The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated by Dante Alighieri

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

As part of a projected six-volume edition of the Divine Comedy, Musa (Indiana Univ.) has revised and reissued his translation of Dante's Inferno (LJ 3/1/95) in a bilingual edition, accompanied by a volume-length commentary. Musa's translation is in fluent, colloquial verse that aims for the speed and rhythm of the original though not the form. This serviceable version is on the same level as the recent translations by Robert Pinskey (LJ 11/1/94) and Robert Durling (LJ 3/15/96). Musa's commentary is thorough and clear but doesn't significantly supersede that of Charles S. Singleton (1970). Nevertheless, it can be recommended.?Thomas L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Critic extraordinaire James (Cultural Amnesia, 2007) is also a poet (Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 2008), and he has been working his way to this daring project ever since he was in Florence in the mid-1960s while studying at Cambridge, as he explains in his rousing introduction. His companion, whom he would soon marry, the future Dante scholar Prudence Shaw, revealed to him the “great secret of Dante’s masterpiece,” the fact that it possesses both “interior intensity” and propulsion. How, James wondered, could a translator re-create this dynamic? Deciding that Dante’s terza rima is too strained in English, he uses robust, rollicking quatrains. He also avoids footnotes, which so rudely interrupt the flow and drama of this defining classic, by working necessary explanations into the poem itself. James’ revitalizing translation allows this endlessly analyzed, epic, archetypal “journey to salvation” to once again stride, whirl, blaze, and sing. Anyone heretofore reluctant to pick up The Divine Comedy will discover that James’ bold, earthy, rhythmic and rhyming, all-the-way live English translation fulsomely and brilliantly liberates the profound humanity of Dante’s timeless masterpiece. --Donna Seaman              

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