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Summary: This is one of the best poems i have ever read.
Review: THis is one of the greatest piece of literature ever written by a poet and gives you i detailed description of a man's journey through hell. Everything is so interesting in this book i juts couldn't put it down.
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Summary: Lucid editing provides a thrilling excursion
Review: I'm sure I must have given up on my original copy of DIVINE COMEDY after "Inferno." But the lucid editing of this edition, with abundant footnotes, make clear and easy that which I could never decipher. With Virgil, Beatrice & Kathryn leading the way, the trip through Inferno, Purgatory & Paradise was a thrilling excursion.
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Summary: This retelling of the Comedy superbly achieves its goal.
Review: At the time he was writing the Comedy nearly seven hundred years ago, Dante Alighieri intended to present to ordinary people the eternal Christian truths of damnation, redemption, and salvation in a work of marvelous splendor. Today, most people are unfamiliar with these truths as they are wrapped in the images Dante used, and the hundreds of contemporary references which enrich the work have been lost to common memory. Kathryn Lindskoog's retelling of the Comedy superbly achieves Dantes aims for our age. She has created an English rendering of poignant, poetic beauty, both inspiring and accessible; and her thorough and detailed knowledge of Dante's life, work, and times comes through footnotes which are expertly written without being intrusive or condescending. The footnotes, alone an impressive accomplishment, afford even a casual reader with sufficient background to the personalities and events of Dante's day which are vital for understanding his work. However, the greatest insight Lindskoog has, not only into Paradise but into the entire Comedy, is that it is a "journey to joy." Her use of these words as the subtitle shows that the Christian Way, so often caricatured as being restrictive, threatening, punishing, or opiative, is rather always to be seen as the Way to the radiant and invincible joy of eternal communion with God. This is the deep and abiding, guiding principle in the Comedy which Lindskoog recognized and never lost sight of. In Paradise, the joy of the redeemed comes through Lindskoog's rendering with almost painful incandescence. This was the great gift of Dante to his time, and Lindskoog has made it new for our own, which has desperate need of it.By David M. Baumann
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Summary: Zappulla's translation is the best I've seen.
Review: Succinct, clear and artfully carved. Zappulla's translation masterfully balances beauty and simplicity. Highly recommended.
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Summary: A fresh new prose version of Dante's PARADISE
Review: 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."
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Summary: A good translation of Dante's great allegory
Review: Ciardi did a great job of translating one of literature's greatest works, while being able to keep all of Dante's true thoughts and emotions in order. His notes help the reader to follow along. this is truly one of the greastest epics ever written.
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Summary: Captivating. The best translation out there. Bar none.
Review: Elio Zappulla's translation of The Inferno is, in my mind, the clearest and most effective one to date...and I've read most of them, I assure you. Others have made Dante's work a chore to read. Zappulla makes it a joy. If you buy one book this year...first of all, you're obviously not reading enough...but if you buy one book this year, make it this one. It'll make one helluva stocking stuffer. Bravo Mr. Zappulla. Continue with your important work!
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Summary: A fresh new prose version of Dante's Inferno
Review: This is the first volume of the only colorful, evocative, exact prose translation of The Divine Comedy on the market today. Unlike even the best translations of Dante's story into verse, it combines utter clarity with utter faithfulness to his text. It will inform and enrich scholars, but -- like the original -- it is written for ordinary readers. The result is pure, fresh Dante. This first volume begins with an unusually lively, readable introduction to the entire Comedy. In addition to traditional aids for understanding Dante, this introduction and the notes that follow provide a variety of new material. In the story, Dante is a likable but unheroic man who wakes up in a dark wood and learns that the only way for him to be rescued from death is to follow a friendly guide who will lead him down through all the sections of hell. There they have dozens of vivid encounters with fiendish creatures and human victims. This quick educational field trip through foul darkness opens Dante's eyes to how evil works in our lives and helps him to begin to understand what is truly good. I have emphasized Dante's sly wit and startling moral, psychological, and spiritual wisdom. His main purposes were to set forth the beauty, humor, and horror of human life; to peel away our dangerous illusions of adequacy; and to lead us all upward toward the eternal heart of reality. I was pleased to read the following review of this book by Cambridge University's Barbara Reynolds, co-translator of Dorothy Sayers' The Comedy of Dante Alighiere the Florentine: Paradise and author of The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante.: "Kathryn Lindskoog has provided a very readable and engaging introduction to Dante.... Her aim has been to provide a faithful restatement of Dante's poetry in clear English prose, for the sake of the story. She achieves this aim admirably. She also achieves more. Her notes are informative and interesting. Her Introduction is fresh and challenging.... Many new readers will have reason to be grateful to her." Here are the titles I gave to Dante's first 34 cantos: 1. The Dark Wood 2. Beginning Again 3. The Entry Hall of Hell 4. A Bright, Hopeless Castlle 5. Lost Lovers 6. Gluttons in Sludge 7. From Mammon to Mud 8. By Boat to a Glowing City 9. Through the City Gate 10. Burning Tombs 11. Edge of the Precipice 12. River of Boiling Blood 13. Suicide Forest 14. A Fiery Desert 15. Along the Embankment 16. A Crimson Waterfall 17. The Face of an Honest Man 18. Driven by Demons 19. Upside-Down Ministers 20. Backward Magicians 21. Boiling Tar 22. Brawling Guards 23. Golden Cloaks 24. A Snake Pit 25. The Reptile Men 26. Flames like Fireflies 27. Caught by a Black Cherubim 28. The Devil's Sword 29. Sick Souls 30. An Everlasting Quarrel 31. Towering Giants 32. In a Lake of Ice 33. Frozen Tears 34. Once More the Stars Dorothy Sayers said, "People who tackle Dante in [a] superficial way seldom get beyond the picturesque squalors of the Inferno. This is as though we were to judge a great city after a few days spent underground among the cellars and sewers; it would not be surprising if we were to report only an impression of sordidness, suffocation, rats, fetor, and gloom. But the grim substructure is only there for the sake of the city whose walls and spires stand up and take the morning; it is for the vision of God in the Paradiso that all the rest of the allegory exists."
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Summary: Everyone is going to hell.
Review: Still complicated with translation. Challenging to read, I could not have read this book if I did not have to do it for homework. I felt really grim reading it. Basically everyone can go to hell in this book.
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Summary: Mandelbaum= good
Review: Allan Mandelbaum's is a beautiful, natural translation of the Divine Comedy that feels medieval without seeming dusty or archaic. The poem itself is, um, really something.
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