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The Divine Comedy

The Inferno. The Purgatorio. And The Paradiso.

By Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi (Translator)

(128)

| Paperback | 9780451208637

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Book Description

Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise-the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation.

Critics

Confounding the Apes

There are several different things one can be aiming at in a verse translation, leaving aside the genre known as ‘Imitation’, in which poets like Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have done such marvellous things. A verse translation may a ... (read full critics)

lrb published on Sun, 5 Sep 2010

Dante Agonistes

A late starter on the road to classic status, Dante stands very high today. The Modernist masters and critics joined in paying him homage. His prestige in the literary world is unquestioned. And now Professor Singleton’s great edition of the Divine C ... (read full critics)

nybooks published on Sun, 22 Aug 2010

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10 Reviews

1 person find this helpful

If the Bible is the first reference book to get understanding of western culture, The Divine Comedy could be the second.

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Scorpi said on May 4, 2008 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

I actually have all three volumes separated, so I've only read "The Inferno" thus far, but loved Ciardi's poetic translation. It's beautiful, well-explicated and gives a reader a sense of why this poem has endured for so long and how it is truly "Divine."

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guaddess said on May 13, 2007 | Add your feedback

Where's hell disappeared to since Dante?

I read the verse translation into English by Dorothy L. Sayers. Although I found some of the vocabulary a little old-fashioned, I did zip through the 34 cantos, reading the very helpful intros before each one, and the barest minimum from the notes to make a little sense of the people encountered and ... (continue)

I read the verse translation into English by Dorothy L. Sayers. Although I found some of the vocabulary a little old-fashioned, I did zip through the 34 cantos, reading the very helpful intros before each one, and the barest minimum from the notes to make a little sense of the people encountered and the terrible sins they had committed. I briefly tried a prose translation before this version, but found the lack of rhythm and colour a complete turn off.
Concerning the actual content, I very much enjoyed reading the careful description of the geography of the place, following Dante's physical and emotional journey, keeping a respectful distance from stern and steady Virgil, and both pitying and recoiling in horror from the writhing, smothered, frozen, itching, burning, deformed tormented souls.
The book was written when the desire to escape hell and reach heaven after death was a major driver in European societies, underpinning much of the economic system (think tithing, rich monasteries etc, the basic deal being "we pay, you pray for us and save us"). Mainstream Christian churches today have completely got rid of the image of grimacing demon with pitchforks in hell or angels, fluffy clouds and harps in heaven. It seems to me that heaven is now a completely abstract notion, a place of your choosing where you can find your loved ones again and meet God/Jesus, according to your fancy. And hell has apparently been dispensed with altogether. I'm not advocating a return to "rule through fear" approach for today's churches, but I do think that some sort of representation of the consequences of transgression might be no bad thing.

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Hélène Wilkinson said on Sep 25, 2011 about the Others edition | Add your feedback