Customer Reviews

Dante's Paradiso

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4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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

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!