> Are you by any chance familiar with recent discussions of who it was
> who had made the "great refusal"? Many associate it with the Pope who
> had resigned, hence making room for Dante's enemy, but the last I
> read years ago was that that speculation was doubtful.
I haven't read *anything* of consequence on Dante in decades, alas. I was always taught the "great refusal" dude was Celestine V (right?), though history in general has treated C. V more kindly than Dante did, assuming he was the person Dante had in mind. IIRC that identification was made very early.
Who else has been proposed?
>
> 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: Saturday, December 04, 2010 3:17 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] List question
>
> 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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> >
> >
> >
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> >
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