“Divide the good from the bad”: is the title of a long analysis of Divine Comedy published by Frankfurter Rundschau which deals with the work of Dante Alighieri comparing it to that of Shakespeare, on the occasion of Dante’s day. The author critically emphasizes the Florentine author’s “pleasure in judging and condemning”.
“Shakespeare’s amorality, his description of what he is, seems to us light years more modern than Dante’s effort to have an opinion on everything, to drag everything to the judgment of his morality. All this gigantic work is there only to allow the poet to anticipate the Last Judgment, to do God’s work ”and to divide the good from the bad, concludes the journalist.
Dante, the attack of the Frankfurter Rundschau
The Italians consider him the father of the Italian language, writes the German newspaper, and yet they are unable to read the Divine Comedy without resorting to notes and explanations, because the one used by Dante is a vulgar language of the thirteenth century, incomprehensible to most today. Beatrice? Muse, inspiration, praised and incensed by Dante, who however does not waste even a word on his wife and children.
And as regards the literary innovations introduced by Dante, the Frankfurter Rundschau has clear ideas: nothing new, all copied or reworked by the Provençal and Arab poets. Dante’s journey between Hell and Heaven? Copied from that of Muhammad. But above all, the only reason why Alighieri would have written the Comedy is to be able to take the place of God and “send” friends and family to Hell or Heaven at will, in a mania of deplorable moral superiority.