[lbo-talk] List question

[Michael Smith]

Maybe part of the misalignment comes from the usual English 
translation (I had not thought death had undone so many -- do 
we owe that to Eliot, or did he crib it from somebody else, 
pasticheur that he was?) Maybe "had not thought" is intended 
to be an archaic subjunctive construction, but it doesn't read 
that way readily for most of us -- we take it as pluperfect indicative 
("Before I saw all those people, I hadn't even realized there 
*were* so many dead people"). But the Italian is unambiguously 
subjunctive -- "I wouldn't have believed".  

On Sat, 4 Dec 2010 10:21:12 -0600
"Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> Well, it's been quite a while since I read Dante (or read any
> commentary). I won't argue the case vigorously. If there are more in
> the circle (or seem to be) than all the dead, that "all" implicitly
> sums up all three states, whether he has seen them yet or not. But
> yes,  your point about this is his first sight of a large group seems
> an important one.
> 
> I like the association of "silent majority" with the dead -- though
> some of the dead speak loudly:
> 
> My father's own father he waded that river,
> They stole all the money he made in his life...
> 
> Carrol
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org
> [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Michael Smith
> Sent: Friday, December 03, 2010 11:25 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] List question
> 
> On Fri, 3 Dec 2010 22:20:33 -0600
> "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Eliot was 'quoting' Dante: I had not known death had undone so may.
> > The line is in the Canto which deals with the ante-room of hell,
> > where all those who were unwilling to act, hence were neither good
> > or bad, but weren't worth damning.  The line is rather curious:
> > there are more people in this anteroom (it seems to Dante) than
> > there were in Hell proper, Purgatory, and Heaven combined. 
> 
> This reading surprises me a bit. At the point where Dante makes this 
> observation, he hasn't yet seen the rest of Hell, much less Purgatory 
> and Paradise. This is in fact the first large group of the dead 
> he has seen, apart from the Staten Island Ferry queue for Charon's 
> services. I always read this passage -- 
> 
> ... sì lunga tratta
> di gente, ch'i' non averei creduto
> che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta 
> 
> -- as an expression of his surprise at the 
> topos-koinos -- which was always true, until perhaps quite recently
> -- that the dead are much more numerous than the living: the maiores 
> in both senses of the word. (That's one of the reasons why Nixon's,
> or rather Safire's phrase, "silent majority", always struck me as
> funny; it sounded like he was referring to the dead). 
> 
> 
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