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Learning with Dante

27th December 2006 by Helena 1 Comment  

My fatherWhen I was a teenager I was re-introduced to my father. He is Italian and much to his horror I didn’t speak the language of Dante. Not surprising really as he and my mother split up when I was three and since then I had lived in Stockhom and Berkshire. “All you need to speak Italian is Dante,” he announced and from then on would recite the fifth canto of the Inferno to me every few minutes.

The fifth canto is the story of Paolo and Francesca. It is one of the most moving in the Inferno and also the most romantic. One of the lines drummed into me was “la bocca mi bacio tutto tremante” – he kissed my lips all trembling. All very well but I was in love with John Travolta at the time and found Dante a bit of a chore.

As I write, my Dante-quoting father (he actually does know everything Dante ever wrote off by heart as well as every other Italian poet and much more, but then again the man has never had a job so he’s had plenty of time to learn) is on his way here to spend a week with me and my family. This may seem perfectly normal, it being Christmas and all that, but my father and I have been estranged more than we have been together. He was out of my life for ten years when I was a child, then he came back in, then he stormed out of my wedding nine years ago and it was only when I wrote Ciao Bella that I went to find him again. He met Leonardo then but has yet to get to know the girls. He seems very excited about the prospect. “Tell them I will teach them the whole of the fifth canto a memoria,” he told me on the phone yesterday. Some things never change…..


Filed Under: blog --> Tagged With: dante, learning

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Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor in chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. Helena is also working on a thriller called Thin Ice that will be published in spring 2021 as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

Her latest non-fiction work Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles came out in hardback in 2016 and in paperback in April 2018.

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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