The Divine Comedy
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
*Includes depictions of Dante, his work, and life.
*Includes Table of Contents
One of the surest signs of fame among men is when one is known solely by his first name, and yet the mention of just that first name makes clear who is being spoken of. So it is with Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), known simply as Dante, thanks to the success of his Divine Comedy, one of the seminal works in human history.
With the Divine Comedy, Dante is often considered the master of contemporary Italian, as well as a forerunner of the Renaissance, which began to flourish in Florence around the same time. The Divine Comedy tells of Dante’s journey through Hell (the Inferno), Purgatory, and Paradise, guided by famous poets including Virgil. Dante’s epic discusses religion, philosophy, and a wide range of subject matter throughout Dante’s travels. Although Dante will always be known for Divine Comedy, he also wrote other works, touching on topics like philosophy in works like Convivio, and religion and power in De Monarchia
This edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy is specially formatted with a Table of Contents and is illustrated with over a dozen illustrations of Dante and his work. In addition, there are six sonnets on this opus, composed by Longfellow, in the Appendix.
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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.
