Why talk about Dante today? Why is it impossible to live or write without thinking back to his Divine Comedy? I learned this text as a child. I entered the thirteenth-century Tuscan language through Inferno, where my mother's family name was sealed. There, hell is a forest full of tears, where an old wanderer — who would be my age now — loses himself among the shadows. Having read, reread, and relived the Divine Comedy, it is now the narrator's tears that haunt me: what if this poetics of tears shed together — author and reader — were the very empathy that gives literature its insurrectionary power?
Hélène Frappat author
Emmanuel Salinger actor
Readings from excerpts from The Divine Comedy and L’Impossible bébé by Hélène Frappat (Cambourakis, October 2026).
Coproduction IRCAM / Bpi - Centre Pompidou.
