Divine Comedy

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On the Web, Bernardo Schiavetta proposes Raphèl. Raphèl is a multilingual cento, a collage poem of quotations in various languages, which is to be read as the endless commentary of a sentence from the Divine Comedy, an asemantic sentence attributed by Dante to Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel. The basic form of Raphèl is a cyclic stanza of ten lines which can reproduce itself infinitely if the reader clicks on one of its ten linear links and/or ten interlinear links: A click on a line in the left column gives access to its source. A click (precise) on a line spacing gives access to the corresponding stanza at the next level.

Raphèl is thus a poetic hypertext whose very form relies on the hyperlink. As far as Raphèl develops a formal process of proliferation of lines based on the principle of the cento and the crown of sonnets, this "unlimited babelic hyperpoem" is structurally a never ending text.

(Source: Serge Bouchardon, "Digital Literature in France")

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Raphèl screenshot
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Williams used an IBM 1070 to identify the 101 most common words from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and used them to create a series of computer poems. Williams borrows a condensed verbal framework from Dante, which is mechanically represented into lines that diminish, in relation to the number of times they appear in Divine Comedy, until a single word remains.

(Source: Chris Funkhouser, "Le(s) Mange Texte(s): Creative Cannibalism and Digital Poetry")