting victory too has consequences both on the individual and the cosmic planes. Of Beatrice, who plays in the Divina Commedia a role not unlike Savitri's in the Indian epic, Charles Williams writes: "Let us say then that this was the effort—the union of virtue and beauty. It is, I think, true that virtue eventually runs ...
... first version... I had no idea of what the supramental World could be like at that time, so it could not enter into the scheme." 37 Taking up the poem later, Sri Aurobindo worked into it the Divina Commedia of the occult worlds with an elaborate and vivid particularity. The revisions came one upon another, and at one stage Sri Aurobindo wrote: ".. .the 'Worlds' have fallen into a state of manuscript ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.