Product Description

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 the story of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman. In The Inferno, Dante's protagonist - and his reader - is presented with a graphic vision of the dreadful consequences of sin, and encounters an all-too-human array of noble, grotesque, beguiling, ridiculous and horrific characters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39046 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-01
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From the Author
A fresh new prose version of Dante's PARADISE
In 1957 C.S. Lewis read my thesis about him and congratulated me: "You are in the centre of the target everywhere. For one thing, you know my work better than anyone else I've met.... If you understand me so well you will understand other authors too. I hope we shall have some really useful critical works from your hand."

With DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY: JOURNEY TO JOY, Lewis’s hope seems to be fulfilled. Nothing could be more useful today than enabling people to understand Dante. And nothing could be a better tribute to C. S. Lewis than the clearest, most accurate, and most readable edition of PARADISE ever published in English.

"C. S. Lewis and Dante’s PARADISE," the introduction to this edition, reveals for the first time how pivotal PARADISE was in Lewis’s life and thought. The year after he first read PARADISE, he became a believing Christian; and he was clearly influenced by Dante for the rest of his life. There are traces of THE DIVINE COMEDY throughout Lewis’s writing, from THE PILGRIM’S REGRESS, his first Christian book, to LETTERS TO MALCOLM, his last.

Unfortunately, few Americans today have read Dante’s PARADISE, and fewer yet have understood it -- because it is the most complex and obscure part of the trilogy. There are parts that even leading Dante scholars have not understood. It is my privilege to fill in some of these gaps with new discoveries while leading ordinary readers up through the circles and spheres of Heaven.

Here are the titles I have given to the cantos of PARADISE:

1. Toward a Golden Target

2. The First Heaven: the Moon

3. Piccarda’s Face

4. The Sacred Stream

5. The Second Heaven: Mercury

6. The Roman Eagle

7. Just Vengeance

8. The Third Heaven: Venus

9. A Ruby Struck by the Sun

10. The Fourth Heaven: the Sun

11. Remembering St. Francis

12. The Double Rainbow

13. The Wisdom of Solomon

14. The Fifth Heaven: Mars

15. Meeting an Ancestor

16. Fine Families

17. Footnotes on the Future

18. The Sixth Heaven: Jupiter

19. The Eagle’s Beak

20. The Eagle’s Eye

21. The Seventh Heaven: Saturn

22. St. Benedict’s Answer

23. The Eighth Heaven: Stationary Stars

24. St. Peter’s Questions about Faith

25. St. James’s Questions about Hope

26. St John’s Questions about Love

27. The Ninth Heaven: A Crystalline Sphere

28. Rings of Fire

29. All about Angels

30. The Empyrean

31. The Celestial Rose

32. The Saints Assembled

33. A Vision of God

In his 1997 book A HISTORY OF HEAVEN, Jeffrey Burton Russell says "To the modern mind heaven often seems bland or boring, an eternal sermon or a perpetual hymn. Evil and the Devil seem to get the best lines. Dante knew better; nothing could possibly be as exciting as heaven itself. The human idea of heaven is a complex tapestry shot with flashes of glory."

Customer Reviews

One of the great works of literature, in lucid translation.
The first of Dante's trilogy, The Divine Comedy, is an imaginative tour de force. Dante's literary hero, Virgil, is his guide through Hell and it's denizens; showing him the inhabitants of each of the nine circles and examples of the divine justice meted out to them.

The choice of Virgil as his guide enables Dante to realise an epic that encompasses multifold aims: there is tension between medieval and classical standards of literature, detailed theology, satire on the Florence of the time and, of course, the partly autobiographical nature of Dante's own spiritual journey. The Inferno, however, is never merely allegorical and the classical standards (of Virgil's own Aeneid can be seen as exemplary) are juxtaposed with an often squalid realism. In this, Dante's creation stands as one of the great works of literature.

This edition, which features parallel Italian text, includes some excellent commentaries after each Canto which outline some of the strands Dante has weaved into his epic, and also brief footnotes as guides to classical and Florentine references. Neither of these are extensive, and so this edition is perhaps not the academic choice, but for the beginner they are an excellent balance between understanding and brevity. The translation is clear, though at times the punctuation could be tightened, and the prose translation is perhaps the best choice for the epic form.

This may be cheap but DON'T READ IT!
this is the cheapest version of Dante available. The original translation dates from the middle of the last century, it is nonsense on every level and being popular once is no excuse. Here are the first seven lines to give you an idea.

In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell It were no easy task, how savage wild That forest, how robust and rough its growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

This is rubbish in English and has only a slight connection with the original. Ther are several marvellous versions out there. Avoid both the Penguin versions, by Sayers and Musa, they have enough faults to choke on. For monolingual versions I recommend. The Divine Comedy translated by C.H. Sisson. World's classics. A great poet translating a greater. The Divine Comedy translated by Allen Mandelbaum Everyman's Library. A good poet, very clean and clear translation, excellent notesand commentaries, and a beautiful book to cap it all with lots of Botticelli drawings. The Divine Comedy translated by Peter Dale.Anvil Press. Metrically strict but surprisingly accurate. Better still buy one of the bilingual version, Dante is easy to get to read.

Divinely nasty
"Midway life's journey I was made aware/that I had strayed into a dark forest..." Those eerie words open the first cantica of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno," the most famous part of the legendary Divina Comedia. But the stuff going on here is anything but divine, as Dante explores the metaphorical and supernatural horrors of the inferno.

The date is Good Friday of the year 1300, and Dante is lost in a creepy dark forest, being assaulted by a trio of beasts who symbolize his own sins. But suddenly he is rescued ("Not man; man I once was") by the legendary poet Virgil, who takes the despondent Dante under his wing -- and down into Hell.

But this isn't a straightforward hell of flames and dancing devils. Instead, it's a multi-tiered carnival of horrors, where different sins are punished with different means. Opportunists are forever stung by insects, the lustful are trapped in a storm, the greedy are forced to battle against each other, and the violent lie in a river of boiling blood, are transformed into thorn bushes, and are trapped on a volcanic desert.

If nothing else makes you feel like being good, then "The Inferno" might change your mind. The author loads up his "Inferno" with every kind of disgusting, grotesque punishment that you can imagine -- and it's all wrapped up in an allegorical journey of humankind's redemption, not to mention dissing the politics of Italy and Florence.

Along with Virgil -- author of the "Aeneid" -- Dante peppered his Inferno with Greek myth and symbolism. Like the Greek underworld, different punishments await different sins; what's more, there are also appearances by harpies, centaurs, Cerberus and the god Pluto. But the sinners are mostly Dante's contemporaries, from corrupt popes to soldiers.

And Dante's skill as a writer can't be denied -- the grotesque punishments are enough to make your skin crawl ("Fixed in the slime, groan they, 'We were sullen and wroth...'"), and the grand finale is Satan himself, with legendary traitors Brutus, Cassius and Judas sitting in his mouths. (Yes, I said MOUTHS, not "mouth")

More impressive still is his ability to weave the poetry out of symbolism and allegory, without it ever seeming preachy or annoying. Even pre-hell, we have a lion, a leopard and a wolf, which symbolize different sins, and a dark forest that indicates suicidal thoughts. And the punishments themselves usually reflect the person's flaws, such as false prophets having their heads twisted around so they can only see what's behind them. Wicked sense of humor.

Dante's vivid writing and wildly imaginative "inferno" makes this the most fascinating, compelling volume of the Divine Comedy. Never fun, but always spellbinding and complicated.