The Divine Comedy
Ante Purgatory - The Sydney narration
Publisher Description
An English translation of a treasure of world literature, faithful to the letter and spirit of Dante’s central part of the ‘Comedy’: Ante Purgatory. Performed since 1999 in this version all over the world with Deo Bosco's original music, this special edition, was created for an Australian series of performances in Sydney, August 2014.
Deo Bosco is an award winning music composer, researcher and author, that has dedicated many years to the study of Dante and his poetry.
Having lived for 2 decades in the heart of Tuscany, Deo Bosco's native knowledge of the Italian language and of the Tuscan dialect in particular, makes this translation one of the most faithful to the literal meaning of Dante's masterpiece.
DESCRIPTION:
Imagine yourself transported by the sound of the sea and the tale of a mystical journey, to the sensual beaches surrounding an island. Welcome to the Island, welcome to Purgatory. In the words of the 'Supreme Poet' written 700 years ago, beyond Hell lays an island in the southern hemisphere, where souls travel on a mountain path to seek redemption.
Purgatory: the human realm on the 'other side':
While Paradise is too pure and still and Hell to irreversible for living beings, it is Purgatory the true human realm of passage and transformation.
Dante's 'Divine Comedy' narrates the journey through these three realms, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Heaven.
Having survived the depths of Hell, Dante and his guide, Virgil ascend out of the dark underworld gloom, to the island/rock of Purgatory on the opposite side of the world to where the journey started. The island, detailedly described as being in the Southern Hemisphere and home to the 'very first people', was created when according to medieval lore, Satan's fall from Heaven generated the Hell realm.
The central parts of the 'Divine Comedy' - Ante-Purgatory and Purgatory - are notable for demonstrating medieval knowledge of a spherical Earth and of a Southern Land. It is a vision of 'our' world filled with amazement at how human beings, by having consciousness of their actions, can completely rewrite their destiny. Dante's 'Divine Comedy' it's an hymn to the true significance of human liberty.
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.
