Divine Comedy – serie

In Purgatorio Dante, having described his journey into Hell, narrates his ascent of Mount Purgatory with Virgil, as he encounters penitents who toil through physical agonies, starvation and flames to assuage their earthly vices. Only by learning from them can he achieve his final enlightened transition to the lost Earthly Paradise at the mountain’s summit, where he meets his dead love, Beatrice, and prepares to ascend to Heaven. Depicting a realm of intense sensation and physical experience, Dante’s poem transformed the traditional Christian idea of Purgatory by showing how the free will of the aspiring soul could change wordly perversions into perfection. It is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human possibility, hope and redemption.

An extraordinary new verse translation of Dante’s masterpiece, by poet, scholar, and lauded translator Anthony EsolenOf the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem’s line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante’s most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians—that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.

Charles S. Singleton's edition of the Divine Comedy, of which this is the first part, provides the English-speaking reader with everything he needs to read and understand Dante's great masterpiece. The Italian text here is in the edition of Giorgio Petrocchi, the leading Italian editor of Dante. Professor Singleton's prose translation, facing the Italian in a line-for-line arrangement on each page, is smooth and literate. The companion volume, the Commentary, marshals every point of information the reader may require: vocabulary; grammar; identification of Dante's characters; historical sources of some of the incidents and, where pertinent, excerpts from those sources in their original languages and in translation; profound clear analysis of the Divine Comedy's basic allegory. There is a complete bibliography of every aspect of Dante studies. This first part of the Divine Comedy which is illustrated with maps of Italy and the region Dante knew especially, diagrams of the circles of Hell, and plates showing some of the historic sites mentioned by Dante in his poem.

Charles S. Singleton's edition of the Divine Comedy, of which this is the first part, provides the English-speaking reader with everything he needs to read and understand Dante's great masterpiece. The Italian text here is in the edition of Giorgio Petrocchi, the leading Italian editor of Dante. Professor Singleton's prose translation, facing the Italian in a line-for-line arrangement on each page, is smooth and literate. The companion volume, the Commentary, marshals every point of information the reader may require: vocabulary; grammar; identification of Dante's characters; historical sources of some of the incidents and, where pertinent, excerpts from those sources in their original languages and in translation; profound clear analysis of the Divine Comedy's basic allegory. There is a complete bibliography of every aspect of Dante studies. This first part of the Divine Comedy which is illustrated with maps of Italy and the region Dante knew especially, diagrams of the circles of Hell, and plates showing some of the historic sites mentioned by Dante in his poem.