Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The recent death of Barbara Reynolds is worth some mention here. Barbara Reynolds was the goddaughter of Dorothy Sayers and a formidable scholar of the Italian language. For more than 30 years she was chief executive and general editor of the Cambridge Italian Dictionary. After Sayers' own untimely death in 1957 it was Reynolds who put together the available materials and finished the work on the Sayers' translation of Paradiso , the third volume of Dante's Commedia . Sayers' translation of Inferno had appeared in 1949, of Purgatorio in 1955. The Sayers/Reynolds translation of Paradiso came out in 1962. Despite huge differences in every sort of respect, I'm a great admirer of the Anglo-Catholic intellects of the first half of the 20th century, the so-called "Inklings" and their circle included, and Sayers perhaps most of all in that crowd, not just for her Dante translation (and the commentaries) but for the detective fiction and the width of h...

I remember when I was in high school I became interested in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY. (For those of you who may be curious, I was reading the Sayers/Reynolds translation, which preserves the terza rima scheme of the original verse.) This was a matter of some consternation to various kin and neighbors, who thought I could not possibly understand such a book and it could only hurt my lil' teenage mind to try. One neighbor lady (whom I will shroud in anonymity hereafter -- the initials NL shall be enough) somberly sought to discuss the book with me. The conversation went something like this: NL: What do you think the book is about? CF: (staggered a bit at the vastness of the ground a proper answer would cover): Well, Dante was writing at a time when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in a struggle for power. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take.... NL:   No no, you're missing the point. His point was the kind of l...