Dante in Mallorca

Perhaps because my children read Hamlet , Great Expectations , and The Count of Monte Cristo in manga versions before the holidays, during these days in Mallorca I've reread Dante's Commedia (Acantilado)—in the multi-award-winning translation by José María Micó—as a future-trend-generating machine. The Florentine's masterpiece is not only pure therapeutic autofiction (which begins with a panic attack at the very gates of hell), it also cultivates avant la lettre romance fantasy , combining romantic asexuality (with Beatrice and Virgil, who never stops embracing the protagonist) and the Tolkienian bestiary (my favorite monster is Geryon, that hybrid of dragon and scorpion, with the face of an honest man). All of this in a very human tension between the thirst for revenge against one's contemporaries and the thirst for eternity (with a God-level ego).

What, unfortunately, didn't have as much future was the Dantesque vision of a philosophical and scientific horizon in which Greco-Latin and Arabic authors are as classic. Avicenna and Averroes appear in the Commedia , and a cultural background steeped in Islamic ideas is palpable. At the Miramar monastery, where his strict contemporary Ramon Llull created an Arabic school, it is evident that the most visionary exponents of the 13th-century creative canon were open to both popular languages—Italian and Catalan—and to translation. During the same period, Alfonso X wrote in Spanish and Galician-Portuguese; and he promoted the Toledo School of Translators. Europe and the Mediterranean can only be understood as transcultural, polyglot, multi-religious, and hospitable spaces, even though luxury tourism, the far right, and migration policies persist in promoting exclusionary and violent narratives.

In the 'Comedy' Averroes and Avicenna appear and the cultural background is steeped in Islamic ideas

In his home in Deià, the professor and translator Eduard Moyà, who has just published El crestall rost. Poemes de muntanya by Robert Graves with Nova Editorial Moll, whose house museum is just a stone's throw away, tells me that the author of I, Claudius was also the author of a biography of his friend Lawrence of Arabia, whom he met after working as a teacher in Cairo. And he tells me about Joan Mascaró, the son of peasants with a supernatural talent for languages, who ended up in Cambridge as a mentor to Juan March's son. A translator of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads from Pali and Sanskrit into English, he spent time in Ceylon, was a teacher in Barcelona and Great Britain, and even influenced The Beatles: after reading his work on Eastern spirituality and meeting him personally, the musicians from Liverpool decided to travel to India.

While we enjoy a delicious rice dish with gin and shrimp, at the bottom of the cliff runs the Painters' Path, which in all honesty should be called the Smugglers' Route. The sea appears blue, but in reality it's a palimpsest of translated colors.