Sandow Birk

I’m not especially fond of the Paradiso as Dante wrote it in the first place. Even St John the Apostle, who had the best claim to having personally been there, had a great deal of difficulty expressing his experience, and Dante never convinced me that he’s actually been there; he doesn’t really seem like the type. So in search of something I can remove from the bookshelf to make room for a hardcover Commedia with the Doré illustrations, and faced with a choice between Birk’s Paradiso and Purgatorio (I had only two volumes) this must go. Birk’s vision of Heaven is extremely gritty, replete with graffiti and traffic, but when he depicts the assembly of the Blessed set in the heart of Mecca, it’s rather transcendent. For that, I’ll miss it.… (meer)

A modern vernacular adaptation of the Divine Comedy in three volumes. The best part of these is the art, by far; gorgeous line drawings in the style of Gustav Dore engravings, but entirely in a modern setting. Sometimes they work as illustrations for the poem, sometimes they're too ironic for their own good. (I liked the illustrations in the Paradiso best, though; there's something moving about Paradise set in a modern city, populated entirely by normal-looking modern people.)

The adapters have used almost painfully casual language for the text, which works in getting across the impact of Dante writing in Italian instead of Latin, but I do think they've made the worst possible choices for it -- if you're going to update the language and the metaphors, why not update all the Yelling About Politics sections so that they mean something to a modern audience? A few contemporary names scattered in amongst the sinners really doesn't cut it. And with no poetry to speak of (they haven't bothered trying to capture even the rhyme scheme, which seems like a lost opportunity for a hip-hop Commedia) there's absolutely nothing of interest in at least 50% of the thing.… (meer)