![]() ![]() Vigorous, one might say, and it keeps Dante’s rhyme scheme perhaps not the greatest of English poetry, but then again it has other merits, including the circumstantial fact that Miss Sayers started her translation while crouching in an air raid shelter during the London Blitz, armed only with her knowledge of Old French and medieval Latin. Sayers: Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. My plan is to work through the poem, slowly (admittedly not always a slowly as this week not all the lines are quite so rich), a Sunday at a time. There is almost unbelievable richness awaiting exploration in these three lines, the first tercet of thousands. These are the opening lines of what I have already mentioned is my favourite book, one of the greatest of all human works, the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth but not by behaviour, as he says in a letter to his patron. Nel mezzo del cammino di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita. ![]()
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