Purgatorio
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A new translation of Dante's Purgatorio that celebrates the human elements of the second part of The Divine Comedy. This is a bilingual edition with an illuminating introduction from the translator.
Winner of the American Literary Translators Association 2022 National Translation Award in Poetry.
Purgatorio, the middle section of Dante’s great poem about losing, and subsequently finding, one’s way in the middle of one’s life is, unsurprisingly, the beating heart of The Divine Comedy, as this powerful and lucid new translation by the poet D. M. Black makes wonderfully clear.
After days spent plumbing the depths of hell, the pilgrim staggers back to the clear light of day in a state of shock, the sense of pervasive dread and deep bewilderment with which he began his pilgrimage as intensified as it is alleviated by his terminal vision of evil. The slow and initially arduous climb up the mount of Purgatory that ensues, guided as always by Virgil, his poetic model and mentor, is simultaneously a reckoning with human limits and a rediscovery of human potential in the light of divine promise.
Dante’s Purgatorio, which has been an inspiration to poets as varied as Shelley and T. S. Eliot, is a book full of human stories and philosophical inquiry; it is also a tale of individual reintegration and healing.
Black, a distinguished psychoanalyst as well as a poet, provides an introduction and commentary to this masterpiece by Dante from a contemporary point of view in this bilingual edition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In addition to the Pessoa title reviewed above, a tremendous amount of terrific poetry in translation is due this fall and winter. The books listed below, in varying ways, re-examine classics and introduce modern masters to English speakers.PURGATORIODante Alighieri, trans. from the Italian by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. Doubleday, $35 (656p) With its elegant, carefully negotiated translations and canto-by-canto notes, outlines and annotations, this second volume from the Hollanders takes its place beside last year's Inferno and paves the way for Paradise. These translations, honed over Robert Hollander's 35 years teaching Dante at Princeton, are touted as the U.S. English standard for rendering Dante's layered meanings.