The Divine Comedy
Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
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Dante's medieval masterpiece "The Divine Comedy" describes the Author's journey through the levels of Hell (Inferno) and Purgatory (Purgatorio) with the Ancient Roman poet Virgil as his guide; and then into Heaven (Paradiso), guided but his departed Love Beatrice.
In the 'Inferno' Dante witnesses the souls of sinners enduring astonishing torments and miseries that befit the sins of their lives, all under the yoke of Lucifer in the lowest level of Hell.
In 'Purgatorio', the souls of the departed attempt to ascend the nine levels of Mount Purgatory, to gain access to the Garden of Eden at the Summit, and then beyond it the gates of Heaven.
"Paradiso" also contains nine levels, above which is the Empyrean Realm, containing the very essence of God.
This epic poem had a profound effect on its medieval readers, and was instrumental in forming and propagating the Medieval Christian concept of Sin, Heaven and Hell.
This beautiful ebook contains dozens of colour illustrations by the celebrated Romantic artist and poet William Blake, as well as the complete text to all three books of Dante's 'Divine Comedy'.
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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.
