You don't get famous by sitting on feathers

 I'm reading Dante's Inferno in the original Italian. That sounds impressive! I don't speak or read Italian! So I'm using Google Translate and, when that fails which is fairly regularly (you can't blame Google: Inferno is written in mediaeval Tuscan) I use wiktionary and when that fails too I fall back on the Mandelbaum translation and sometimes even Dorothy L Sayers's translation although hers is written in such poetic language (because she keeps to the original's scansion and rhyme scheme) that I prefer the mangle Google. This cumbersome procedure means I am proceeding very slowly at about a dozen lines a day. It's hard work.

And there are a lot of boring bits. Dante spends a lot of time in Hell meeting old acquaintances and political enemies from Florence and having a chat with them. Often, he doesn't name them (libel laws? -but they were all dead by the time which is how he can meet them in hell) which makes it even more difficult.

But sometimes it is very rewarding, such as when you encounter a vivid (and often timeless) image or a nugget of information about mediaeval Italy or a neat little proverb. Today I met: 

seggendo in piuma,

in fama non si vien, né sotto coltre

which I translate as: 'you don't get famous by sitting on feathers or lying under the blanket'. So very true.

This post was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God