The novelties of the month

At the time of Dante modern Armenia was dominated by the Saljuq Turks, but there was an Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (also known as Little Armenia) created by Armenian refugees and located on the gulf of Alessandretta.

Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza - Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes, but virtue to pursue and knowledge high - Vi ne naskiĝis por vegeti brute, sed por akiri virton, mondan scion

Farideh Mahdavi Damghani is a well known Iranian lady of letters. She translated into Persian a large number of masterpieces of  the European literatures, including a celebrated translation in tercets of Dante's Divine Comedy.  Mrs Mahdavi Damghani has graciously accepted our invitation that she herself read Francesca’s verses in her translation for Dantepoliglotta.  We thank her for that. Read more about Farideh Mahdavi Damghani and listen to her voice reading Francesca in her language, click here. Read more about Dante and Iran, click here.

The first translation of the Divine Comedy into Spanish is due to a XV century Castilian noble, Enrique de Villena, also known as Enrique de Aragón (1384-1434). It is a prose translation finished in 1428 which has been published in print only in 1974 at Salamanca and whose manuscript – preserved in Madrid in the Biblioteca Nacional de España – has been digitized and made available on line [...]

The Occitan language, or Langue d’Oc, is a neo-Latin language spoken in a specific area of southern Europe known as Occitania, roughly identified with southern France, but also encompassing a strip of territory in Piedmont along the frontier with France. It was the famous language used in the poetry of the trobadours of Provençal root, which emerged around the 11th century and was flourishing in medieval times. Dante greatly admired the Occitan troubadours to the extent that he actually bestowed the unique privilege on one of them of using his [...]

Dante refers to the Friulian people naming them "Aquilegienses" since the town Aquileia was at his time the political, religious and cultural centre of the region. Due probably to that cultural environment, the fate of Dante’s poem in Friuli was quite prompt, so that the most ancient Friulian library, the "Guarneriana" of San Daniele, preserves one of the most ancient illuminated manuscripts of the poem. Furthermore, the Friulian language boasts several translations of the Divine Comedy, two of them complete and in terza rima. [...]