Last edited Tue Jul 10, 2012, 12:24 PM - Edit history (1)
I'm reminded of something Martin Luther said, that he re-read The Epistle to the Romans almost every day, and almost every time he got something new out of it.
Similarly, I read Dante about every five years, and every time I get something new out of it. I have two and a third translations: Dorothy Sayer's translation (yes, the woman who wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories), John Ciardi's translation, and Robert Pinsky's translation of The Inferno. Sayer's poetry is not very good, but her notes are brilliant (she was a scholar, not a poet); Ciardi's poetry is pretty good, but his notes aren't great (he was a poet, not a scholar); Pinsky's poetry is better than Ciardi's, his notes are the worst of the lot.
When I was 16, I had to read The Brothers Karamazov. I hated it. It said nothing to me. Ten years later, in a theology class in graduate school, I had to re-read part of it, "the Parable of the Grand Inquisitor", which I really liked. When I was 50, I re-read the whole of The Brothers Karamazov, and found it fascinating. At 50, I was ready for the book; at 16 I was not. (Thomas Aquinas said that no one under the age of 50 should study philosophy. I have always suspected he said that after reading too many undergraduate philosophy papers. Incidentally, Aquinas himself died at 49.)
I recently finished re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Memory and A Civil Campaign, two of my favorite novels.
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