Book Description
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The Divine Comedy begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.

Allen Mandelbaum’s astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets.

This Everyman’s edition–containing in one volume all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso–includes an introduction by Nobel Prize—winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli's marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (51)

Very Nice!
Clean, well bound book with ribbon bookmark. It was a perfect gift, my son loved it.

Fine Introduction to Dante's World
The Everyman's Library edition of Dante's Divine Comedy in an English translation makes this classic text accessible to students, interested readers, and literary researchers. In a convenient size, the volume contains not only the entire text in translation, but an excellent introduction by an Italian Nobel-prize winner, as well as very useful notes. Dante's journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven is steeped in the philosophy, theology, and social history of medieval Italy, yet there is much to learn from his grasp of the human condition. Any modern-day reader can appreciate its poetic substance; the effort to understand Dante's world is rewarded by the richness of description, insight, and transcendence in this artful and epic masterpiece. The Everyman's edition belongs on the bookshelf of all those who consider themselves to be well educated.

The Best Single Volume Available Today
First. The Divine Comedy is an ur-text: one of the select few that have been passed down through centuries, almost millenia, to create a foundation on which is built our Western literary tradition.

Second. Allen Mandelbaum's translation is excellent. It has the readability of prose but stays lyrical. It does not strain itself to be lyrical, though, as I think Ciardi's translation does too often.

Third. The notes are fantastic. Dante constantly alludes to the Greek mythology and his contemporary Italy. Without the excellent notes it can be very difficult to interpret what point the author is trying to make. Most importantly, the notes make reference to the original work on which Dante based the allusion. If you have a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses or Virgil's Aeneid you can easily cross-reference and get more out of the Divine Comedy than you would otherise. (Mandelbaum's translations of Metamorphoses and Aeneid are also great and recommended, though not as nicely packaged as this work.)

Finally, and my Main Point. This is physically the nicest single volume of the Divine Comedy you can buy new today.

The dust jacket is very attractive. But if you're like me you take off the jacket immediately and read it without. Under the jacket you'll find a very handsome cover and spine, as you do with all Everyman's Library editions. This volume will not only look good on your shelf, but it should last through many readings and be a very nice to hand down to a child or grandchild someday.

The physical dimensions are perfect. Some volumes of the complete Divine Comedy I have seen are just unwieldly; they are too tall or too thick to comfortably read while kicking back in a chair or lounging in bed. This also has a perfect heft. It feels like you are holding and reading an important work.

The paper is very nice. Just thick enough, it easily turns without fear of tearing while not being too heavy to be cumbersome. It won't fall to pieces in five year's time either. (Unfortunately, the current printing of Mandelbaum's translation of Virgil's Aeneid by Bantam Classics is a mass-market paperback and already rotting on the shelf.)

Most importantly, the text is very readable. A very friendly typeface is used. It is put on the paper with modern methods - not as a facsimile of a photo of an old metal type pressing as so many classics appear. And a professional actually spent time on the layout. Too many classics are thrown together cheaply. The people at Everyman's Library do a consistently great job at this. By contrast, old Penguin Classics volumes are terrible to read because the type, press, and layout are poorly done and painful to read. (To be fair Penguin Classics has gotten much better recently. In particular their "Deluxe Editions" are very nice. I have the "Deluxe Edition" of Odyssey, Iliad, and Candide and recommend them.)

Summary. After growing tired of the genre fiction that filled my leisure reading, I began reading the classics. This book was one of the first I picked up and it has completely spoiled me. Everyman's Library sets the bar against which all other printings of the classics must be compared.

If you are looking for the best single volume of Dante's Divine Comedy, this is it. It will make a handsome addition to your library and you will easily be able to say you have actually read it too.

The divine journey
"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 "Divine Comedy," the legendary poem that takes its author through the eerie depths of hell, heaven and purgatory. It's a haunting, almost hallucinatory experience, full of the the metaphorical and supernatural horrors of the inferno, and joys of paradise.

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.

Well, that was fun. But after passing through hell, Dante gets the guided tour of Purgatory, where the souls of the not-that-bad-but-not-pure-either get cleansed. He and Virgil emerge at the base of a vast mountain, and an angel orders him to "wash you those wounds within," then lets them in.

As Virgil and Dante climb the mountain, they observe the seven terraces that sinners stay on, representing the seven deadly sins -- the angry, the proud, the envious, the lazy, the greedy, the lustful and the gluttons. It's a one-way trip, and you don't even get to look back.

The road up the mountain leads to the gates of Heaven, and soon Dante has been purified to the point where he's allowed to go inside. Virgil doesn't get to enter Heaven, so he passes Dante on to the beautiful Beatrice, the woman he loved in his younger years.

She whisks him up to the spheres of those who are now pure of soul -- the wise, the loving, the people who fought for their religion, the just, the contemplative, the saints, and finally even the angels. And after passing through heaven's nine spheres, he passes out of the physical realm and human understanding -- and sees God, the incomprehensible, represented by three circles inside each other, but all the same size.

Needless to say, it's a pretty wild trip.And admittedly "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" aren't quite on the writing level of "Inferno," which has the most visceral, skin-crawling imagery and lines ("Fixed in the slime, groan they, 'We were sullen and wroth...'"), and a wicked sense of irony. It makes the angels and saints seem a bit tame.

But there's plenty of power in the second two books, particularly when Dante tries to comprehend God, and almost blows out his brain in the process -- "my desire and my will were turned like a wheel, all at one speed by the Love that turns the sun and all the other stars." It's haunting, and sticks with you long after the story has ended.

More impressive still is his ability to weave the poetry out of symbolism and allegory, without it ever seeming preachy or annoying. Even at the start, Dante sees lion, a leopard and a wolf, which symbolize different sins, and a dark forest that indicates suicidal thoughts. Not to mention Purgatory as a mountain that must be climbed, or Hell as a Hadesian underworld.

Dante's vivid writing and wildly imaginative journey makes the "Divine Comedy" a timeless, spellbinding read, and hauntingly powerful from inferno to paradiso.

The Divine Comedy: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso
It's a good book, it's new and i received it in a timely manner for a really low price. ... Read more

Book Description
The New York Times Bestseller

Boston, 1865. A series of murders, all of them inspired by scenes in Dante’s Inferno. Only an elite group of America’s first Dante scholars—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and J. T. Fields—can solve the mystery. With the police baffled, more lives endangered, and Dante’s literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find the killer.


From the Trade Paperback edition.Download Description

Words can bleed.

In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club -- poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields -- are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.

The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.

Customer Reviews (318)

a great read
I assign this book for my literature classes to connect a very old text to a more modern text and of bringing Dante to America, so to speak. Pearl does a wonderful job of pulling out parts of the Inferno for readers to remember or reread.

Great mystery and historical fiction novel
Overall, just great and well written. I can only say that I hope his next novel is as good.

Efficiently written and occasionally exciting thriller
This novel is based upon historical fact. In 1867 the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published the first-ever American translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy". In preparing his translation he had the assistance of his fellow-poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, his publisher James T Fields and the historian George Washington Greene. This endeavour does not appear to have met with universal approval. Although earlier British translations were available, Dante's poem was not well-known in mid-nineteenth century America, where Italian was not widely spoken. (The great influx of Italian-American immigrants was not to take place until later in the century). In Britain, Dante's criticisms of the Papacy meant that he was sometimes regarded as a proto-Protestant, but in an America whose religious life was still dominated by Puritan ideology the "Divine Comedy" was widely regarded, especially by those who had not read it, as a pernicious work of Papist superstition.

The book is a historical crime mystery set in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the autumn and winter of 1865, a few months after the end of the American Civil War. A number of the city's most prominent citizens- a judge, a clergyman, a businessman- are found murdered in horrific and bizarre ways. With one exception, the police investigating the crimes do not realise the significance of the killer's methods. Longfellow and his friends, however, realise that all the killings parallel the punishments meted out to sinners in Dante's "Inferno". To their horror they begin to suspect that the person responsible is committing these crimes in an attempt to blacken Dante's reputation and thus sabotage their translation. Worse still, the Dante connection means that they themselves might be suspected of the killings. Together with Nicholas Rey, Boston's first black policeman and the only man outside their circle to realise the connection between the murders and Dante, they try to track down the killer. There is, however, no shortage of suspects. Many of Boston's intellectual elite, especially the powerful Corporation which controls Harvard University, are vehemently opposed to the idea of a Dante translation being published in their city.

Perhaps my main criticism would be that also made by another reviewer, namely that the book does not really convey a sense of time and place. Although the intellectual background is set out well, we do not really get much sense that we are in nineteenth-century Boston rather than, say, nineteenth-century London or twentieth-century Boston. The one part of the book where Matthew Pearl's writing does really come to life is in the vivid passages describing one character's experiences in the Civil War. The characterisation is also well done, with each of the three poets emerging as a character in his own right- Holmes timid and hesitant, Lowell impulsive and Longfellow calm and rational.

I must confess that I am probably not the ideal reader for the book, which seems to have been aimed at those whose literary interests encompass not only Dante but also detective stories and nineteenth-century American poetry. While I have read the "Divine Comedy", crime fiction, historical or otherwise, is not really my favourite literary genre, and, Longfellow apart, I am not particularly familiar with the Fireside Poets, who are much less widely known in Britain than in America. (I now realise that I had in fact conflated Holmes with his son Oliver Wendell Holmes junior, the distinguished Supreme Court Justice). I did, however, find "The Dante Club" an efficiently-written and at times exciting thriller, one that had me turning the pages as quickly as I could to find out the identity of the killer.

Slow Moving, but Interesting Historical Mystery
THE DANTE CLUB takes place in 1865 Boston, and Matthew Pearl does a great job re-creating that time period for the reader.In particular, he does a good job informing the reader of how American intellectuals thought and acted during the post-Civil war period.I learned a lot from this novel, and am now more interested in this era of US History.

Unfortunately, THE DANTE CLUB also tries to be a thriller of sorts, and I don't think it succeeds very well at that level.The plot moves too slowly and is bogged down with too much historical detail.Pearl tries to write in the antiquated prose of the 19th century, and as a modern reader I found this style very difficult to get into.

Also, the four members of the Dante Club are ultimately quite bland -- most of them are privileged, wealthy members of the elite.I found them historically interesting, but not particularly likable.The mulatto policeman is the most intriguing character, but he's not in the novel enough to establish a real presence.

Unfortunately, the lack of good characters leads to an real absence of drama.As a result, there is little in this book that engages the readers emotional interest.I suspect many will find this book boring, and many of the negative Amazon reviews reinforce this point.

I would mainly recommend this novel to people with an intellectual interest in this historical period.If you're looking for a fast-paced DA VINCI CODE experience, or an intense drama with compelling characters, you will most likely be disappointed with this book.

I do not like it, Sam I am.
This is the kind of book that kind of seems that it was written for people like me. I was supposed to like it. Unfortunately, I could barely get through it. It is clearly designed to appeal to people with a yen for historical fiction more than it was supposed to appeal to mystery fans. I found that it irritated me on both levels. That's actually quite an accomplishment in and of itself.

I found the historical literary characters to be precious and charmless. The dialogue was trying very hard to be smart. All of this is a shame, since it is obvious from the caliber of the prose that Pearl can write. I agree that he is skilled, I just don't like much at all how he uses that skill. I am probably a little biased, since this period in letters is one of my favorites. I have my own internal view about how these men and women acted and lived. And it does not jibe at all with the characters that The Dante Club brought to life. I guess that this is an occupational hazard of writing about historical figures.

Finally, to add insult to injury, I figured the murderer out too early in the book. It made some of the climactic exciting scenes significantly less exciting.

The background information about the introduction of Dante in the US was very interesting. Too bad that Pearl did not choose to write a magazine article instead of historical fiction. ... Read more

Book Description
Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise-the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (27)

Great read
Perhaps I'm one of the few people who didn't have to read this in high school / college.I'm not sure I would have liked to have been required to read it, but reading it now as an older adult I found it fascinating.

Divine
"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 "Divine Comedy," the legendary poem that takes its author through the eerie depths of hell, heaven and purgatory. It's a haunting, almost hallucinatory experience, full of the the metaphorical and supernatural horrors of the inferno, and joys of paradise.

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.

Well, that was fun. But after passing through hell, Dante gets the guided tour of Purgatory, where the souls of the not-that-bad-but-not-pure-either get cleansed. He and Virgil emerge at the base of a vast mountain, and an angel orders him to "wash you those wounds within," then lets them in.

As Virgil and Dante climb the mountain, they observe the seven terraces that sinners stay on, representing the seven deadly sins -- the angry, the proud, the envious, the lazy, the greedy, the lustful and the gluttons. It's a one-way trip, and you don't even get to look back.

The road up the mountain leads to the gates of Heaven, and soon Dante has been purified to the point where he's allowed to go inside. Virgil doesn't get to enter Heaven, so he passes Dante on to the beautiful Beatrice, the woman he loved in his younger years.

She whisks him up to the spheres of those who are now pure of soul -- the wise, the loving, the people who fought for their religion, the just, the contemplative, the saints, and finally even the angels. And after passing through heaven's nine spheres, he passes out of the physical realm and human understanding -- and sees God, the incomprehensible, represented by three circles inside each other, but all the same size.

Needless to say, it's a pretty wild trip.And admittedly "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" aren't quite on the writing level of "Inferno," which has the most visceral, skin-crawling imagery and lines ("Fixed in the slime, groan they, 'We were sullen and wroth...'"), and a wicked sense of irony. It makes the angels and saints seem a bit tame.

But there's plenty of power in the second two books, particularly when Dante tries to comprehend God, and almost blows out his brain in the process -- "my desire and my will were turned like a wheel, all at one speed by the Love that turns the sun and all the other stars." It's haunting, and sticks with you long after the story has ended.

More impressive still is his ability to weave the poetry out of symbolism and allegory, without it ever seeming preachy or annoying. Even at the start, Dante sees lion, a leopard and a wolf, which symbolize different sins, and a dark forest that indicates suicidal thoughts. Not to mention Purgatory as a mountain that must be climbed, or Hell as a Hadesian underworld.

Dante's vivid writing and wildly imaginative journey makes the "Divine Comedy" a timeless, spellbinding read, and hauntingly powerful from inferno to paradiso.

The Best Translation of Inferno. . .
. . .is the one that you'll actually read. For most of
us, that's the magnificent one by John Ciardi. It's also
the one that's most likely to lead the reader on to Purgatorio
and Paradiso. Hell, it turns out, is the most attractive of
the three canticles into which the Divine Comedy is divided.
Fleshy, graphic and personal it has a lurid appeal that the
other, more spiritual canticles lack. Many people have
well-thumbed copies of The Inferno and barely touched volumes
of the other two.

So translation is the key. Translators, according to the
Italian proverb are always traitors.

There is no way around it, something is always lost in the
leap from one language to another. You can consult a modern
'adaptation' of Shakespeare to get the feel of what has to
be surrendered.

John Ciardi decided to keep the original rhyme scheme: 'aba'
in which the poem is divided into groups of three lines of
which the first and third rhyme. In Italian, this is fairly
easy, in English a great deal more difficult.
So in order to keep the feel of the tercets (as they're called)
Ciardi sometimes had to stray a bit from the literal
meaning. Nothing vital is lost, but the specialist will
surely find some points to dispute.
For the rest of us, this is a first-rate view into a world
we can barely otherwise imagine. Ciardi's notes and glosses
on the cantos are breezy, illuminating and approachable.

There are other, more correct translations- Mandelbaum's
is first among them -that might be better for the specialist
or the student of the Italian Language. But Ciardi is
still irreplaceable.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of New Short Course in Wine,Theand
bang BANG: A Novel ISBN 9781601640005

Excellent work, excellent translator
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," is an apt phrase from this book.However, Ciardi's translation and footnotes make the social and theological context of the work spring to life and make it sensible to the modern reader.This diagrams, analogies, and history lessons are always interesting to read and give a deeper meaning to the text that would be missed entirely by the non-specialist.He seldom sacrifices rhyme, rhythm or meaning, and never all of them at once.Further, he insists on maintaining the parallelisms and structural cycles of the original, which makes for an excellent reading experience.

A forgotten masterpiece
The Divine Comedy was written in the 1300s by Dante. It has three parts: The Inferno, The Purgartory, and The Paradise. The Inferno is Hell where sinners are punished in various ways according to the degree of their sins. The Purgartory is a waiting place in which sinners must endure certain hardships in order to inherit the Paradise. The Paradise is Heaven, where a select few live in a perfect society. The Divine Comedy follows Dante in his journey to perfection, however, it has many politicial ideals inbedded. This particular translation is excellent. It has a wealth of knowledge in its footnotes. ... Read more

Book Description
A groundbreaking bilingual edition of Dante’s masterpiece that includes a substantive Introduction, extensive notes, and appendixes that reproduce Dante’s key sources and influences. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (102)

Sets the bar high for future B&N Classics
I ended up reading this book twice. The first time, I read straight through the poem and was thoroughly unimpressed. The story, as Longfellow himself says, is "tedious" and self-congratulatory and mostly a platform for attacking his enemies. It isn't really great reading.

So what made me read it a second time? This time, Barnes & Noble seems to have found the right person to write the introduction and put together endnotes and discussion notes. The second time through, I read the poem along with each endnote, and my appreciation of the book was dramatically better.

Without the background as presented in the introduction and endnotes, the story is hobbled from the outset. You simply can't understand the story and what Dante is trying to say without a clear understanding of the history and circumstances in which he wrote it. Who are these people in Hell? Why is Hell shaped the way it is? What is the meaning of each character in Hell? The endnotes answer all these questions, and make the story interesting.

The follow-on discussion notes pose an interesting question. Can a reader read and enjoy The Inferno as a book and story, rather than as "literature"? The answer, based on the story alone is a resounding no. However, this edition by Barnes & Noble Classics turns that right around and proves that with the right supporting material, even a "tedious" book like this can be made enjoyable.

5 stars for the excellent B&N addition, but -1 for the story itself.

Amazing Translation for the Novice
I paid an absolute fortune for this edition while studying in Perugia, Italy (apparently the dollar isn't doing so well these days, hence the price), but I would say it was worth it.My first time reading Dante (recreationally, to boot!), I was entraced by the beautiful language of the translation.In his story, Dante makes several obscure references to unknown historical figures of his age.This edition features the Italian text on the left side of the page, and english on the other.This was great to help me improve my Italian, or if I wasn't sure of the meaning of a word, I was able to work out another translation.The notes at the end of the book served to inform without dumbing it down.Don't be confused--these are not cliffnotes at the end, simply clarifications.As a Dante novice, I fell in love with this edition and quickly recommended it to all my friends.In fact, after I finished, I ran back to the Italian bookstore to purchase Purgatorio and Paradiso, each equally as expensive as Inferno.As far as the story goes, it is very highly praised.It is completely beautiful, and truly helps you grasp more Italian context, as well as to catch the many literary and pop culture references to Dante that exist today.It's just so amazing, it is quickly understandable why it is so unbelieveably popular.

John Ciardi has the best Dante translation to date.
I truly enjoy reading the classics. However some classics must be translated. Some translations loose meaning since you can not translate word for word. Only the meanings can be translated and with the evolving English language sometimes words can have skewed definitions. John Ciardi is the best Dante translator I have read. Signet has done a good job at this price point. The Devine comedy is a book set that will expand your understanding on many uncannonized ideas. The Inferno (Signet Classics)The Paradiso (Signet Classics)The Purgatorio (Signet Classics)

Chthonic Boom...
You know how some so-called "classics" suck? This isn't one of them.

Ciardi's translation is readable and fluid, and he sets up the action in each canto with a modern English preface. He also provides end-notes to each canto that explain obscure people, places, events, and choices of translation. (Various illustrations and diagrams also give a clear picture of the infernal topography and spatial structure.)

The Inferno itself is a masterpiece...one of those numinous works of literature where you catch yourself at intervals marveling at its brilliance. I wish I'd read it ten years ago.

Intro to Inferno
Translators, according to the Italian proverb are traitors.
There is no way around it, something is always lost in the
leap from one language to another. You can consult a modern
'adaptation' of Shakespeare to get the feel of what has to
be surrendered. In the end, a preference for one translation
over another is a matter of what you're most willing to lose.

John Ciardi decided to keep the original rhyme scheme: 'aba'
in which the poem is divided into groups of three lines of
which the first and third rhyme. In Italian, this is fairly
easy, in English a great deal more difficult.
So in order to keep the feel of the tercets (as they're called)
Ciardi sometimes had to stray a bit from the literal
meaning. Nothing vital is lost, but the specialist will
surely find some points to dispute.
For the rest of us, this is a first-rate view into a world
we can barely otherwise imagine. Ciardi's notes and glosses
on the cantos are breezy, illuminating and approachable.

There are other, more correct translations- Mandelbaum's
is first among them -that might be better for the specialist
or the student of the Italian Language. I notice, however,
that when I want to spend a pleasant few moments in the
Poet's company-and especially for the Inferno- that this
is the translation I usually reach for.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINEand
the novel bang BANG. ISBN 9781601640005 ... Read more

Amazon.com
The one quality that all classic works of literature share istheir timelessness. Shakespeare still plays in Peoria 400 years afterhis death because the stories he dramatized resonate in modern readers'hearts and minds; methods of warfare have changed quite a bit since theTrojan War described by Homer in his Iliad, but thepassions and conflicts that shaped such warriors as Achilles,Agamemnon, Patroclus, and Odysseus still find their counterparts todayon battlefields from Bosnia to Afghanistan. Likewise, a little travelguide to hell written by the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri in the13th century remains in print at the end of the 20th century, and itcontinues to speak to new generations of readers. There have beencountless translations of the Inferno, but this one by poetRobert Pinsky is both eloquent and tailored to our times.

Yes, this is an epic poem, but don't let that put you off. An excellentintroduction provides context for the work, while detailed notes oneach canto are a virtual who's who of 13th-century Italian politics,culture, and literature. Best of all, Pinsky's brilliant translationcommunicates the horror, despair, and terror of hell with suchimmediacy, you can almost smell the sulfur and feel the heat from therain of fire as Dante--led by his faithful guide Virgil--descends lowerand lower into the pit. Dante's journey through Satan's kingdom mustrate as one of the great fictional travel tales of all time, and Pinskydoes it great justice.Book Description

Customer Reviews (45)

Medieval vision of the afterlife
This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) "Devine Comedy" weaved together aspects of biblical and classical Greek literary traditions to produce one of the most important works of not only medieval literature, but also one of the great literary works of Western civilization.The full impact of this 14,000-line poem divided into 100 cantos and three books is not just literary.Dante's autobiographical poem Commedia, as he titled it, was his look into the individual psyche and human soul.He explored and reflected on such fundamental questions as political institutions and their problems, the nature of humankind's moral actions, and the possibility of spiritual transformation; these were all fundamental social and cultural concerns for people during the fourteenth-century.Dante wrote the Commedia not in Latin but in the Tuscan dialect of Italian so that it would reach a broader readership.The Commedia was a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, (Inferno), Purgatory, (Purgatorio), and Paradise, (Paradisio).

The poem narrated in first person, began with Dante lost midlife.He was 35 years old in the year 1300 and in a dark wood.Being lost in the dark wood was certainly an allegorical device that Dante used to express the condition of his own life at the time he started writing the poem. Dante had been active in Florentine politics and a member of the White Guelph party who opposed the secular rule of Pope Boniface VIII over Florence.In 1302, The Black Guelphs who were allied with the Pope, were militarily victorious in gaining control of the city and Dante found himself an exile from his beloved city for the rest of his life.Thus, Dante started writing the Commedia in 1308 and used it to comment on his own tribulations of life, and to state his views on politics and religion, and heap scorn on his political enemies.

Dante's first leg of his journey out of the dark wood was through the nine concentric circles of Hell (Inferno), escorted by his favorite classical Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid.Dante borrowed heavily from Virgil's Aeneid.Much of Dante's description of hell had similarities to Virgil's description in his sixth book of the Aeneid.Dante's three major divisions of sin in hell where unrepentant sinners dwelled, had their sources in Aristotle and Augustinian philosophy.They were self-indulgence, violence, and fraud.Fraud was considered the worst of moral failures because it undermined family, trust, and religion; in essence, it tore at the moral fabric of civilized society.These divisions were inversions of the classical virtues of moderation, courage, and wisdom.The fourth classical virtue, justice, is what Dante came to believe after his journey through hell that all its inhabitants received for their unrepentant sins.There were nine concentric circles of hell inside the earth; each smaller than the previous one.For Dante the geography of hell was a moral geography as well as a physical one, reflecting the nature of the sin.Canto IV describes the first circle of hell, Limbo, which is where Dante met the shades, as souls where called, of the virtuous un-baptized such as Homer, Ovid, Caesar, Aristotle, and Plato.

In the four circles for the sin of self-indulgence Dante met shades who where lustful, gluttons, hoarders and wrathful.In the second circle of Hell, lustful souls were blown around in a violent storm.In Canto V, one of the great dramatic moments of the poem, Dante had his first lengthy encounter with an unrepentant sinner Francesca da Rimini, who committed adultery with her brother-in-law.Like all the sinners in hell, Francesca laid the blame for her sin elsewhere.She claimed to be seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere.At the end of the scene, Dante fainted out of pity for Francesca.

In Canto X, the sixth circle of hell reserved for heretics who are punished by being trapped in flaming tombs, Dante took the opportunity to use the circle to chastise political leaders for participating in political partisanship.A Florentine who was a leader in the rival Ghibbelline political party, Farinata degli Uberti, accosted Dante.Both men aggressively argued with each other, recreating in hell the bitterness of partisan politics in Florence.Farinata predicted Dante's exile.Dante used this Canto to show the dangerous tendencies of petty political partisanship that he harbored.

The seventh circle of hell was subdivided into three areas where sinners were punished for doing violence against themselves, their neighbors, or God.In Canto XIII Dante encountered Pier della Vigne in the wood of the suicides.The shades there were shrubs who had to speak through a broken branch.Pier spoke to Dante about how he had been an important advisor to Emperor Frederick II, and how he blamed his fall, and his suicide, on the envy of other court members.This Canto was especially important because Dante came to grips with his own "future" fall from political power and exile.Pier's behavior served as a strong example to Dante how not to act in exile.Whether he had been tempted to commit suicide is not clear; however, he certainly had been prone to the selfish and despairing attitude that Pier represented.

The last two circles of hell contained the sinners of fraud.In the eighth circle, there were ten ditches for the various types of fraud such as Simony, thievery, hypocrisy, etc.Canto XIX described the third ditch, which contained those guilty of Simony, the sin of church leaders perverting their spiritual office by buying and selling church offices.Simonists were buried upside down in a rock with their feet on fire.Pope Nicholas III mistakenly addressed Dante as Pope Boniface VIII who was the current Pope in 1300, and whose place in hell was thereby predicted.This is not surprising since Boniface was the person most responsible for Dante's exile.In an interesting literary twist, Nicholas "confessed" to Dante, as if he was a priest, his sin of greed and nepotism.He admitted that even after becoming Pope he cared more for his family's interests than the good of the whole Church.Dante responded to Nicholas' "confession" with a stinging condemnation of Simony drawn from the Book of Revelation.After this encounter, Dante came to understand that hell was a place of justice.

Canto XXXIV, the last one in the Inferno, depicted Satan with three heads.Each head was chewing the three worst sinners of humankind.The middle head was chewing on the head of Judas Iscariot, who was a disciple to Jesus and his betrayer.The other two heads were chewing Brutus and Cassius; the murderers of Julius Caesar, and the two men Dante faulted for the destruction of a unified Italy.Dante considered the two ultimate betrayals against God and against the empire as the worst betrayals perpetrated in the history of humankind.

Thus, Dante's intent in his Commedia was to teach fourteenth-century readers that if one wanted to ascend spiritually towards God then one needed to learn the nature of sin from the unrepentant.By doing this, one could learn to overcome the same tendencies found in themselves.He wanted people to realize what he had come to learn that political partisanship would only stand in the way of unifying Italy and keep it from regaining any of its former glory that it enjoyed during the time of the Roman Empire.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

Abandon hope
"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.

Infernal Translating
The Inferno of Dante is undoubtedly a book worth reading because of its historical influence and impressive poetry, but without a skilled translator the meaning or poetic form is lost. Robert Pinsky manages to find a perfect balance between Dante's message and style. Combined with notes that explain Dante's many historical references, this balance allows The Inferno of Dante to continue to be a great piece of literature. In order to maintain the necessary balance between Dante's message and style, Robert Pinsky uses a looser form of rhyming than most people use. He rhymes leads with sides and defer with there. Although these may not rhyme as well as heat and sheet, they have enough in common that they are able to demonstrate the rhythm of the tertiary rhyme in The Inferno of Dante. Pinsky's loose rhyming gives him more choices, which allow him to better preserve Dante's message.
This message, however, would be lost on today's readers if it were not for notes that help further translate the meaning of events within The Inferno of Dante. Most of the characters Dante meets along his journey have long been forgotten by the average reader. How many people would understand the significance of the name Bocca? Upon hearing this Dante says, "I have no further need to speak with you" (Pinsky 347). This leaves the reader completely clueless as to who Bocca was. This is remedied by using the notes Pinsky provides in his translation. These notes tell the reader that Bocca betrayed his party in battle causing their defeat (Pinsky 423).
This extra information is essential to Robert Pinsky's translation, which retains the amazing rhythm, beauty, and message that Dante designed.


Works Cited
Dante. The Inferno of Dante. Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus, and

Giroux, 1994.

Best book I've ever read
Ignore any negative reviews of this translation of Dante's Inferno.The only negative thing I can say is, after reading Pinsky's translation of Inferno, the non-Pinsky translations of Purgatorio and Paradiso were not so interesting by comparison (Mr. Pinsky!Please!Translate the other two books!).

Pinsky is a former U.S. Poet Laureate, so the few people here who bashed his work are in the minority.

Forget the boring rules of poetry you learned in high school.Read the introduction/prologue in which Pinsky explains the type of poetry Dante used and how Pinsky chose to follow that method.I then suggest you read the whole book twice.Read it once, stopping to check the end notes so you will know who the characters are and their importance in history, and their relevance to the story.Then read it again, with just an expectation of pure enjoyment.

Also, ignore the expectations of meter your high school teacher may have taught you (like mine did).Just read and follow punctutation, rather than the ends of the lines.

Doing these things allowed me to more fully enjoy Inferno, and I still marvel at the literary beauty produced some 700 years ago.

touring Hell in cargo pants
Pinsky has alighted on the translation solution that will eventually give rise to the definitive English Dante.Rather than forgo ryme altogether or force his English into perfect terza-rima, Pinsky employs slant rhyme.Pinsky calls his version Yeatsean, but of course other poets have embraced slant rhyme to great effect--Dickinson stands out for me.

But reading Pinsky's "Translator's Note" prepares you for the failings of his translation.For he has also aimed for a more compressed version, one with more enjambment, to convey something of Dante's own compression and, I suppose, swiftness.The problem arises in the very first tercet, where Dante spends three full lines on waking up lost in that dark wood.Pinsky dispenses with those lines in 18 syllables, then interrupts Dante's startling recollection at the end of the second line to rush the next tercet into the first one.The enjambent conceals the slant rhyme, mooting Pinsky's otherwise brilliant poetic solution, and also shucks the essential weight of Dante's opening.It reads like a prose translation, embarrased by even its own of-rhymes (which are actually a great idea!) and blasting through Dante's thought without recognizing Dante's own choices about end-stopping his thoughts more frequently.Unless English is 20 percent more efficient than Italian, or translators care for sense at the exclusion of the original's poetics, this book disappoints.

And it's a swift, compressed opening even at three full lines.Three lines--just three--for Dante to depict himself as spiritually waylaid:further compression simply detracts, and it dishonors the poem's already admirable economy, not just its efficiency but also how it chooses to spend each tercet, the careful filing of each one with this step or that in his journey, or to run over into the next tercet.

Pinsky's is a bilingual translation, allowing you to just visually register how much more ready he is than Dante to break Dante's thoughts before the end of a line and start Dante's next phrase or sentence with two or three or four syllables left.All that enjambment is perfectly natural to English poetry, maybe even to Italian, but the facing-page presentation of Dante's actual words reveal that Dante employed rhyme togeth with the regular ryhthm of the line-endings to generally honor his rhetoric.

That compression, by the way, makes most of the cantos radically shorter than Dante's own verse.Canto after canto is 20 to 30 lines short of Dante's Italian, and when a Canto is maybe 120 or 130 lines long, the translation becomes more like a discount version of Dante than an English Dante.Allen Mandelbaum, who translates into blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), offers the poem the dignity Dante's Italian merits.You can use the facing page Italian to see that.Dope out what those latinate words obviously mean, and see how much reordering and reduction Pinsky offers--here turning a descriptive phrase into a single adjective, there shrinking a long appositive or subordinate clause.

Pinsky's diction is more fluent, more readily grasped than other translations, but it often feels off-hand, hasty, artless, undramatic--a tour of Hell in cargo pants.The story still conveys its tone, but mostly through incident, not via Pinsky's poetry. ... Read more

Book Description
A faithful yet totally original contemporary spin on a classic, Dante's Inferno as interpreted by acclaimed artist Sandow Birk and writer Marcus Sanders is a journey through a Hell that bears an eerie semblance to our own world. Birk, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as one of "realism's edgier, more visionary painters," offers extraordinarily nuanced and vivid illustrations inspired by Gustave Dore's famous engravings. This modern interpretation depicts an infernal landscape infested with mini-malls, fast food restaurants, ATMs, and other urban fixtures, and a text that cleverly incorporates urban slang and references to modern events and people (as Dante did in his own time). Previously published in a deluxe, fine-press edition to wide praise, and accompanied by national exhibitions, this striking paperback edition of Dante's Inferno is a genuinely provocative and insightful adaptation for a new generation of readers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

It's not the original, but it still works on some level.
I remember reading "Inferno" for the first time. I was avidly turning pages and I continued through into the heavens (which it got a little dull after purgatory). Inferno is a great book, and I would recommend it highly.

With this adaptation, I have to admit, I was smitten with the cynical artwork of this book and it's move into modern life. The actual writing was a little harder to swallow. It's kind of like someone took a really amazing story and decided to do a remake that didn't quite hit the mark. The original in this case was much better, but the artwork of this new version helps it sing (so to speak). If it had stood alone, it might have appealed to a couple of college kids looking for an alternative to "Cliff Notes", but not to many others.

The depressing landscapes and the illustrations of the modern damned helped pull it together. I was a little disappointed with the language (not that I'm so offended there is "foul" language, just that Dante's journey wasn't supposed to be akin to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure...)

Not bad, but I'd recommend it mostly for the artwork.

Excellent shape
The book is of brand new condition as advertized...content of book is mystical very good reading...

Medieval vision of the afterlife
This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) "Devine Comedy" weaved together aspects of biblical and classical Greek literary traditions to produce one of the most important works of not only medieval literature, but also one of the great literary works of Western civilization.The full impact of this 14,000-line poem divided into 100 cantos and three books is not just literary.Dante's autobiographical poem Commedia, as he titled it, was his look into the individual psyche and human soul.He explored and reflected on such fundamental questions as political institutions and their problems, the nature of humankind's moral actions, and the possibility of spiritual transformation; these were all fundamental social and cultural concerns for people during the fourteenth-century.Dante wrote the Commedia not in Latin but in the Tuscan dialect of Italian so that it would reach a broader readership.The Commedia was a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, (Inferno), Purgatory, (Purgatorio), and Paradise, (Paradisio).

The poem narrated in first person, began with Dante lost midlife.He was 35 years old in the year 1300 and in a dark wood.Being lost in the dark wood was certainly an allegorical device that Dante used to express the condition of his own life at the time he started writing the poem. Dante had been active in Florentine politics and a member of the White Guelph party who opposed the secular rule of Pope Boniface VIII over Florence.In 1302, The Black Guelphs who were allied with the Pope, were militarily victorious in gaining control of the city and Dante found himself an exile from his beloved city for the rest of his life.Thus, Dante started writing the Commedia in 1308 and used it to comment on his own tribulations of life, and to state his views on politics and religion, and heap scorn on his political enemies.

Dante's first leg of his journey out of the dark wood was through the nine concentric circles of Hell (Inferno), escorted by his favorite classical Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid.Dante borrowed heavily from Virgil's Aeneid.Much of Dante's description of hell had similarities to Virgil's description in his sixth book of the Aeneid.Dante's three major divisions of sin in hell where unrepentant sinners dwelled, had their sources in Aristotle and Augustinian philosophy.They were self-indulgence, violence, and fraud.Fraud was considered the worst of moral failures because it undermined family, trust, and religion; in essence, it tore at the moral fabric of civilized society.These divisions were inversions of the classical virtues of moderation, courage, and wisdom.The fourth classical virtue, justice, is what Dante came to believe after his journey through hell that all its inhabitants received for their unrepentant sins.There were nine concentric circles of hell inside the earth; each smaller than the previous one.For Dante the geography of hell was a moral geography as well as a physical one, reflecting the nature of the sin.Canto IV describes the first circle of hell, Limbo, which is where Dante met the shades, as souls where called, of the virtuous un-baptized such as Homer, Ovid, Caesar, Aristotle, and Plato.

In the four circles for the sin of self-indulgence Dante met shades who where lustful, gluttons, hoarders and wrathful.In the second circle of Hell, lustful souls were blown around in a violent storm.In Canto V, one of the great dramatic moments of the poem, Dante had his first lengthy encounter with an unrepentant sinner Francesca da Rimini, who committed adultery with her brother-in-law.Like all the sinners in hell, Francesca laid the blame for her sin elsewhere.She claimed to be seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere.At the end of the scene, Dante fainted out of pity for Francesca.

In Canto X, the sixth circle of hell reserved for heretics who are punished by being trapped in flaming tombs, Dante took the opportunity to use the circle to chastise political leaders for participating in political partisanship.A Florentine who was a leader in the rival Ghibbelline political party, Farinata degli Uberti, accosted Dante.Both men aggressively argued with each other, recreating in hell the bitterness of partisan politics in Florence.Farinata predicted Dante's exile.Dante used this Canto to show the dangerous tendencies of petty political partisanship that he harbored.

The seventh circle of hell was subdivided into three areas where sinners were punished for doing violence against themselves, their neighbors, or God.In Canto XIII Dante encountered Pier della Vigne in the wood of the suicides.The shades there were shrubs who had to speak through a broken branch.Pier spoke to Dante about how he had been an important advisor to Emperor Frederick II, and how he blamed his fall, and his suicide, on the envy of other court members.This Canto was especially important because Dante came to grips with his own "future" fall from political power and exile.Pier's behavior served as a strong example to Dante how not to act in exile.Whether he had been tempted to commit suicide is not clear; however, he certainly had been prone to the selfish and despairing attitude that Pier represented.

The last two circles of hell contained the sinners of fraud.In the eighth circle, there were ten ditches for the various types of fraud such as Simony, thievery, hypocrisy, etc.Canto XIX described the third ditch, which contained those guilty of Simony, the sin of church leaders perverting their spiritual office by buying and selling church offices.Simonists were buried upside down in a rock with their feet on fire.Pope Nicholas III mistakenly addressed Dante as Pope Boniface VIII who was the current Pope in 1300, and whose place in hell was thereby predicted.This is not surprising since Boniface was the person most responsible for Dante's exile.In an interesting literary twist, Nicholas "confessed" to Dante, as if he was a priest, his sin of greed and nepotism.He admitted that even after becoming Pope he cared more for his family's interests than the good of the whole Church.Dante responded to Nicholas' "confession" with a stinging condemnation of Simony drawn from the Book of Revelation.After this encounter, Dante came to understand that hell was a place of justice.

Canto XXXIV, the last one in the Inferno, depicted Satan with three heads.Each head was chewing the three worst sinners of humankind.The middle head was chewing on the head of Judas Iscariot, who was a disciple to Jesus and his betrayer.The other two heads were chewing Brutus and Cassius; the murderers of Julius Caesar, and the two men Dante faulted for the destruction of a unified Italy.Dante considered the two ultimate betrayals against God and against the empire as the worst betrayals perpetrated in the history of humankind.

Thus, Dante's intent in his Commedia was to teach fourteenth-century readers that if one wanted to ascend spiritually towards God then one needed to learn the nature of sin from the unrepentant.By doing this, one could learn to overcome the same tendencies found in themselves.He wanted people to realize what he had come to learn that political partisanship would only stand in the way of unifying Italy and keep it from regaining any of its former glory that it enjoyed during the time of the Roman Empire.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

Dante's Inferno by Sandow Bonk
It is an up-dated version; but as far as I can tell it has kept the 'feel" of the origional

Dont waste your money: get Dores pics and Musas translation
Im a fan of Dante.I've read a couple of translations, and as admirer of graphic art, I've always thourght that Dore's illustrations were classics.

I truly wanted to like this version.I'm from California, and I thought a surfer version could be witty and charming.But I was disappointed:

Fact: this is not a translation.The authors merely read other english translations, then rewrote the text in plain english, adding occasional contemporary references (Jason Blair, Dr. Laura) and obscenities.

Fact: The illustrations demonstrate the skill of junior-high school doodles.Not even close to Dore, or other book illustrators like Rockwell Kent or Tenniel.

I understand that tastes vary.But these pictures are downright awful.The reason they've been gotten some attention is that the pictures are set in urban settings (L.A., San Francisco, New York).How many times does Birk rely on McDonalds golden arches to get a chuckle? I lost track at 6.It was funny the first time.

Clearly, these authors had an outstanding publicist who got this book mentioned in prominently, and it has caught on to a limited extent.The book jacket repeatedly mentions the art gallery showings of Birk's graphic work, so I'm guessing this book was written mostly to promote sales of his artwork.

But if you are searching to buy a copy of Dante, get Musa's translation (very readable) and Dore's illustrations (timeless).

The Birk/Sanders version may be trendy in 2005, but it will soon fade into obscurity.
... Read more

Book Description
The "Divine Comedy" was entitled by Dante himself merely "Commedia," meaning a poetic composition in a style intermediate between the sustained nobility of tragedy, and the popular tone of elegy. The word had no dramatic implication at that time, though it did involve a happy ending. The poem is the narrative of a journey down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, and through the revolving heavens into the presence of God. In this aspect it belongs to the two familiar medieval literary types of the Journey and the Vision. It is also an allegory, representing under the symbolism of the stages and experiences of the journey, the history of a human soul, painfully struggling from sin through purification to the Beatific Vision. Contained in this volume is the first part of the "Divine Comedy," the "Inferno" or "Hell," from the translation of Charles Eliot Norton. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

The Inferno
I first read this book when I was in highschool and it's still one of my favorites books today.

perfect carry along book
tucks away easily in my back pack, easy to read, and even the coffee house snobs pay it respect.

Excellent Book
I found Dante's Inferno to be in excellent shape, a great book, and plan on purchasing volumes II and III.

Medieval vision of the afterlife
This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) "Devine Comedy" weaved together aspects of biblical and classical Greek literary traditions to produce one of the most important works of not only medieval literature, but also one of the great literary works of Western civilization.The full impact of this 14,000-line poem divided into 100 cantos and three books is not just literary.Dante's autobiographical poem Commedia, as he titled it, was his look into the individual psyche and human soul.He explored and reflected on such fundamental questions as political institutions and their problems, the nature of humankind's moral actions, and the possibility of spiritual transformation; these were all fundamental social and cultural concerns for people during the fourteenth-century.Dante wrote the Commedia not in Latin but in the Tuscan dialect of Italian so that it would reach a broader readership.The Commedia was a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, (Inferno), Purgatory, (Purgatorio), and Paradise, (Paradisio).

The poem narrated in first person, began with Dante lost midlife.He was 35 years old in the year 1300 and in a dark wood.Being lost in the dark wood was certainly an allegorical device that Dante used to express the condition of his own life at the time he started writing the poem. Dante had been active in Florentine politics and a member of the White Guelph party who opposed the secular rule of Pope Boniface VIII over Florence.In 1302, The Black Guelphs who were allied with the Pope, were militarily victorious in gaining control of the city and Dante found himself an exile from his beloved city for the rest of his life.Thus, Dante started writing the Commedia in 1308 and used it to comment on his own tribulations of life, and to state his views on politics and religion, and heap scorn on his political enemies.

Dante's first leg of his journey out of the dark wood was through the nine concentric circles of Hell (Inferno), escorted by his favorite classical Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid.Dante borrowed heavily from Virgil's Aeneid.Much of Dante's description of hell had similarities to Virgil's description in his sixth book of the Aeneid.Dante's three major divisions of sin in hell where unrepentant sinners dwelled, had their sources in Aristotle and Augustinian philosophy.They were self-indulgence, violence, and fraud.Fraud was considered the worst of moral failures because it undermined family, trust, and religion; in essence, it tore at the moral fabric of civilized society.These divisions were inversions of the classical virtues of moderation, courage, and wisdom.The fourth classical virtue, justice, is what Dante came to believe after his journey through hell that all its inhabitants received for their unrepentant sins.There were nine concentric circles of hell inside the earth; each smaller than the previous one.For Dante the geography of hell was a moral geography as well as a physical one, reflecting the nature of the sin.Canto IV describes the first circle of hell, Limbo, which is where Dante met the shades, as souls where called, of the virtuous un-baptized such as Homer, Ovid, Caesar, Aristotle, and Plato.

In the four circles for the sin of self-indulgence Dante met shades who where lustful, gluttons, hoarders and wrathful.In the second circle of Hell, lustful souls were blown around in a violent storm.In Canto V, one of the great dramatic moments of the poem, Dante had his first lengthy encounter with an unrepentant sinner Francesca da Rimini, who committed adultery with her brother-in-law.Like all the sinners in hell, Francesca laid the blame for her sin elsewhere.She claimed to be seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere.At the end of the scene, Dante fainted out of pity for Francesca.

In Canto X, the sixth circle of hell reserved for heretics who are punished by being trapped in flaming tombs, Dante took the opportunity to use the circle to chastise political leaders for participating in political partisanship.A Florentine who was a leader in the rival Ghibbelline political party, Farinata degli Uberti, accosted Dante.Both men aggressively argued with each other, recreating in hell the bitterness of partisan politics in Florence.Farinata predicted Dante's exile.Dante used this Canto to show the dangerous tendencies of petty political partisanship that he harbored.

The seventh circle of hell was subdivided into three areas where sinners were punished for doing violence against themselves, their neighbors, or God.In Canto XIII Dante encountered Pier della Vigne in the wood of the suicides.The shades there were shrubs who had to speak through a broken branch.Pier spoke to Dante about how he had been an important advisor to Emperor Frederick II, and how he blamed his fall, and his suicide, on the envy of other court members.This Canto was especially important because Dante came to grips with his own "future" fall from political power and exile.Pier's behavior served as a strong example to Dante how not to act in exile.Whether he had been tempted to commit suicide is not clear; however, he certainly had been prone to the selfish and despairing attitude that Pier represented.

The last two circles of hell contained the sinners of fraud.In the eighth circle, there were ten ditches for the various types of fraud such as Simony, thievery, hypocrisy, etc.Canto XIX described the third ditch, which contained those guilty of Simony, the sin of church leaders perverting their spiritual office by buying and selling church offices.Simonists were buried upside down in a rock with their feet on fire.Pope Nicholas III mistakenly addressed Dante as Pope Boniface VIII who was the current Pope in 1300, and whose place in hell was thereby predicted.This is not surprising since Boniface was the person most responsible for Dante's exile.In an interesting literary twist, Nicholas "confessed" to Dante, as if he was a priest, his sin of greed and nepotism.He admitted that even after becoming Pope he cared more for his family's interests than the good of the whole Church.Dante responded to Nicholas' "confession" with a stinging condemnation of Simony drawn from the Book of Revelation.After this encounter, Dante came to understand that hell was a place of justice.

Canto XXXIV, the last one in the Inferno, depicted Satan with three heads.Each head was chewing the three worst sinners of humankind.The middle head was chewing on the head of Judas Iscariot, who was a disciple to Jesus and his betrayer.The other two heads were chewing Brutus and Cassius; the murderers of Julius Caesar, and the two men Dante faulted for the destruction of a unified Italy.Dante considered the two ultimate betrayals against God and against the empire as the worst betrayals perpetrated in the history of humankind.

Thus, Dante's intent in his Commedia was to teach fourteenth-century readers that if one wanted to ascend spiritually towards God then one needed to learn the nature of sin from the unrepentant.By doing this, one could learn to overcome the same tendencies found in themselves.He wanted people to realize what he had come to learn that political partisanship would only stand in the way of unifying Italy and keep it from regaining any of its former glory that it enjoyed during the time of the Roman Empire.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

Abandon hope...
"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. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Translation is always an imperfect art, demanding from its practitioners a level of dual fidelity that even a seasoned bigamist would envy. And no work of art has prompted more in the way of earnest imperfection than Dante's Divine Comedy. Transforming those intricate, rhyme-rich tercets into English has been the despair of many a distinguished translator, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to W.S. Merwin (whose estimable rendition of Purgatorio found the poet rattling over more than one linguistic speed bump). Now comes a fresh rendition of the Inferno from a husband-and-wife team. Robert Hollander, who has taught Dante for nearly four decades at Princeton, supplies the scholarly muscle, while his wife, poet Jean Hollander, attends to the verbal music.

How does their collaboration stack up? In his introduction, Robert Hollander is quick to acknowledge his debt to John D. Sinclair's prose trot of 1939, and to the version that Charles Singleton derived largely from his predecessor's in 1970. Yet the Hollanders have done us all a favor by throwing Sinclair's faux medievalisms overboard. And their predilection for direct, monosyllabic English sometimes brings them much closer to Dante's asperity and rhythmic urgency. One example will suffice. In the last line of Canto V, after listening to Francesca's adulterous aria, the poet faints: "E caddi come corpo morto cade." Sinclair's rendering---"I swooned as if in death and dropped like a dead body"--has a kind of conditional mushiness to it. Compare the punchier rendition from the Hollanders: "And down I fell as a dead body falls." It sounds like an actual line of English verse, which is the least we can do for the supreme poet of our beleaguered civilization.

Robert Hollander has also supplied an extensive and very welcome commentary. There are times, perhaps, when he might have broken ranks with his academic ancestors: why not deviate from Giorgio Petrocchi's 1967 edition of the Italian text when he thinks that the great scholar was barking up the wrong tree? In any case, the Hollanders' Inferno is a fine addition to the burgeoning bookshelf of Dante in English. It won't displace the relatively recent verse translations by Robert Pinsky or Allen Mandelbaum, and even John Ciardi's version, which sometimes substitutes breeziness for accuracy, can probably hold its own here. But when it comes to high fidelity and exegetical generosity, this Inferno burns brightly indeed. --James Marcus Book Description
The epic grandeur of Dante’s masterpiece has inspired readers for 700 years, and has entered the human imagination. But the further we move from the late medieval world of Dante, the more a rich understanding and enjoyment of the poem depends on knowledgeable guidance. Robert Hollander, a renowned scholar and master teacher of Dante, and Jean Hollander, an accomplished poet, have written a beautifully accurate and clear verse translation of the first volume of Dante’s epic poem, the Divine Comedy.Featuring the original Italian text opposite the translation, this edition also offers an extensive and accessible introduction and generous commentaries that draw on centuries of scholarship as well as Robert Hollander’s own decades of teaching and research. The Hollander translation is the new standard in English of this essential work of world literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

brilliant translation
This is a very satisfying translation. It does not attempt rhyme so it can reproduce the rhythms of the original without distorting the meaning for the sake of English rhymes. The notes are breathtaking in their scope and thoroughness. It would probably be a good idea for readers new to Inferno to go through it once without the notes soas to be carried along by the poem, and then a second time reading the notes to examine closely the building blocks of Dante's genius.

For all its scholarship, this book is pleasant to deal with physically -- nice typeface, well laid-out pages, not too heavy in the hand. You can actually read it in bed without crushing your abdomen.

el mezzo camnin something or other
I'm pretty sure this is what anyone that doesn't speak Italian wants out of an Inferno translation.

1.There's facing page Italian so you can do the Milton thing.You really can understand what the Italian is saying, and when you read it, you can get some idea of what an incredible achievement the Comedy really was.The poetry itself is astounding, but you have to read the Italian to get it - and to understand why it's untranslatable.

2.The translation is fairly literal.This time, the translation is there to tell you what the Italian actually says instead of serving as a clever solution to the poetic problems posed by translation.Nobody is going to pull off a translation into a Germanic language that conveys Dante's vowel heavy Italian rhyming.We would not translate Palestrina into Bach, please give up on this.

3.The notes are written to interpret the poem.Instead of merely providing historical background to the obscure personages, the notes provide readings across the past 700 years on difficult lines.That's one heck of a resource.I wish I had that for poets in English;I might actually read the stuff.

4.There's actually literary criticism.One of the revelations from the critical work here is how much Dante is making fun of the Virgil character.You see him get mad, plot and scheme, become boastful.It's really pretty hilarious.I never got a sense of that before, but it's pretty obvious once you start looking for it.That adds a completely different flavor to the poem.Like most great works, part of the reason it's great is because it's funny.Maybe not Milton.Screw Milton.

I've always liked the Inferno, but I feel like I must have been missing huge themes.Not even really sure why I liked it.Read this, you'll have a whole new take on the poem.I'm waiting on the next two volumes.

Great book and excellent translation
This version was my first encounter with Dante.I read the book as required reading for my Senior English class and was highly impressed at how the Hollanders made a readable translation while maintaining detail and accuracy.

I compared my version to several of my friend's versions and found that the notes in this version were beyond sufficient.The chapter summaries preceding each canto were gratefully welcomed and the notes after each canto were detailed and informative.Essentially, the book was 'self-contained' meaning that no external sources (i.e. sparknotes, cliffnotes, etc) were needed to fully appreciate the book.

Very good translation
This translation of The Inferno, the first canticle of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, by Robert and Jean Hollander, is one of the best that I've read. Their English version of the Comedy is fast and straightforward, sticking close to the original text but adding vigor to what can sometimes be very bland in English. Having read the Comedy numerous times in many different translations, I didn't expect to be swept up in it again as I was. The Hollanders have done us a great favor with this translation.

The notes are copious and excellent, presenting numerous perspectives on textual, symbolic, narrative, and historical issues in the Comedy. A line-by-line breakdown of each canto is at the beginning of each, and charts detailing the layout of Dante's Hell help organize a narrative that can be infinitely confusing to the beginner.

Highly recommended for beginners and seasoned fans of Dante alike.

An admirable translation
This translation, although being the only one I have read, leaves me with no desire for any other. I can speak Italian, and the words used reflect the orginal marvelously well. I have found no discrepancy that was not covered in the extensive endnotes.

The Italian text used is a modern translation of the original vernacular, and though it would have been nice to have the Vulgar alongside of the Italian, I respect the Hollanders for not giving us a $50, 10 lb. monster. The text itself retains Dante's tercet structure, leaving out only the rhyme scheme that would have constrained terribly the English words and meaning.

This poem is epic in every aspect of its contribution to the 14,233 verses of the entire Commedia, and deserves an equally epic rendition into English. Hollander's work does this poem justice, in an easily read, very accurate depiction of Hell. It should inspire as it disgusts, and bring tears of sympathy alongside tears of sheer joy for the beauty of the verse. ... Read more

Book Description
Dante Valentine has been through Hell.Literally.Her body shattered and her mind not far behind, she's dumped back into her own world to survive--or not--as a pawn in one of Lucifer's endless games. Unfortunately, he's just messed with the wrong Necromance. And this time she's mad enough to do something about it.This time, the Devil will pay. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (20)

Train wreck you can't help but watch
Overall an inspired series.I enjoyed Dante Valentine, her transition into human into hedaria and the events following it kept you at the edge of your seats.It was only towards this last two books that I found myself getting irritated at her.

Her blind faith in Eve--didn't Jeph deserve some of that?She kept telling him she trusted him but negates it with her actions.She totally cut loose of everything. Flaws I could swallow, she was trying to adjust to her situation and she had some hard knocks But blind stupidity was just too much.Didn't Jeph's actions deserve much more credit? The bottom line is he went to hell and back for her.Gave up everything.Kept her alive.In my book, that is a 5 star rating.

Who was Eve?Consort?Carrier of a smidge of Dante's DNA?Didn't Dante realize that she was a DEMON too? Lies and deceit.Couldn't she tell the difference in HER actions to those of Jeph?Sheesh, It gets me worked up.I'm not even gonna get started on the ending.I truly WISH that there would be a follow up.Just way too many loose ends.

A keeper
These are the books you can reread in 20 years and they suck you right in!
The story keeps getting better and better. I bought it and read it the same day! That was how engrossing the story was.

spoilers ahead:








The Loa - I was not expecting it. But, it was great to 'see' her old lover again even if it was limited.

The Anibus/beleiver concept seems to give a hint at possible future events. I really can't wait for the next book!

The Eve storyline - whao! it's getting complex and that's a good thing considering how the demons are in the book. Keeps you guessing.

It's a toss up for my fav author now. Both Lilith Saintcrow and Kim Harrison create complete worlds where magic and gods/demons seem very real. Excellent book and worthy of the series. Good stuff!

All Over the Place
I gave this book four stars becuase I think it was a good book, but it might have deserved less. Saintcrowe has been pretty consistent in everything up until this book. Yes, Dante did have a whiny bout in the second book but that ended when Japh came back. But in this book Dante seems so out of character. I understand she was tortured between books, but Dante makes horrible decisions that just up plans for everyone. She is difficult for pointless reasons. Her reasoning doesn't make sense. And she is whiny again. She's hooked on some point through the whole book.

But this is a must read for the end of the series. I would recommend buying it, even if it's just to complete the series. It was good overall, and I will say that I will miss the series, and mourn its finish. I will reasd Saintcrowes' other series too

Still emotional unstable, but interesting.
After reading the entire series, and waiting to find out how Dante and her demon lover, Japhrimel win and defeat the Devil.I was suprised at how she eliminates her opponent without using a weapon forged of steel or the holy relic the raced over the earth to find.If you thought Dante to hard to tolerate in the prior books was painful, think about how unstable she is after spending six months a guest of the Prince of Hell.She has been tortured within an inch of her life, and all because the Lucifer needs bait to rein in those rogue demons of his.The author ties up some loose ends that have puzzled me from the beginning of the series, but some things are left unresolved.Overall, this is a must read if only to find out the final battle between Lucfier and Dante.

Too many unanswered questions
This one, and I have read all the others, was frustrating.Dante again was fighting everyone!There is no way she could effectively do this without ?This is the way the book goes.There are unanswered questions about the prior book, as it didn't end.It just continued into this book.I really liked the series, but way too many unanswered questions. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (17)

Dore Illustrations
Book arrived in promised condition, and in a timely fashion.I would buy from this seller again.

Skip this comic book
This guy is pretty much in the same league as Jack Kirby. Whereas Kirby's all soft lines and images pancaked on the page, Dore looks like he's carving his cartoons into a tree. And all these scary demons and things look tired, like they've been running marathons all day. The victims kind of look like they're enjoying it, so I guess if you're into S&M, I could recommend it. Me, I prefer "Spawn" by Todd McFarlane. The Violator? Now that's a monster you can sink your eyeballs into. And I know it's like super-uber hip, but I don't know why these illustrators feel they are so special when they work exclusively in shades of black. Like my momma used to say, "A little rouge really accents the cheekbones."

An Excellent book for the Doré or Dante lover
The quality of this book - along with an amazingly affordable price tag - quickly persuaded me to pick up a copy. Its really everything you could ask for in an art book;

The pictures are all very big, but not overwhelming; Its easy to see minute detail, and the overall scope of the image. I actually blew up some of the prints in photoshop and printed them on huge poster paper for my room, while not sacrificing a drop of detail.

Also, I had to put quite a good deal of pressure onto the spine of the book in order to get a good scan from them, and im happy to say that doing so didn't even leave an annoying "bookmark" crease in the book, and the spine didn't even crease. Dover books really did produce a fine quality book, and the note on the back really is true: This book IS permanent.

If you have read or are reading the divine comedy this book is a great reference to glance at every now and again to truly suck you into Dante's epic poem, and bring you to the Heights of Heaven, The Depths of Hell, or the pain of purgatory in a way you could never have imagened.

The woodcuts done here by dore are so elaborate and vivid you could spend a good portion of a day just gazing into the faces of cursed souls writhing in hell, or the beauty of millions of angels soaring in the highest heaven. Dore illustrates every picture so full of movement and depth its the next best thing to a movie.

Absolutely Wonderful (Really 4 and a half stars)
I have looked at a variety of Dante artists. Some well known and some are not. Suloni Robertson, John Flaxman, Willam Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Sandow Birk, Herb Roe. Do a google search to look at the works of some of these like Sandow Birk. There are some that are more obscure which in a way documents the Comedy, more specifically the Inferno. I'm not going to say who I don't like but Dore is the best. I am rather specific about artists. Dore makes the grade. He is good, really good and when you look at this book, you feel like you are in the terrible depths of hell. I like purgatorio too. I feel the religious prayer songs in my head as I see Beatrice's entrance. There is so much symbolism in these pictures, especially in Paradiso. Though I do disagree with the depiction of Muhammad in hell, the rest is fantastic. I mean that he looks more like he's British then Middle Eastern. I imagine him with blonde hair in the plate. The tortured look on Dante's face in the plate with Betrand de Born, (The cover pic) is extraordinary. I felt how he felt. That is why Dore is so good. I had also hoped for more detail with Ugolino because his story is fantastically horrifying.

The book is a must for any Dante fan. I look at it a lot, even if I have seen the pictures hundreds of times. I really don't think that you can get bored with this. There is always something new to look at. Some detail you looked over. Buy this book because the scans online don't give the justice that this book has. Buy it, look it over, get inspired by it. Maybe we will see your work on Amazon in the near future.

The Dore's Illustrations for Dante's Commedia are great.
The Illustrations from the 1st canto in the Inferno to the last of Paradiso are great because they help as a visual aid when reading the Divina Commedia.One can really see how and in which ways Dore, when he design the illustrations, followed the text very closely. ... Read more

Book Description
This vigorous translation of the poet's journey through the circles of hell re-creates for the modern reader the rich meanings that Dante's poem had for his contemporaries. Musa's introduction and commentaries on each of the cantos brilliantly illuminate the text.

Translated with Notes and an Introduction by Mark MusaDownload Description
This timeless Christian allegory has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery fo its own identity. In the Inferno, the first of the Comedy's three parts, Dante is conducted by the spirit of the classical poet Virgil through the nine circles of Hell on the initial stage of his arduous journey toward God. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (25)

Abandon hope...
"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.

Readable translation
A lovely, readable, blank verse translation.The notes are helpful, but not so overwhelming as to detract from the poetry of the text.I'd highly recommend to any reader.

Medieval vision of the afterlife
This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) "Devine Comedy" weaved together aspects of biblical and classical Greek literary traditions to produce one of the most important works of not only medieval literature, but also one of the great literary works of Western civilization.The full impact of this 14,000-line poem divided into 100 cantos and three books is not just literary.Dante's autobiographical poem Commedia, as he titled it, was his look into the individual psyche and human soul.He explored and reflected on such fundamental questions as political institutions and their problems, the nature of humankind's moral actions, and the possibility of spiritual transformation; these were all fundamental social and cultural concerns for people during the fourteenth-century.Dante wrote the Commedia not in Latin but in the Tuscan dialect of Italian so that it would reach a broader readership.The Commedia was a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, (Inferno), Purgatory, (Purgatorio), and Paradise, (Paradisio).

The poem narrated in first person, began with Dante lost midlife.He was 35 years old in the year 1300 and in a dark wood.Being lost in the dark wood was certainly an allegorical device that Dante used to express the condition of his own life at the time he started writing the poem. Dante had been active in Florentine politics and a member of the White Guelph party who opposed the secular rule of Pope Boniface VIII over Florence.In 1302, The Black Guelphs who were allied with the Pope, were militarily victorious in gaining control of the city and Dante found himself an exile from his beloved city for the rest of his life.Thus, Dante started writing the Commedia in 1308 and used it to comment on his own tribulations of life, and to state his views on politics and religion, and heap scorn on his political enemies.

Dante's first leg of his journey out of the dark wood was through the nine concentric circles of Hell (Inferno), escorted by his favorite classical Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid.Dante borrowed heavily from Virgil's Aeneid.Much of Dante's description of hell had similarities to Virgil's description in his sixth book of the Aeneid.Dante's three major divisions of sin in hell where unrepentant sinners dwelled, had their sources in Aristotle and Augustinian philosophy.They were self-indulgence, violence, and fraud.Fraud was considered the worst of moral failures because it undermined family, trust, and religion; in essence, it tore at the moral fabric of civilized society.These divisions were inversions of the classical virtues of moderation, courage, and wisdom.The fourth classical virtue, justice, is what Dante came to believe after his journey through hell that all its inhabitants received for their unrepentant sins.There were nine concentric circles of hell inside the earth; each smaller than the previous one.For Dante the geography of hell was a moral geography as well as a physical one, reflecting the nature of the sin.Canto IV describes the first circle of hell, Limbo, which is where Dante met the shades, as souls where called, of the virtuous un-baptized such as Homer, Ovid, Caesar, Aristotle, and Plato.

In the four circles for the sin of self-indulgence Dante met shades who where lustful, gluttons, hoarders and wrathful.In the second circle of Hell, lustful souls were blown around in a violent storm.In Canto V, one of the great dramatic moments of the poem, Dante had his first lengthy encounter with an unrepentant sinner Francesca da Rimini, who committed adultery with her brother-in-law.Like all the sinners in hell, Francesca laid the blame for her sin elsewhere.She claimed to be seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere.At the end of the scene, Dante fainted out of pity for Francesca.

In Canto X, the sixth circle of hell reserved for heretics who are punished by being trapped in flaming tombs, Dante took the opportunity to use the circle to chastise political leaders for participating in political partisanship.A Florentine who was a leader in the rival Ghibbelline political party, Farinata degli Uberti, accosted Dante.Both men aggressively argued with each other, recreating in hell the bitterness of partisan politics in Florence.Farinata predicted Dante's exile.Dante used this Canto to show the dangerous tendencies of petty political partisanship that he harbored.

The seventh circle of hell was subdivided into three areas where sinners were punished for doing violence against themselves, their neighbors, or God.In Canto XIII Dante encountered Pier della Vigne in the wood of the suicides.The shades there were shrubs who had to speak through a broken branch.Pier spoke to Dante about how he had been an important advisor to Emperor Frederick II, and how he blamed his fall, and his suicide, on the envy of other court members.This Canto was especially important because Dante came to grips with his own "future" fall from political power and exile.Pier's behavior served as a strong example to Dante how not to act in exile.Whether he had been tempted to commit suicide is not clear; however, he certainly had been prone to the selfish and despairing attitude that Pier represented.

The last two circles of hell contained the sinners of fraud.In the eighth circle, there were ten ditches for the various types of fraud such as Simony, thievery, hypocrisy, etc.Canto XIX described the third ditch, which contained those guilty of Simony, the sin of church leaders perverting their spiritual office by buying and selling church offices.Simonists were buried upside down in a rock with their feet on fire.Pope Nicholas III mistakenly addressed Dante as Pope Boniface VIII who was the current Pope in 1300, and whose place in hell was thereby predicted.This is not surprising since Boniface was the person most responsible for Dante's exile.In an interesting literary twist, Nicholas "confessed" to Dante, as if he was a priest, his sin of greed and nepotism.He admitted that even after becoming Pope he cared more for his family's interests than the good of the whole Church.Dante responded to Nicholas' "confession" with a stinging condemnation of Simony drawn from the Book of Revelation.After this encounter, Dante came to understand that hell was a place of justice.

Canto XXXIV, the last one in the Inferno, depicted Satan with three heads.Each head was chewing the three worst sinners of humankind.The middle head was chewing on the head of Judas Iscariot, who was a disciple to Jesus and his betrayer.The other two heads were chewing Brutus and Cassius; the murderers of Julius Caesar, and the two men Dante faulted for the destruction of a unified Italy.Dante considered the two ultimate betrayals against God and against the empire as the worst betrayals perpetrated in the history of humankind.

Thus, Dante's intent in his Commedia was to teach fourteenth-century readers that if one wanted to ascend spiritually towards God then one needed to learn the nature of sin from the unrepentant.By doing this, one could learn to overcome the same tendencies found in themselves.He wanted people to realize what he had come to learn that political partisanship would only stand in the way of unifying Italy and keep it from regaining any of its former glory that it enjoyed during the time of the Roman Empire.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

Wow
Mr. Musa writes a nice translation of a tough work, and even more challenging topic. I recommend.

One of the most thought provoking I've read yet...
While browsing through the local bookstore, one cannot help but to be bombarded with at least 5 different published versions of this wonderous story.
'The Divine Comedy' by Dante Aligheri sets in motion the journey of a pilgrim through the nine layers of hell. Accompanying him is his guide, none other then the famous poet Virgil. While he accends down into the depths, each layer has a character with a story to be told. To be honest, I had flipped through this book before and found in daunting. Set up in 'Canto' form, the book is split in 34 chapers. I was pleasently surprised to see that I had been very wrong. This book has opened up new ideas to me, and made me think of religion and the philosophy of life in a way I never thought of before. The Inferno is a very descriptive story that will not leave you unsatisfied. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Stunning - a must have
I must confess that the large format makes reading the formal translations a bit easier on the eyes.The volume also includes a preface and section introductions/interpretations in contemporary english which make the text much more approachable.And the woodcut illustrations are simply gorgeous - it's worth getting the book just for these.They really bring to life the imaginations from when they were created in the 19th century all the way back several hundred years more to when Dante wrote the text.They also help to explain the perceptions that our predecessors had of religion, sin, and piety.This is a terrific volume - highly recommended.

One tangential note - if you like the illustrations in this you should also check out "Barlow's Inferno", published a few years ago.Wayne Douglas Barlow synthesizes interpretations of hell from many cultures and periods into illustrations of terror and frightful beauty.Barlow is the spiritual inheritor of Dore's vision.

A classic only for $17.98
NOTE: Barnes and Noble sells it for only $17.98 in store or online.

Great translation.The classic black and white illustrations by THE master Gustave Dore. A must for your classics library. I bought it at B&N, very happy with the quality of paper andthe lay-out.
This title is quite large in size, almost coffee table book style. Not for dragging around the beach.
Highly recommended!

dante, longfellow and dore'
this is a beautiful book and contains all three volumes of the divine comedy. the longfellow translation is very clear and readable and i like the fact that he didn't try to reproduce the rhyme. the language is only slightly outdated in places, but i don't mind that since it is a very old poem and the slightly formal language gives it a classic feel. the original woodcut illustrations are wonderful, there are many of them, and the whole thing adds up to a very nice volume. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Exactly what I was looking for
This is exactly what I was looking for, a simple tour that I could read in my free time. I also bought a book with the Dore Illustrations of the Divine Comedy. A perfect way to go through the Comedy without actually reading it. Recommended for all of those who won't read the poetic translations but want to educate themselves with this important work of art.

Essential !!
Dante is difficult to read, and I found this guide to be extremely useful.I also used the Cliff's notes, which were fine, and which supplemented Freccero's guide.My feeling is that most readers of Dante will benefit from all the help they can acquire, and having the Modern Reader's Guide is virtually essential!

Arguably the finest intro to Dante in English
For the reader tackling Dante for the very first time, this might be the best book currently available.Though targeted at first time readers, this can also be helpful for those who need to review all the seemingly endless names the permeated the COMEDY on a second reading.There are three primary reasons that I so strongly recommend Gallagher's guide.First, it is geared to make Dante as accessible as possible without in any way trivializing or tritely popularizing the text.Second, for Gallagher reading Dante is not merely a question of spiritual devotion or literary adoration, but flat out fun.Reading Dante is and ought to be recognized as above all else flat out fun.Gallagher's enthusiasm and enjoyment of Dante pours out at every point.Third, although not geared to scholars, the book nonetheless was obviously written with an exceptional knowledge of the scholarly studies of the work, which is to say:the book is academically quite solid.

The book is arranged both simply and logically.First, after a foreword recommending the work by the most recent dean of Dante studies in the United States, John Freccero, and a preface by the author himself, Gallagher starts off with a series of questions that he anticipates any novice reader might have in approaching the text for the first time.By eliminating the connecting narrative and structure that this information would need if presented in essay form, Gallagher is able to compress a significant amount of helpful information in a very small amount of space.He then proceeds to provide a canto-by-canto commentary for each part of the COMEDY.He first discusses the action of each canto, and then makes a series of random comments on various aspects of the canto.The book concludes with a brief but helpful discussion of Dante's other surviving works and a bibliography.

For anyone wanting to read Dante for the first time, I recommend Gallagher's reader's guide above all other beginner's tools.Dante is not, as is often supposed, an especially difficult writer (with the caveat that there is much in Dante that remains impenetrable or mysterious for even lifelong scholars), but there are many mistakes that one starting off in Dante can easily make that can complicate reading him.There is also a confusing array of political characters, and while this in the long run is less of a problem than a beginner might imagine, Gallagher will serve as a reliable guide who will help the neophyte avoid many hazards and will point out many of the glories of Dante's great work.

Tour Guide Available for Trip "To Hell and Back"
Joseph Gallagher, a retired Catholic priest and professor, who has taught at such venerable institutions as John Hopkins, Notre Dame, Loyola, and Oxford presents on an easy-to-understand guide through the intricacies ofDante's imaginative work. Written in a conversational style that anyone canunderstand, this expert tutor of many students for over 50 years explainseach of the characters canto by canto. The outline at the beginning is agreat help. While it is not as analytical as that of Erich Auerbach's"Mimesis", this book is a valuable addition. It should proveindispensable for those who need a companion guide; the homeschooler'slibrary should contain this erudite explanation. ... Read more

Book Description
When the Devil needs a rogue demon killed, who does he call? The Player: Necromance-for-hire Dante Valentine is choosy about her jobs. Hot tempered and with nerves of steel, she can raise the dead like nobody's business. But one rainy Monday morning, everything goes straight to hell. The Score: The Devil hires Dante to eliminate a rogue demon: Vardimal Santino. In return, he will let her live. It's an offer she can't refuse. The Catch: How do you kill something that can't die? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (79)

Creative and edgy series, I really liked it
This is the first book in the Danny Valentine series by Lilith Saintcrow. Amazon kept recommending this book to me as a great book to read. Guess what? I really did like it!

Danny is a Necromance; that is she communes with the dead. In order to make some extra cash on the side she often takes up bounty hunts. The rumor of her hobby has reached Lucifer, yes the Devil himself, and he has sent one of his demons to bring Danny to hell to offer her a job. A demon is on the loose, a demon that's been granted immunity from hell, and Lucifer needs Danny to take the job. To help keep Danny alive Lucifer sends along his right hand assasin, Japhrimel.

This is a face paced, fun book, with a dark sense of humor. Much of the humor is somewhat cutting and sarcastic. The whole book is very dark and reminds me a little bit of Sin City or Gotham City. The cast of characters is very entertaining and each has their own bits of dark past that gives them great depth. There is a little kung-fu taste to the book, as Danny fights with a katana and has her own specific version of honor. Think Kill-Bill, with more magic and not quite as much revenge.

There is non-stop action, more than a little violence and gore. The thing I liked best though was the creativity of the book. The book takes place in a future earth type setting. As such, there is some bandying about of tech-talk that leaves the reader wondering at times. Yet, the incorporation of magic and demons into this tech world is done seamlessly. I was very impressed.

My only complaint would be that the writing is not as high level as I usually like; but for this book the writing style fits the context. Some of the book reminds me a little of Kim Harrison's "Dead Witch Walking" series. This series has a lot more edge and darkness to it though; I guess if I had to compare it with something I've read before (although it's a very unique book so that is tough) I would compare this series to the Sonya Blue Series by Nancy Collins. Although, Danny is not as screwed up as Sonya was and this is a more comfortable series for me to read than Sonya Blue was.

The main story was tied up nicely at the end of the book. Still, I yearned to know more about Danny after I finished the first book. For instance what horrible things happened at the school she went to? What really happens to the demon? How will Danny deal with her new...physique?

Loved the book. I ran right out and bought the second one as soon as I had finished the first.

http://karissabooks.blogspot.com/

My New Favorite Author!- 5 Stars
I picked this up as a lark and have since purchased everything Ms. Saintcrow has written.I'm waiting for the 5th installment in this series and just purchased her other 2 series.While not a "light" read, the words in this book fairly flew off the pages.I carried it with me so I could catch a couple paragraphs whenever the opportunity arose.I'm looking forward to reading the next 2 series and am trying to get some work done so I can sneak in some reading time!

More, more, I want more!!!
This book is flawless. I devoured it, having fallen for its spell. The book has this "dark atmosphere" that I've so enjoyed on the books of the Nightside, and is incredible how this author has managed to throw together super natural things with a more evoluted world than the one we are living now, and everything justs seems correct, just fits in. You don't feel lost on the world where the story is being told, and the things have a logic of its own that is easy to comprehend.

Also the characters are enjoyable. Dante is such a... I have no words for her. She's tough, but she's human, and maybe she acts like nothing can ever scare her, but reading the book from her point of virew you know when she's scared, or angry or sad, and the emotions she has and that she showns are just... amazing.

And the dark and beloved Japhrimel... it's exquisite. I loved this demon from the very beginning... well, not from the beginning but when he waits for her to acclimate before going on in her first trip to Hell. Since then to the last page, I was in love with this powerful, well-built, full of cohesion character.

The story is good, some deceptions are to be read at the end of the book, and the plot surprises you withh¡out need of thrwogin things in for effect.

I won't talk about the plot in itself, as it appears reviewed here in Amazon, but I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy and likes it dark.

When I Finished the Book I Wasn't Sure If I Had Just Read a Noiror a Western
In fact, I began to wonder about that more than half way in when the shooting began in seriousness.It doesn't really matter but it did sum up that Working for the Devil is a very dark, edgy book-- packed with betrayal and action.Trust no one, trust nothing should be the reader's mantra.

The first part involves Dante Valentine being dragooned into taking on a hunt that she both does and doesn't want to do.She is saddled with a partner she cannot get rid of and cannot trust.She gathers her resources.Then in the second part she is in a strange city with her group and finds that she is a wanted woman with a very high bounty on her head.She has no reason to trust anyone now. And the action heats up.

This is a very good book. I think the addition of the demon/partner adds to the suspense.That she can't get rid of him and can't trust him gives the story a great edge.

My complaints have been stated by others.I can't get a grasp of what type of government the Hegemony is and Dante's back story is too closed at this point.I think a little more information would helped.

Not exactly good writing
It was fun. And it passed the time but I wouldn't put this anywhere near my list of favorites ... Read more

Book Description
"Dark fantasy has a new heroine."--- SFXWhen the dead call, she answers.Bounty hunting is a helluva job, but it pays the bills. And it lets Necromance Dante Valentine forget her issues---like struggling with her half-demon side and the memory of her lover's death.Now psychics all over the city are being savagely murdered---and a piece of the past Dante thought she'd buried is stalking the night with a vengeance. Too bad she's got no way to tell which fiend--or friend--to trust. Or that her most horrifying nightmares are gathering to take one kick-ass bounty hunter down for the count.But that's only the beginning. The Devil just called. He's looking for Dante's lover--the one he killed... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (44)

Dead Man Rising
Better than the first book in this series. Same gritty feel but with better insight into the main characters. Great fight scenes.

Dark but Wonderful
This book was a little tough to zoom through because of the darkness and sorrow, but it was still a wonderful book.I'm absolutely in love with all of Ms. Saintcrow's books!Can't wait for the 5th installment!

A Great Series!
A paranormal mysteries with a bit of romance.The series kept me in suspense as to what was going to happen with the two men in Dante's life.

Move over Anita!!!
Because Dante V. is on your heels! She's fun and doesn't take herself to seriously. I found the first book in the library and they don't carry the others so I hopped on Amazon and started ordering them all. I could not have found a better heroine than Dante.

First four books are enjoyable
Each of the first four books are fun reads with an interesting twist on demons, werewolves, magic and so forth.There is a narrative thread running through all the books, which is concluded in the fifth (last one) of the series.The last book is a disappointment, both in terms of lack of growth in the leading character and a twist at the end that I found unsatisfying. ... Read more

Book Description
Dante Alighieri paved the way for modern literature, while creating verse and prose that remain unparalleled for formal elegance, intellectual depth, and emotional grandeur. The Portable Dante contains complete verse translations of Dante's two masterworks, The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova, as well as a bibliography, notes, and an introduction by eminent scholar and translator Mark Musa.

Translated and edited by Mark Musa. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Excellent translation, but some drawbacks to this edition
First, a word about Mark Musa's translation of Dante's works. His interpretations of the Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova are very beautiful, extremely readable, and as true to Dante as you can be in English. Musa's scholarship is excellent, and his introductory essays on Dante and his works are a pleasure to read, offering a broad understanding of what Dante is all about.

However, it is important that you keep in mind that a number of concessions had to be made for this book. Collecting the massive poems of the Divine Comedy, along with La Vita Nuova, is no mean task - I'm astounded Penguin Classics pulled it off in such a compact and readable volume. But this collection comes at the expense of some features that range from minor to outright baffling.

First, the minor stuff. This edition lacks the informative diagrams and illustrations of the standalone Divine Comedy volumes from Penguin Classics (Inferno, et al). Given the complexity of Dante's creation, it is very helpful to have maps to show you where the various parts of the afterlife are, and who inhabits them. Puzzlingly, /The Portable Dante/ includes a detailed map of Purgatory, but only a very vague and un-labeled map of Inferno, and NO map of Paradiso and the celestial spheres. Very strange and disappointing.

More unfortunate is the lack of a glossary. The Penguin Classics /Inferno/ has an excellent glossary of people and places that appear in the poem. This is a phenomenal resource for figuring out who is where in Hell, what they represent, and what Dante is doing with them.

However, the most (potentially) major issue with this volume is the sparse commentary. The individual books of The Divine Comedy have extensive endnotes, detailing broad sections and individual passages in great detail. The notes offer a better understanding of what Dante is doing, because virtually every line of poetry includes multi-faceted references to classical mythology, Christian scripture, and contemporary or historical Italian culture. For the majority of the Divine Comedy, well over 50% of the notes (as compared with the individual Penguin Classics books) have been removed.

The endnotes have been converted to non-intrusive footnotes, which is a welcome shift. But I can't help but feel that also including a detailed endnotes section would have added much, so that at the very least the reader could explore the more obscure references (passages from the Aeneid, the Bible, and so on) if they so desire. I also noticed some notes rather crucial to understanding have been removed completely, which is very unfortunate.

So how come, after all this whining and moaning, I still give /The Portable Dante/ a full five stars? Because Mark Musa's translation is so fluid and vital, and having such a beautiful collection in a compact volume is extremely valuable. There is enough supplementary material that casual readers can enjoy Dante's mastery and creativity, and they will perhaps be tantalized to explore the deeper meanings he plants throughout.

Here's the bottom line: /The Portable Dante/ is what I use when I wish to read Dante to others, or to simply read through for my own enjoyment. If you need extensive scholarly information, I recommend also buying the Penguin Classics editions of the individual parts of The Divine Comedy. But as a smooth and very readable base camp for your exploration of Dante, I can think of no better book than this.

Highly recommended, whatever your level of interest in this fascinating poet and his works.

Good basic text
good translation - not excellent, but good, and the footnotes are helpful. The translator also makes an attempt at explaining the contrapasso for each Canto of Inferno, which can be helpful to the independant reader.

The All-In-One Dante
"The Portable Dante" provides readers with the complete "Divine Comedy" (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise), an excellent biography on the author, historical background, a great translation by one of the the best translators of the genre, and Dante's often forgotten work "La Vita Nuova". What more could you ask for? Essentially, this volume has it all. I would highly recommend it for anyone who wishes to read the entire "Divine Comedy" from Hell to Heaven. It's better than having to buy each book separately. And nothing is lost from putting it all into one place. Each Canto is complete and excellently translated into verse form (as it should be). This edition makes the often difficult work easier to read by providing a summary at the beginning of each Canto (though I often skip over these because I don't want to spoil the surprise, but they're there if you need them) and notes at the bottom of each page (instead of in the back of the book like another edition I read), making them easy to refer to while reading.

There are a lot of editions of this timeless work out there, but this is the one to get. Great translation and excellent organization.

Dante - My admittedly poor review
Dante has always been a difficult writer for me. His long established greatness and unquestioned place in the pantheon of man's great literary creators is not something I question or doubt. I understand that he is the major writer of the Christian Middle Ages, and for many along with Shakespeare at the very pinnacle of the world's literary creators.My own difficulty with Dante may in part relate to the fact that he is presenting a Christian vision of life on earth, hell, purgatory and heaven. And that this vision is something I as a Jew have difficulty giving full emotional sympathy to. But there is another difficulty which I found in reading even the most colorful portrayals of those suffering in the Inferno. I found it all to be cruel. And I was repelled by the idea that God would so delight in the tremendous sufferings inflicted on sinners, who are after all too God's creatures. In other words the whole emotional landscape of Dante's lower world, and the great imaginative effort made to portray various strange and unusual sufferings repelled me. I found it in so many way petty and wrong and outside my sense of what God who made all creatures great and small , would condone. Could God who is Good really take delight in all these unending torments? I prefer to think of God as One who rather would seek a way to help save others even those who have sinned, rather than condemn them.
Thus the very premise of this great work seems to put it outside my own particular grasp or emotional comprehension.
Moreover as Dante moved to Purgatory and then later to Paradise I found myself somehow sleeping and not interested. These ' spiritual landscapes ' were too outside my own sense as a Jew of what the world is truly about . Of course God wants our penitence but there does not have to be some special realm in order for God to get it.We can repent and change everyday where we are in our own life.
I realize that what I am providing the review reader here is a very poor review indeed. It shows no knowledge or appreciation of the beauties of the language and other strengths of Dante's writing.
It is however one poor reader's honest impression however little it be worth.

A master's works
Okay, everyone has heard of the "Divine Comedy," the medieval masterwork of legendary poet Dante Alighieri. Heaven, hell, purgatory and so on. In "The Portable Dante," that sprawling supernatural epic is paired with his exquisite love ode, "La Vita Nuova."

"The Divine Comedy" is the story of Dante's guided tour through the three parts of the afterlife: Hell, where he is shown (by the poet Virgil) how the sinners are tormented in all sorts of inventive ways, depending on their sins. Purgatory, "the second kingdom," where Dante sees the suffering that people undergo to be purified of their wrongs. And finally paradise, where his beloved muse Beatrice shows him heaven, encountering his ancestors, angels, saints, and finally God himself.

"La Vita Nuova" (The New Life) is only loosely connected with the "Comedy." It tells of how Dante met Beatrice when they were both children, and he fell in love with her. Many years passed, and Dante's quiet adoration of Beatrice grew stronger, even though they married other people. The story follows his emotional ups and downs, and the writings that resulted... even when Beatrice died.

The main similarity between these two books is that they both feature (and adore) Beatrice. "La Vita Nuova" is an intimate little book, but the "Divine Comedy" sprawls all over Earth, the solar system (within the bounds of "paradiso"), and the three parts of the supernatural realm. You can't get much more epic than that.

Dante's writing remains rich and detailed, even translated into English. The descriptions of heaven and hell are mind-blowing, and sometimes the "Inferno" sections are even funny. Yes, hell is funny. But he also excels in describing his inner highs and lows in "La Vita Nuova," as he struggles with doubts, sorrow, anguish and joy.

But don't think that Dante's journeys are merely supernatural. While "La Vita Nuova" doesn't describe much beyond art and love, "Divine Comedy" also tackles religion and politics. It's a bit uncomfortable when Dante describes various people he disliked in hell. And he also takes the opportunity to criticize the Catholic chuch of his time, which had quite a few problems. However, his fervour for his religion, Beatrice and his art shine through.

"The Portable Dante" is an excellent way to check out Dante's most prominent works. Whether checking out an unrequited love, or journeying through the circles of hell, this is a spellbinding collection. ... Read more

Book Description
“Powerful . . . A combustible mixture of science and mysticism, a high-altitude
thriller fizzing with intrigue.” –JOHN CASE, Author of The Eighth Day

In a breathless thriller that explores the relationship between science and the divine, good and evil, space and time, Jane Jensen takes us from the world we know into a reality we could only scarcely imagine. Until now.

Rabbi Aharon Handalman’s expertise with Torah code–rearranging words and letters in the Bible–has uncovered a man’s name. Who is Yosef Kobinski, and why did God hide his name in His sacred text? To find the answers, Aharon begins an investigation, and discovers that Kobinski, a Polish rabbi, was not only a mystic but also a brilliant physicist who authored what may be the most important lost work in human history.

In Seattle, Jill Talcott’s work with energy wave equations is being linked to Yosef Kobinski, now deceased, who claimed nearly fifty years ago that he discovered an actual physical law of good and evil. But when Jill’s lab explodes, she is forced to flee for her life, realizing that her cutting-edge research is far more dangerous than she ever has imagined. And that powerful people have a stake in what she may have uncovered.

Now Jill, her research partner, and a writer fascinated by Kobinski are about to meet Handalman in Poland–all four desperate to solve the astonishing riddle. Searching through the past, they trace Kobinski to a clearing in the woods near Auschwitz. And in that clearing they come face-to-face with the inexplicable: that Kobinski, drawing on his own alchemy of science and the Kabbalah, made himself vanish from the death camp in a blaze of fire. Now, with intelligence agents hot on their trail, the investigators have no choice. They must follow Kobinski –to wherever he may have gone. . . .


From the Trade Paperback edition.Download Description

In a breathless thriller that explores the relationship between science and the divine, good and evil, space and time, Jane Jensen takes us from the world we know into a reality we could only scarcely imagine. Until now.

Rabbi Aharon Handalman's expertise with Torah code -- rearranging words and letters in the Bible -- has uncovered a man's name. Who is Yosef Kobinski, and why did God hide his name in His sacred text? To find the answers, Aharon begins an investigation, and discovers that Kobinski, a Polish rabbi, was not only a mystic but also a brilliant physicist who authored what may be the most important lost work in human history.

In Seattle, Jill Talcott's work with energy wave equations is being linked to Yosef Kobinski, now deceased, who claimed nearly fifty years ago that he discovered an actual physical law of good and evil. But when Jill's lab explodes, she is forced to flee for her life, realizing that her cutting-edge research is far more dangerous than she ever has imagined. And that powerful people have a stake in what she may have uncovered.

Now Jill, her research partner, and a writer fascinated by Kobinski are about to meet Handalman in Poland -- all four desperate to solve the astonishing riddle. Searching through the past, they trace Kobinski to a clearing in the woods near Auschwitz. And in that clearing they come face-to-face with the inexplicable: that Kobinski, drawing on his own alchemy of science and the Kabbalah, made himself vanish from the death camp in a blaze of fire. Now, with intelligence agents hot on their trail, the investigators have no choice. They must follow Kobinski-- to wherever he may have gone....

"Powerful... A combustible mixture of science and mysticism, a high-altitudethriller fizzing with intrigue."
   JOHN CASE, AUTHOR OF THE EIGHTH DAY

"In this remarkable thriller, wave mechanics and hidden codes quickly give way to the fundamental nature of space/time -- and that's just for starters! A tour de force of speculative imagination, grounded in science that is both credible and cutting-edge."
   DOUGLAS PRESTON and LINCOLN CHILD, AUTHORS OF THE RELIC AND THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

Customer Reviews (25)

The Oppenheimer Theme
For me it is a welcome thing to find a sci fi novel
that reminds me of Arthur C. Clark's "City and the Stars"The City and the Stars (Millennium SF Masterworks S). It also reminds one of Michael Chabon's SummerlandSummerland with it's ladder of parallel worlds. Chabon's Pulitzer winner also had a kabbalah sub-theme. It is hard with science that is probably not right to make a convincing novel as is achieved here. It tests new themes of religious
philosophy being parallel to science. At least one Jewish genius of the WW II era seems to fit Rabbi Yosef Kobinski: F. Hausdorff who died rather than go to the camps.The dichotomyof morality and science that gripped Robert Oppenheimer seems to form the theme of this excellent novel.

Never been much of a reader but...
I couldn't wait to get to the next page.I felt I understood each character and their motives so well. Going into such depth with each character gave me a sense of compassion for all of them.I don't think a book has ever made me feel compassion for every character.

The beginning of the book did not hook me as much as it did towards the middle when things started coming together.

It is so exciting just writing a review about the book it makes me want to read it again.It blows away the Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.to me those books seem like Hollywood fluff compared to this book.Although I think if I hadn't read Dantes Equation first I might not have expected so much more.

Not worth the effort
What could have been an interesting plot - it sounds like a Tim Powers novel when described - wasted by horribly shallow, one-dimensional and utterly unsympathetic characters. I managed to drag myself through it, but the conclusion was ultimately unsatisfying, the turn-arounds in the characters unexplained an unbelievable. Don't bother.

This is a very ambitious work, that mostly succeeds
This is not a fast read book, and as another reviewer noted (unhappily) it makes some rather drastic changes in venue near the end of the novel.

However, it is well-worth reading.A good story, with some very imaginative ideas about the balance of good and evil and control vs chaos.I didn't completely agree with the unbalanced worlds that she created and how they applied to and affected the people who went to them, but I liked the idea of them and marvelled at the amount of creativity and imagination that went into creating them.

I am going to try some more Jane Jensen novels as a result of reading Dante's Equation.

Slow to start, but worth finishing.
I almost put it down several times over August, as I found it quite boring. The first 200 pages that is. Anyone reading the novel may or may not disagree. I guess the first part of the book really delved into the characterization and laying out the how's and whys that many of the characters acted.

It also helped tie the various characters together, while trying to explain the forces of good and evil as an actual physical law of nature, and how a Jewish Rabbi discovered these laws and was able to use them, along with microscopic black holes, to escape the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp near the end of WW2. A young scientist named Jill Tallcott and her assistant Nate Adros have stumbled upon this very same law, and she is determined to see what good can be made of it.

Three other Characters are caught up in the middle of it. A Soldier named Calder Ferris, who is out to learn what he can about this potential new technology, and a writer named Denton Wyle, who is hunting for the lost manuscript that was written by Rabbi Yosef Kobinski, in order to publish these lost works and make a fortune. Finally there is another Jewish Rabbi named Aharon Handalman, who's expertise with Torah code discover several very un-nerving names and phrases in the code, of which Jill Tallcott's name, and weapons of mass destruction are only part of it.

The novel, as I said, does pick up pace and quickly jumps into the realm of SF with the characters discovering these microscopic gateways to other universes.

I found that the very heart and soul of the novel was, if anything, more about finding redemption and changing the darker, uglier sides of ones identity and soul, and that no matter what has happened in the past, you can always change yourself for the better of not only those around you, but mankind.

Very confusing, but it did finally pick up the pace, and I am glad that I stuck with it until the very end.
... Read more

Amazon.com
History, literature, love, and religion come together in this graceful biography of the world's most revered and influential poet. R.W.B. Lewis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Edith Wharton, displays the same intelligent understanding here of the complex interplay of inner and outer forces that shape an artist. His lucid account of political and literary conflict in 13th-century Florence (subject of another Lewis book, The City of Florence) illuminates the context in which Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) came of age, fell in love with the unattainable Beatrice Portinari, forged the "sweet new style" that transformed Italian literature, and embroiled himself in factional disputes he would angrily renounce after his exile from Florence in 1302. Lewis makes palpable the intellectual and imaginative energy that fired Dante to write an influential political treatise (De Monarchia), a powerful argument for literature written in the common tongue (De Vulgari Eloquentia), and of course his twin tributes to Beatrice: one of the most eloquent love poems ever written (La Vita Nuova) and that supreme chronicle of the human spiritual quest, Divine Comedy. The author notes autobiographical elements in all Dante's works without trivializing their creative majesty, and if the poet's personality is somewhat muffled across the distance of eight centuries, his artistic presence still "sparkles and sings and smiles like one of the spirits in Paradise." Drawing cogently (and with generous acknowledgment) on previous scholarship, this volume worthily fulfills its mission as an entry in the excellent Penguin Lives series of short biographies for the general reader. --Wendy Smith Book Description
Only R.W.B. Lewis-the renowned biographer and author of The City of Florence-could write so insightfully about Dante Alighieri, Florence's famous son.

In Dante he traces the life and complex development-emotional, artistic, philosophical-of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, and to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a century later. Lewis reveals the boy who first encounters the mythic Beatrice, the lyric poet obsessed with love and death, the grand master of dramatic narrative and allegory, and his monumental search for ultimate truth in The Divine Comedy. It is in this masterpiece of self-discovery and redemption that Lewis finds Dante's own autobiography-and the sum of all his shifting passions and epiphanies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

pretty good book
In depth about his life, but fortunately was only about 200 pages.

Defining Presence in Italian Literature
Dante was the poet-historian of Florence.He associated himself with his native city.He was an ardent personality.In Florence there was a surging economy and seven guilds.City walls were extended to form a new circuit completed in 1333.

Virgil's AENEID was the poem Dante admired most.Dante died in 1321 in Ravenna and is buried there.In 1373 Boccaccio offered a series of lectures on Dante's life and work. Dante's father died in the early 1280's.Brunetto Latini became a role model.Dante provides a portrait of the old master in his COMEDY.

Dante had divergent impulses.Love and death are counter themes in VITA NUOVA.Following Beatrice's death, Dante became immersed in THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY by Boethius describing a soul finding comfort in the vision of God.Dante was gifted in discourse.He led a private and family life during the years he held public office.

Florentine discord began in family feuding between the Donatis and the Cerchis.Dante became a literary man, exalting the welfare of the commune over the warfare of the two sides.Around 1301 Dante incurred the Pope's displeasure.Subsequently the poet suffered banishment and the threat of the imposition of the death sentence.First he lived in Verona, like Florence a daughter of Rome.

Next Dante went to Padua, briefly, and then to Bologna.He was on his own.He identified fourteen separate Italian dialects in one of his books.He wrote much of the INFERNO on the run.He settled in Verona from 1312 to 1318.The PURGATORIO was written there and the PARADISIO begun.There is a tone in the former work of hope refreshed.

In 1318 Dante moved to Ravenna.The Christian humanism of Thomas Aquinas appealed to him.Both men hold the idea that grace perfects nature.Examination of what he truly believed found Dante a changed man.Peter, James, and John represent faith, hope, and love.The PARADISIO was completed in 1320.

T.S. Eliot's mind was infested with Dante.

Tuscan Sun
The Peguin Lives series thrives on its clever and sometimes surprising pairings of subjects and writers, often non-specialists with a more personal take on the life. Giving Dante to a Yale English professor isn't the most inspired choice, though Lewis's expertise is mainly American lit. The book shows the marks of several pleasant vacations in Tuscany, with brief pen portraits of the various sites and geographical features that shaped Dante's world providing most of the color in an otherwise dry march through the facts of his life. Lewis often circles back to people or scenes described earlier in the work, which is either a tribute to Dante's own narrative style or a sign of slack editing. If you don't know something about Dante already, this isn't the book to convince you he's one of the world's great writers, or to help explain why. But for a quick tourist map of a complex place and time, it's a short, effective read.

An excellent biographical introduction to Dante
Prior to this biography on Dante, R. W. B. Lewis had established himself as one of the leading authorities on Edith Wharton and had also written a book about Florence.Although he is not widely acknowledged as a Dante scholar, this brief volume is testimony to his obvious love for Florence's greatest poet.Unlike many brief biographies of great literary figures, this is a remarkably balanced account of Dante's life and career.Given the strictures on what can be covered in a small number of pages, other biographers of other writers often focus on an individual's life to the near exclusion of all else, or on the greater cultural context of their work, or on a discussion of the writings, ignoring the writer's world and life.Lewis strikes a marvelous balance between explaining the historical-especially the political-context for Dante's life, in detailing the significant biographical moments that informed his career (including most of what we know about his limited encounters with Beatrice), and the development of his art.Lewis's skill in refusing to neglect any significant aspect of Dante's life and work is laudable.

Lewis's narrative progresses chronologically on a number of parallel levels.He reverts on several occasions to Dante's genealogy, on the political situation in Florence in the conflict between the Ghibellines (who favored the claims of the Holy Roman Emperor in Europe) and the Guelphs (who favored the Pope and later split into the Black and White Guelphs, Dante being associated with the latter), Dante's platonic adoration of Beatrice, the development of Dante's poetry, Dante's role in the government of Florence, his eventual banishment from Florence, and the composition and content of his COMEDY.I was especially encouraged by the number of theological figures who were crucial to Dante and essential for understanding the theological structure of the COMEDY.

I do have a couple of minor criticisms.One is that Lewis isn't always as sharp in his exposition as he clearly is capable of being.There are also some curiosities, such as his comments near the end identifying Robert Penn Warren as "the most complete man of letters of our time," a good if not great writer whom I believe will be largely forgotten in as little as twenty-five years (one wonders if Warren and Lewis were close friends).There is an annotated biography, but most of the secondary works Lewis discusses are either out of print or not readily available, while many key contemporary texts dealing with Dante are omitted, such as Freccero's THE POETICS OF CONVERSION.And how could any discussion of translations omit Singleton's, which is easily one of the highpoints of Dante scholarship in the past half century?Two other small complaints:no index and no chronology of Dante's life.My own feeling is that there is never justification for not including an index in an academic book; the omission sharply reduces the book's usability.Even in a short biography a chronology is useful, allowing one to make rapid comparisons between the various events in a writer's life and their work.

Nonetheless, for most readers of Dante in English, this brief biography will serve as a superb introduction to both Dante's life and his work.

Dazzling Spirituality
This is one of several volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Each provides a concise but remarkably comprehensive biography of its subject in combination with a penetrating analysis of the significance of that subject's life and career. I think this is a brilliant concept. My only regret is that even an abbreviated index is not provided. Those who wish to learn more about the given subject are directed to other sources.

When preparing to review various volumes in this series, I have struggled with determining what would be of greatest interest and assistance to those who read my reviews. Finally I decided that a few brief excerpts and then some concluding comments of my own would be appropriate.

On Dante's masterpiece: "The Commedia, to which the adjective Divina was affixed two centuries afterward, is, all things considered, the greatest single poem ever written; and in one perspective, as has been said, it is autobiographical: the journey of a man to find himself and make himself after having been cruelly mistreated in his homeland. It is also a rhythmic exploration of the entire cultural world Dante had inherited: classical, pre-Christian, Christian, medieval, Tuscan, and emphatically Florentine. And it is the long poetic tribute to Beatrice Portinari which Dante promised, at the end of the Vita Nuova." (pages 12 and 13)

On Dante's response to Beatrice's death: He "did more than write an occasional poem of memorial grief; he put together the work to which he gave the title La Vita Nuova di Dante Alighieri. It was essentially an act of compilation, probably begun in 1293 and finished two years later. Dante drew up[ a narrative account of his relationship with Beatrice Portinari, from his first sight of her at the May Day party in 1274 to her death sixteen years later, sprinkling through it the poems -- canzones, sonnets, a ballad -- written to enshrine each successive moment." (page 59)

On progression in the Paradiso: In it, "Dante ascends; he does not climb, as in the Purgatorio, but, as he is constantly remarking, is propelled upward with the speed of an arrow. He is swept up through the lower planets -- the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn; into the Fixed Stars; then upwards to the Primum Mobile, when come all distinctions of space and time, of 'where' and 'when,' through itself beyond space and time; to the Empyrean, the actual and eternal dwelling-place of the Three-in-One God, of the angels and the saints, of the community of the blessed." (page 170)

In the concluding portion of his biography, Lewis briefly but eloquently suggests the ubiquitous and energizing presence of Dante in English and American literature, notably in the works of Shelley, Byron, Robert Browning, Rossetti, Emerson, Pound, Eliot, and Warren. According to Lewis, that presence "sparkles and sings and smiles like one of the spirits in Paradise." The same can be said of Lewis' writing style which, in combination with his erudition, enables the modern reader to gain a greater appreciation of someone who lived more than 600 years ago but whose Comedy is as contemporary as tomorrow's sunrise.

As is also true of the other volumes in the "Penguin Lives" series, this one provides all of the essential historical and biographical information but its greatest strength lies in the extended commentary, in this instance by R.W.B. Lewis. He also includes a brief but sufficient "Bibliographical Notes" section for those who wish to learn more about Dante. I hope these brief excerpts encourage those who read this review to read Lewis' biography. It is indeed a brilliant achievement. ... Read more

Book Description
Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach’s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante’s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity.

CONTENTS
I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature
II. Dante's Early Poetry
III. The Subject of the "Comedy"
IV. The Structure of the "Comedy"
V. The Presentation
VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality
Notes
Index ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

a way
Auerbach's Dante book was published first in 1929 before the period of his Turkish teaching as Michael Dirda's helpful preface relates. In this book one can see Auerbach working out his thoughts both on mimesis, which would bear fruit in his most celebrated work, and on typology or that would become the focus of a stellar essay. What is most dazzling about this work here is its simultaneous attention to historical sweep and poetic detail. One works one's way from Homer, Greek tragedy and comedy, Aristotle and Virgil through Augustine, Guizinelli and Cavalcanti. By the time Dante's early works appear for discussion, the reader has amassed a tremendous background. Auerbach's writing on the Comedy is as impressive where he shows the ability to ponder the value of white petals on a rose or the necessity of the Veltro, or greyhound as the foe to the She-wolf that menaces Dante. Also, I was struck by Auerbach's attention to Dante's word order and period construction. After all that, it is remarkable to discover how sparsely emulated and admired Dante's poetry was for centuries after its completion. This little book fits scintillating learning within its 180 pages. I do recommend it. ... Read more

Book Description
The legendary golf instructional, available again. This is, along with Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, THE book Golf professionals turn to.



"Thirty years ago I was recommending Joe Dante's book The Four Magic Moves To Winning Golf as a must read for aspiring PGA professionals.  What Dante said in '62 has influenced many of the game's finest teachers.  Dante was a visionary."--Gary Wiren, author of New Golf Mind



When published, The Four Magic Moves To Winning Golf   radically changed the way many players thought about the golf swing.  Dante's system showed how simple it was to improve one's game, and at the same time gave the golfer one of the most comprehensive analyses of swing mechanics ever published.  Now, thirty-three years after its original publication, Main Street is proud to reissue this classic instructional. Dante begins by sweeping out all the misconceptions of the game.  "If good golf is to be learned and the poor player is to improve, a purging must take place, painful as it may be." Dante discusses a few basics of grip and stance, and then he gets to the heart of his book, the four magic moves.  As he reveals each of the moves, Dante focuses on the physical checkpoints so that any golfer can make sure that his or her swing is on the right track.



The Four Magic Moves To Winning Golf is straightforward and easy to understand, yet unlike other golf books it is irreverent and audacious in its approach to mastering the game.  The publication of this rediscovered classic is sure to establish Joe Dante's reputation as one of golf's greatest teachers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (25)

Its just alright
There is a lot of rehashed material in this book and frankly its a little hard to read and not terribly insightful. I've read many many many golf books over the years and this one has some good information in it but it takes way too long to get to the point sometimes. Also, I think some of the wrist techniques are outdated and really have to be developed with perfect timing. A decent book for Novice and better golfers but NOT recommended for beginners. Their is no "magic" here folks.

Shazamm . . .
Approaching sixty, for some godforsaken reason I have determined to construct a serviceable golf swing.It appears that no one book will satisfy that intention, rather one must sort through and experiment with what the literature provides.That said, the one constant during my erratic golf career, other than high scores, has been a wicked, wicked slice.It is a big reason I have only played the game some ten times in the past twenty five years, the greens fees here in Japan being another.Joe Dante's Magic Move #1 has cured me of it.Whether the 'backward wrist break' has driven a stake through Banana's evil heart remains to be seen, but each trip down to Hanazato Golf confirms that MY SLICE IS DEAD.Anyway, I think so.Joe seems to revel in the pain inducing awkwardness of the Magic Moves and the 'wrist break' has indeed caused a dull ache in my hands and forearms.One hopes it will go away.In the meantime I'm enjoying sliceless golf shots and even the occasional draw.The rest of the 'magic moves' are yours for the taking; I'm not so sure about them.I suppose any book which cures someone of a slice should get five stars but it's all so relative.What worked for me may not for you.But don't forget Fred Shoemaker's book.Or Jim McLellan's video!And good luck!

Back injury waiting to happen
If you follow this you will get back pain and risk ending up like Fred Couples.

Finally in the position to go after it
I bought Dante's book after connecting in spirit with the other customers here who bought it, found it worked, and shared their views.I'd watch the pros on TV and was always intrigued by that great position at the top with the flat wrist and the first move down.Getting the whole thing from the dead start to the top is a process that has never been adequately conveyed to me and absorbed by me...until I read this book.The meticulous treatment of the first move with the early wrist break to the top is a masterpiece of instruction for the lost soul. Don't rush your time spent reading and practicing Move Uno. Once you feel that sensation of owning your grip on the club with the hands set solid and perfectly at the top of your coil, you're about ready to trust Dante with your firstborn. Ahhh...so THIS is what a player's swing actually feels like.

The alternative golf swing that works
I am a golf instructor based in New Zealand and purchased the book based on what I had read on some internet sites. The book advocated an early wrist break that is not commonly taught or known about.

Dan Shaugers/Mike Austin "How to Kill the Ball" and "21st Century Golf Swing" which I am an accredited teacher..... are the only other books that you will read that teach such an action with the wrists. Not only that we both teach lateral movements of the hips.

If you have purchased Dan's books you will certainly enjoy reading about Joe Dante's method. ... Read more