The Divine Comedy
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Dante Alighieri's 'The Divine Comedy' is a literary masterpiece that follows the poet's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Written in the early 14th century, this epic poem is considered a seminal work of Italian literature and a defining piece of the medieval period. The vivid descriptions of each realm, intricate use of symbolism, and moral undertones make this work a complex and rich exploration of the afterlife. Alighieri's use of terza rima adds a musical quality to the text, enhancing its poetic beauty and making it a compelling read for those interested in allegorical storytelling and theological themes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Do we really need yet another translation of Dante's world-famous journey through the three parts of the Catholic afterlife? We might, if the translator is both as eminent, and as skillful, as Clive James: the Australian-born, London-based TV personality, cultural critic, poet and memoirist (Opal Sunset) is one of the most recognizable writers in Britain. James's own poetry has been fluent, moving, sometimes funny, but it would not augur the kind of fire his Dante displays. Over decades (in part as an homage to his Dante-scholar wife, Prue Shaw), James has worked to turn Dante's Italian, with its signature three-part rhymes, into clean English pentameter quatrains, and to produce a Dante that could eschew footnotes, by incorporating everything modern readers needed to know into the verse from the mythological anti-heroes of Hell through the Florentine politics, medieval astronomy, and theology of Heaven. Sometimes these lines are sharply beautiful too: souls in Purgatory "had their eyelids stitched with iron wire/ Like untamed falcons." Even in Heaven, notoriously hard to animate, James keeps things clear and easy to follow, if at times pedestrian in his language: "I want to fill your bare mind with a blaze/ Of living light that sparkles in your eyes," says Dante's Beatrice, and if the individual phrases do not always sparkle, it is a wonder to see the light cast by the whole.
