Product Description

This book is translated by H. F. Cary. It comes with an introduction by Claire Honess. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his "Comedy" (the epithet Divine was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian vernacular, to produce a radically new and all-encompassing work. "The Comedy" tells of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman through the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He presents a vision of the afterlife which is strikingly original in its conception, with a complex architecture and a coherent structure. On this journey Dante's protagonist - and his reader - meet characters who are variously noble, grotesque, beguiling, fearful, ridiculous, admirable, horrific and tender, and through them he is shown the consequences of sin, repentance and virtue, as he learns to avoid Hell and, through cleansing in Purgatory, to taste the joys of Heaven.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10889 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Customer Reviews

Divine
A fantastically adept translation of a masterful classic; with useful introductions and notes which make sense of the text. Good quality & inexpensive!

The Divine Comedy (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)
I bought this book because I had heard it's a great classic and I thought (past tense) that the plot seemed very interesting.

The book itself has no major flaws; the paper quality is very good and the text is not too small and is easy to read. Each canto has a short introduction at the beginning of it to explain to the reader what they can expect in the following canto.

In order to read this book, however, one needs a relatively advanced knowledge of Italian history & geography, as Dante mentions many (many) famous Italian people and places along his travels, far too many to individually look up one at a time. The translator does include notes to accompany each canto at the end of the book but they made very little sense to me.

Dante uses an incredibly convoluted form of language and takes many lines to get his point across. Many sentences make no sense at all and must be examined in the greatest of detail to discern their meaning.

All in all, not a book for the casual reader. I have awarded this book 2 stars because the physical qualities of the book are nothing to be complained about. The language and the content of the book are far too confusing.

Unless you're serious about buying this book, avoid The Divine Comedy outright, regardless of the edition; be it Wordsworth or the alternative from the Oxford Classics, you'll get confused relatively early on.