I read The Divine Comedy, enjoyed it, and the translation I read

>>9111468
Pee pee poo poo

honestly, in this case, the translation meme is true. Every translation of Dante is ugly and loses a great deal of the music of his poetry. Dante is the greatest Italian writer of all time, and The Comedy is one of the greatest works, if not the greatest work, stylistically speaking, but only in the original Italian. I'm not trying to be pretentious, it's just true. The only reason to read it in English is to say that you've read it so that you can check it off your list of "classic books to read to make me look smart"

>>9111516
sell me on learning italian instead please.

>>9111522
If you speak any Spanish, or can read Spanish fairly well, learning to read Italian will literally take a few months if you study it every day. Just focus solely on reading and vocab. If you don't speak any spanish, then I would suggest perhaps learning it, because it allows you to branch off into various other languages like portuguese as well, and ends up being like 3-4 languages for the price of one

>>9111533
that's great news, because I wanted to learn spanish too. Is spanish a better starting point? I think it has more writers i'm interested in frankly.

It's worth it to shop around and jump between translations and then look up the original italian for passages you really like, but my favorite is Ciardi since he maintains a rhyme scheme without compromising the translation and structure. Plenty of notes too.

>>9111543
Yes, Spanish should be very easy for you to learn, and it's more of a fundamental/core language than Italian is. Another suggestion for the Comedy is if you want to get to it as soon as possible, get a bilingual text. Only do this after you are relatively proficient, or else you'll just be flipping back and forth and it will be really frustrating and time consuming and kind of pointless. But, having a bilingual text makes it so that you don't have to constantly look shit up.

Hollander to soothe my autism.
>those 1000 pages of analysis

Fagles

>>9111468
If you don't want to learn Italian, you should read multiple translations. Mandelbaum, Hollander, and Ciardi are all good, but it is true that a lot is lost in translation and there will be some ugly bits, there's no getting around that.

>>9111516
Will I actually be able to read the probably complex and dated Italian literature with good comprehension if I'm not a fluent speaker though?

I've been learning french for 3 years but I still don't think I could read Descartes or Dumas without significant difficulty over months of reading.

Blake, obviously

>>9111533
>portuguese
When will I ever use this except for dealing with criminals?

Spanish is useless for literature. French is too different, Portuguese, Romanians, Romansch and Ladins have no literature, so it's basically only useful for Italian, which has far more literature (and is closer to Latin if you want to learn that) so why not just learn Italian?

>>9111939
Cervantes
gabriel garcia-marquez

not to mention the ease with which you may deal with the laboring class chicano once you may communicate with them. You may even find it of use to manipulate their small minds to your needs, if you should so please, pinche gringo

>>9111939
>Spanish is useless for literature
I wonder why anons that hate reading come here, or why do they give opinions like this when it's clear they're kids just starting to read and have no idea what they're talking about.

Does anyone else feel distraught that they will never be able to read everything in its original language.

How can one learn Ancient Greek, Latin, old English, french, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian all in one lifetime? How can one even master two after adolescence without dedicating ones whole existence to it? I know in some cases translations will suffice but in cases like The Divine Comedy it makes me very sad at the loftiness of such a task in the face of my English and measly french comprehension.

>>9112008
If you can read English you're good. Pretty much all of literature is in Shakespeare.

>>9112020
I know English is probably the most important but it still would be nice to know others at least fluently