About this title: Dante's masterpiece of medieval literature contains many levels of meaning, including the literal (Dante's trip through hell, purgatory, and paradise); the allegorical (the progression of the soul toward goodness); and the moral (what it takes to lead a good life). Dante's great love, Beatrice, is seen in the poem as the personification of love ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: 1997-09-01
ISBN-13:9780374525316ISBN:0374525315
Description: Like New in Like New jacket. The front and back covers are slightly scratched. Satisfaction guaranteed. USPS tracking included at no additional charge. read more
Description: Mazur, Michael. Fine. No dust jacket as issued. LIKE NEW. Owner's stamp embossed on title page. Text in English, Italian. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 464 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Mazur, Michael. Fine. No dust jacket. Trade paperback in fine condition. Text in Italian, English. 427 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"Another week, another masterwork I'm ashamed to admit I haven't read sooner.
Dante's Inferno is a lot of different things: It's the text that legitimized Italian as a worthy literary language. It's a piece of proselytizing propaganda that intended to terrify the masses into good Catholic living. It's the supreme dystopic vision -- a map and story of proper Hell that makes those Hell-On-Earth books like 1984 and The Road look like bedtime stories.
And it is an absolutely required read.
In the class for which I read it, we blew through the Inferno in two lectures -- about three hours in total. This feels like a bit of a disservice because the text is so layered, stylistically and thematically, and it's replete with references to then-current Italians who are not, in 2009, household names the way Judas, Brutus, Mordred, Tiresias, Socrates, and other historical sinners are. Then again, ... Dante himself travels through all of Hell, from the gate to the court of Satan himself, in about that same amount of time. He returns to the real world after serious sensual overexposure, and that's about how I feel, too.
I'd love to think more about Dante's ordering of sins -- sodomy as worse than genocide? what! -- and I am especially tempted to place some newer names in their appropriate circles. But that, I suppose, is Dante's point."
"Having wanted to read Inferno for a long time, I was glad to find Dorothy Sayers' translation since I value her own writing. I'm no scholar, so I can't compare this critically to the numerous other translations available. I just come looking to enjoy reading and understanding great classic literature on occasion. It takes a great deal of background information to appreciate this work. The Divine Comedy can be examined from many different angles: Poetry, allegory, theology, a spiritual journey, a love story. Sayers' introduction and notes, and the diagrams and drawings in this book were a great help to me. Some may argue that the scholarship is a bit dated, but Sayers clearly loved The Divine Comedy and wanted her readers to appreciate it also. The result of her work was a very interesting reading experience for me, better than I expected. I particularly enjoyed the insights she incorporated into the notes from Charles Williams' book, The Figure of Beatrice. (Sayers dedicated her translation of The Divine Comedy to Williams.) The verse might make it a little more difficult to get the meaning until you get used to it, but I think it's worth the effort. Once I found a good reading pace, I didn't find the rhyming forced as some readers have. (It might seem that way if you look for it.) It must be a difficult thing to try to give readers of English the same experience that Dante's Italian readers had and I think that was Dorothy Sayers' goal. She got me interested enough to take seriously her claim that readers of Dante are cheating themselves if they stop after Inferno. On through Purgatory to Paradise ... It must only get better from here."
"Having reviewed Dante's work elsewhere, I will restrict my comments to Mr. Esolen's translation, which is brilliant. He has translated Dante's verse into iambic pentameter, maintaining the three line stanzas, but has not gone to any great lengths to force the English to rhyme. This makes the meaning of the "Commedia" more clear in as much as the syntax is not distorted for the sake of rhyme. The vocabulary is contemporary, so there is no need to read with a dictionary handy. The end result is a reading experience that is edifying and pleasurable. Mr. Esolen has done a great service to Dante, and the English speaking world, by making the "Commedia" more accessible than other translations while preserving all the genius of the work.
In spite of all this, I do prefer the Sayers translation in some ways. Sayers preserves the rhyming structure and uses a somewhat more archaic vocabulary. This results in a more challenging reading experience, but it is also more elegant. There are times when I like to wrestle with a text. It requires more effort, but it is almost always more rewarding.
Preferring Sayers to Esolen doesn't really mean too much, though. It's like preferring Maxfield Parrish to N. C. Wyeth. There is no denying the skill, the craftsmanship, the aesthetic merit of these artists. I'm not sure there is a qualitative difference between Esolen and Sayers. This may be merely an issue of personal preference. I am grateful for both of them. The world is larger and more beautiful because of their work.
The explanatory notes and supplemental reading material supplied is of great use to the reader by providing information that is critical to understanding who Dante was and what he believed. I highly recommend Anthony Esolen's translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy" to everyone who seeks to enrich their lives."
"What a joy to read literature that is not only well executed, but beautiful in spirit! Dante's work is one of the pillars of western literature, and justly so. Conceived and executed in a poetical form called "terza rima" and functioning on multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, the three books of the "Commedia" are a microcosm of human spiritual life. Care is lavished on every detail from the geography to the astronomy and everything in between. It is a monumental achievement, encompassing theology, politics, aesthetics, literary criticism, science, philosophy, metaphysics...you name it.
The first book, the Inferno, chronicles the beginning of Dante's spiritual odyssey. He wakes one day in the middle of his life to discover that he is lost in a dark forest and surrounded by mortal dangers. Against all hope, rescue comes in the form of the ancient poet Virgil, who has been commissioned by Heaven to lead Dante back to the true path. Virgil, the personification of pagan wisdom, must lead Dante down through the nine circles of Hell where he will begin to learn the wisdom that leads back to life, which will ultimately be found only in Christ. Each circle in Hell is the final resting place of souls who have died in their sins, the punishments at each level being perfectly suited to the sin that defined the earthly life of the soul. The sins at each circle are progressively more vile than the circle before, and the punishments grow more horrible and gruesome.
Though the tortures of Hell are graphically described, Dante is not gratuitous. He is no medieval Quentin Tarantino. Part of his purpose is to reveal the hideous nature of evil and expose the ugliness of the soul that remains unrepentant and self-interested even after death. Dante's theology is solid and Hell is the place where true, lasting judgment is meted out and justice is finally satisfied. These are not popular ideas in our politically correct, selectively tolerant society. But exactly what have these flaccid new ideologies done for us except to shackle our thoughts, and silence dissenting voices? Give me Dante any day.
Sayers' translation is magnificent. She reproduces both the meter and rhyme, giving those of us who do not know Italian a taste of what the original must be like. Her explanatory notes provide much needed details that enrich the reading experience. Even more helpful was her dedication to Charles Williams which, in turn, led me to read "The Figure of Beatrice". It was there that Dante's meaning became more clear to me."
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