The Divine Comedy
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Publisher Description
Dante Alighieri's masterpiece "The Divine Comedy" is a famous Medieval Italian epic poem depicting the realms of the afterlife. Dante (who was born in 1265) wrote "The Divine Comedy" somewhere between 1308 and his death in 1321, while he was in exile from his hometown of Florence, Italy, which had been enduring civil war.
"The Divine Comedy" is divided into three separate volumes, each containing 33 cantos (or chapters). These volumes are Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
Dante is both the author and the central character of this trilogy. He travels through all of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven to make his way back to God, meeting several characters from history and literature on his way.
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.
