Dante's Paradiso [Paperback]

Sandow Birk (Adapter, Illustrator), Marcus Sanders (Author), Peter Hawkins (Preface), Michael Meister (Introduction), Mary Campbell (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 14, 2005

With the publication of Dante's Paradiso, Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders complete their literary and artistic achievementthe retelling of The Divine Comedy in contemporary words and images. Hailed as "inspired" by the The London Review of Books, Birk and Sanders's adaptation of Dante's classic work is true to the spirit of the original and is as acerbic and shockingly funny today as in thirteenth-century Italy. With a text that incorporates modern slang and references to anachronistically recent public figures, Birk and Sanders pay tribute to Dante's linguistic approach and clever politics. Birk's striking spin on Gustave Dor's famous engravings accompany the cantos. Together they lend the timeless poem a postmodern edge. A major retrospective of all of Birk's illustrations and paintings for the trilogy will be held at the San Jose Museum of Art in August 2005 in tribute to a masterpiece for our times.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The completed Commedia is a masterwork, vulnerable in places to nitpicking but infinitely enriched by motifs that emerge only after contemplation of the full trilogy. One would no sooner own this Inferno without its two sequelae than eat breakfast but skip lunch and dinner. -San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Sandow Birk's work has been exhibited widely and published in several books. He lives in Long Beach, California.

Marcus Sanders is a contributing editor for Surfing and Surfline , and has written for numerous magazines. He lives in San Francisco.

Peter Hawkins is director of the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University and coeditor of The Poets' Dante .

Mary Campbell is a poet and scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature at Brandeis University.

Michael Meister is professor of religious studies at Saint Mary's College of California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (July 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811847209
• ISBN-13: 978-0811847209
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 7.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #347,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful Contemporary Read, July 29, 2006

By 

Cecilia Rodriguez (Tucson, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dante's Paradiso (Paperback)

I adore the Divine Comedy-- and all of the Modern Library translations of the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. I tried out these books by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders because they looked appealing. They're definitely great reads. No, they're not perfect, and some of it is a little strange to read, but overall, I think you can't really go wrong in trying them out. It keeps all of Dante's main points, it just presents them in a different, more modern way. Anyone interested in Dante's work, would should at least read these for experimentation.

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing!, May 2, 2010

By 

Melinda L. Hurley - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

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

I absolutely LOVED this series! The way the author adapted it to modern day life was great. I recommend it to readers everywhere.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars You Lost me at "Dante's Paradise is the Islamic Mecca", March 22, 2011

By 

Jordan Saxony "m3812784" (USA) - See all my reviews

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

Despite being a Dante scholar and Dante-lover since childhood, I actually got a big kick out of this vernacular version, the crazy, modern pictures, the paraphrase into slang, etc. I even overlooked Mary Campbell's egregiously bad and near total misunderstanding of Catholicism, as evidenced in the foreward. Darn...I was really having a little bit of fun, even, until I got to where the Vision of the Empyrean was......the Islamic Mecca, where everyone bows down to a monolithic box that represents a monolithic God, and God without interior communication, love, and relationship, as in Dante's Trinity.

Yeah, I get it, it's supposed to be all postmodern "subversive" and all that, but really, it was just too much. The preface goes on and on about "imagining a heaven" where Jews and Moslems could go, but the Catholic Church (surprise, surprise) does NOT teach that only Catholics are saved. I won't try to fit it into a review - you can look it up; many decades ago a priest in Boston was excommunicated for saying only Catholics were saved. Someone must be thinking of Protestant evangelicals or something. There is in Catholicism "baptism by desire" - not desire for Christianity, but desire for the truth. So essentially, this apparent in-crowd "wink" at all those who despise Dante's Catholicism, and imagine that they can strip it away from him, and also imagine that in the end Islam will in fact take over every aspect of the world, physically, politically, AND by rewriting western literature, was based on a falsehood from the start.

Readers will probably still enjoy this, but do NOT let it be your ONLY Dante experience!