Virtual Memories Show 665:
Prue Shaw
“I felt again incredulity that one person could have produced this poem.”
With her amazing new book, DANTE: THE ESSENTIAL COMMEDIA (Liveright), scholar Prue Shaw brings us a canto-by-canto journey through Dante’s masterwork, interweaving translated verses with her commentary, and serving as a Virgil-like guide to the poem. We talk about how she was inspired by John Carey’s The Essential Paradise Lost, why the Paradiso was her biggest challenge, how the poem has changed for her over the course of her life, and why she went with prose translations of Dante rather than verse. We get into Dante’s balance of pride in his art and his humility before God, the modern sound of Dante’s verse and the challenge of translating Italian into English, what she’s learning from helping translate Shelley into Italian, why she wants The Essential Commedia to serve as a gateway drug into Dante, and the nature of language & why the Tower of Babel plays a big role in the Commedia. We also discuss her incredible work on third edition of the Digital Commedia, life after the death of her husband, Clive James, and putting a collection of his final poems together, how an issue of the X-Men turned me on to Dante as a kid, my changing views on Ulysses in the Commedia, why sloth is my fave of the deadly sins, and more. Give it a listen! And go read DANTE: THE ESSENTIAL COMMEDIA!
“I wonder about some basic aspects of Dante writing the Commedia in exile, from court to court: How did he get his parchment? Where did he stash it?”
“Clive was a poet, not a TV celebrity. He got totally involved with TV, and may have lost his sense of direction. But in the last years, because he was ill and couldn’t leave the house, all he did was write poems.”
“I wanted the reader who has some Italian or wants to learn it to feel that they could read the English than look to the left and see how the Italian works.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Prue Shaw is an emeritus reader in Italian at University College London. She is the editor of the edizione nazionale of Dante’s medieval Latin treatise Monarchia and of a groundbreaking digital edition of the Commedia. She lives in Cambridge, England. Her new book is Dante: The Essential Commedia.
Listen to our 2015 conversation about Reading Dante: From Here To Eternity.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Prue’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Portrait photo of Prue by someone else; other ones by me, including ALL THE BOOKS. It’s on my instagram.
