Tall Smurfs and Italian Poetry

Ok, so… I was going to write a post about Avatar (which I had just watched), but I stumbled onto something much more deserving of my attention.

So let’s get this Avatar business done with: 3 hours of 8-feet tall Smurfs spouting cliches in a lush, beautifully rendered 3D landscape. Here’s a picture:

Thank You, Google Image Search. You make comedy easy.

Now, onto business. I was checking out some of my usual sites, one of which is Penny Arcade. A glorious web-comic and one of the first who started the “two-gamer buddies” trend of web comics. Check out if you haven’t heard of it.

Anywho, through them I stumbled onto a Kotaku post detailing this lovely gem:

This is the cover for a “novelization” of the upcoming Dante’s Inferno video game. For those unfamiliar, here is the trailer for the game.

As you can see, they took some creative liberties. So, one would expect the novelization to be similarly… creative. A novelization of said game, I would assume, would be a gory affair, filled with choppy prose, used as an excuse to get from one bloody battle to the next.

Here’re the opening few lines:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straight-forward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,
Vested already with that planet’s rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.”

It goes on for a bit…

Yes. That is The Divine Comedy. The one written by Dante Alighieri in the 14th century.

My initial reaction, of course, was “oh my fucking god, they cannot be serious”. Then, however, I started thinking.

Thousands of hack-and-slash gamers, a good majority of which probably never opened a book published earlier than this century (well, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt – last two centuries), will now purchase a book of poetry written over 700 years ago.

I can imagine their surprise, opening the book, expecting gore and blood, instead finding poetry. I guess a good majority of them will throw the book aside, pick up a controller and move on to Bayonetta. If just a few, however, hell – if even one reads through it, well, then we’ve done a wonderful thing. This could be the second renaissance right here.

Maybe that’s pushing it, but it’s a clever marketing push, one that, let’s be honest, probably won’t work. But it might mean there is still a little bit of hope left for the human race.

Now where’s that controller?