The Divine Comedy
Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
This convenient single-volume edition contains all three parts of Dante's 14th century poem ― Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso ― in an acclaimed translation by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Combining classical and Christian history as well as medieval politics and religion, this trilogy of sublime verse is among Western civilization's most important artistic works and essential reading for students of literature and history.
Dante's allegory of the soul's journey to God begins with Inferno, in which the narrator traverses the underworld in the company of the ancient Roman poet Virgil. As they travel through the nine circles of Hell, the poets encounter historical and mythological figures suffering symbolic punishments for their earthly crimes. In Purgatorio, Dante continues on alone through the realm of redemption, where departed souls reflect upon their sins and work toward their moral improvement. The tale culminates in Paradiso, where the divine Beatrice guides Dante in the final stage of his intellectual journey from doubt to faith.
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.
