Dante's Inferno [Paperback]

Dante Alighieri (Author), Daniel Halpern (Editor), Various Poets (Translator), James Merrill (Introduction), Giuseppe Mazzotta (Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1994

A new telling of Dante's Inferno, this translation is the most fluent, grippingly readable version of the famous poem yet, and—with all the consummate technical skill that is the hallmark of Sean O'Brien's own poetry—manages the near-impossible task of preserving the subtle power and lyric nuance of the Italian original, while seeking out an entirely natural English music. No other version has so vividly expressed the horror, cruelty, beauty, and outrageous imaginative flight of Dante's original vision.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

"Virgil's design for Dante, that he will 'grow used/to the sad stench,' for 'after a short while/human senses numb,' does not extend to this volume's readers; our senses are continually jostled and primed by the unexpected shifts in style."

Review

"It seems right that Dante would provide such an unusual meeting ground of cultures, eras, and writers: his voice took in many voices. Curious, questing, and provocative, this literary project should be a signpost to anyone who cares about language." -- Publisbers Weekly

"Many hands have made, in the present case, not light but lasting work." -- -- James Merrill

"What drew such disparate poets as Amy Clampitt, W. S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand, C.K. Williams, and Alfred Corn into the translating project? The glory of the poem itself, the grand enterprise of making a work written 700 years ago beautiful for a new generation." -- Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, Editor, The New York Times Book Review

Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 1 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 10 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 11. by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 12. by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 13. by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 14. by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 15. by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 16. by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 17. by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 18. by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 19 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 2 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 20 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 21 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 22 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 23 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 24 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 25 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 26 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 27 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 28 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 29 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 3 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 30 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 31 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 32 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 33 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 4 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 5 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 6 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 7 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 8 by Dante Alighieri
Divina Commedia: Inferno. Canto 9 by Dante Alighieri
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

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Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880013737
• ISBN-13: 978-0880013734
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #261,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence. His family, of minor nobility, was not wealthy nor especially distinguished; his mother died when he was a child, his father before 1283. At about the age of 20 he married Gemma Donati, by whom he had three children. Little is known of Dante's formal education-it is likely to have included study with the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Franciscans in Florence, and at the university in Bologna. In 1295 he entered Florentine politics and in the summer of 1300 he became one of the six governing Priors of Florence. In 1301, the political situation forced Dante and his party into exile. For the rest of his life he wandered through Italy, perhaps studied at Paris, while depending for refuge on the generosity of various nobles. He continued to write and at some point late in life he took asylum in Ravenna where he completed the Divine Commedia and died, much honoured, in 1321.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars In fact an old translation, June 4, 2011

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MM (Madrid) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dante's Inferno (Classic Collections!) (Kindle Edition)

Dante's Inferno is wonderful, but has to be read in a decent translation. I ordered this one because I thought it would be interesting to see how different translators handled it. But something has gone wrong. This Classic Collections version of Dante is not as advertised. It's actually an atrocious old translation by the Rev. Cary, poorly put together, and with no proper table of contents, etc. In any case, it's available elsewhere for free. I'm not sure whether I can return Kindle books, so I'll probably just throw it away.
If Amazon check out these reviews, please can they remove or adapt the inaccurate information on this one.

37 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Medieval vision of the afterlife, April 30, 2007

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Michael A Neulander "Political Philosophy" (VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dante's Inferno (The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell) (Paperback)

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.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars dante led through a hall of carnival mirrors, April 26, 2002

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"hirofantv" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dante's Inferno (Paperback)

led by 20 contemporary poets who offer their own stylistic interpretations of Dante's great Inferno. So many translations have been done that the goal of this book seems to me not to be to attempt another Inferno of syntax that's become standardised, but to introduce Dante to the world of contemporary poetry by meshing the classic with the eclectic array of poets in this book. Most actually do seem to want to do a somewhat standardised translation for their canto/s, but new ideas are welcome. This is not a book to read to familiarise oneself with the Inferno, but it is a great book to read to think about evolution of classicism through these writers.