Let’s add Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Achipelago”, all three volumes. Well, let’s add MacBeth, which is an excellent exposition of the nature of sin and what penitence requires. Not many appreciate Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” for anything other than its raciness, but it is one of the best expositions of what love really is that I have ever read.Along with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, Joyce’s Ulysses, and a handful of other great literary works, Dante’s Divine Comedy is one of humanity’s great works and should certainly be read, in Italian or a good translation, by anyone who considers themselves educated.
I read that some have done so. I imagine it would take an immensely long time. But I’m guessing if one knew no Italian whatever before doing it, he would know it extraordinarily well by the time he memorized even a quarter of it.I was thinking about how one would memorize the whole thing, how long it would take and whether it would be worth it.