George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century Book

Just what the title claims, by the woman who was Sayers's protegee, and who completed her Penguin translation of Dante's Paradiso after Sayers's death in 1957. Barbara Reynolds is still alive at age 100. Fascinating for some of the inside baseball in academic politics and publishing just after WWII in England. Sayers was always regarded with some skepticism by the academic establishment because she was a woman and because she was a popular detective novelist. Those two things just would not do. I had not realized that Sayers only read Dante for the first time at the age of 51, during the war. Previous to that she had only quoted from him occasionally and had put off reading him, saying: "After all, fourteen thousand lines are fourteen thousand lines, especially if they are full of Guelfs and Ghibellines and Thomas Aquinas." But fearing that otherwise she'd wind up with all the other hypocrites in the eighth circle, she finally picked up the Comedy. She was blown away, read it rapidly twice over, and spent the last 12 years of her life pretty much exclusively studying it. Her enthusiasm is what hooked me years ago. I have never liked her translation, but her notes, introductions, and essays are worth reading and re-reading for their common sense and dry wit. She was a force to be reckoned with. C.S. Lewis said that discussing anything with her was like standing on the edge of a cliff in a high wind. She was surprised to find that Dante was not like Milton--his language let him discuss anything from farts to the mystical celestial rose. Milton's choice of extremely formal language limited him. When he wanted to describe an elephant curling its trunk, he had to say it "wreathed its lithe proboscis." Her writing is full of nuggets like that, and this book is a pleasant reminder.