The Portable Dante
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The famed Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s two masterworks—The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova—in one volume
A Penguin Classic
As a philosopher, he wedded classical methods of inquiry to a Christian faith. As an autobiographer, he looked unsparingly at his own failures to depict universal struggles. As a visionary, he dared draw maps of Hell, with Purgatory and Paradise, and populate all three realms with recognizable human beings. As a passionate lover, he became a poet of bereavement and renunication. As all of these, Dante Alighieri paved the way for modern literature, while creating verse and prose that remain unparalleled for formal elegance, intellectual depth, and emotional grandeur.
The Portable Dante captures the scope and fire of Dante’s genius as thoroughly as any single volume can. It contains complete verse translations of The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova, as well as a bibliography, notes, and an introduction by the eminent scholar and translator Mark Musa.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Customer Reviews
Great translation, lousy formatting for iBooks
My review is upon the formatting only. The translation is excellent and there are plenty of reviews in other places on various Dante translations.
The active table of contents includes only the major divisions (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) so quickly locating a specific Canto is not very convenient.
This was my first purchase for iBooks, and I was a bit disappointed for several reasons. I bought it here since it wasn't available on my kindle.
1. Why no iBooks app so I can read on my mac? Doesn't seem like that would be difficult. Kindle has been doing that for quite a while.
2. The program is incredibly sluggish on my iPhone 4s, and if I change orientation I have about a 45 sec wait for it to change and another 45 sec wait until the text shows up again. Perhaps it has something to do with the size of the book, but my large books on the kindle app for iPhone work just fine.
3. Several times when I switch to portrait orientation, the text shows up as one word per line (and the text is small enough that it shouldn't) making it practically unreadable.
4. App even crashed a couple times - none of the many apps on my iPhone have ever done that.
I hope this is just a problem with this book and not the rest of the iBooks catalog, but I'm not in a hurry to try another after this lousy experience.