Customer Reviews

The Divine Comedy (Classic Books on Cassettes Collection) [UNABRIDGED]

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I always felt it a crime that I made it through high school and college without reading this. I recently read The Dante Club which re-ignited my interest in finally reading The Divine Comedy. I looked at all the versions out there and decided on this one. I am so glad I did.
Intro:
There is an introduction on "How to read Dante" which was indispensible for my first time foray.
There is a note from the translator that explains how his translation might differ from others and why.
There is an introduction from a collegue of the translator that puts the Divine Comedy in a historical context.

Text:
So easy to read!
Each Canto begins with a synopsis. If all you wanted to know was the plot of the Divine Comedy you could just read all of these half page summaries (but you'd really miss out.)
Then the canto in beautiful verse.
Then copious notes that explain the minute details about whom you meet in the Canto and relevant events in history. The notes are as interesting as the Cantos themselves.

I am so glad I picked this copy up. I have now read and ENJOYED Dante's Divine Comedy. I highly recommend this as a starting point. It is extremely accessible.

I was introduced to Ciardi's translation of "The Divine Comedy" in an anthology of continental literature I read in college. At that time, after experiencing fragments of Fagles' horrible "verse" translation of Homer's works, I had low expectations for the translations in that anthology.

However, the instant I started reading John Ciardi's verse translation of "The Inferno", my hardened heart once again began to beat with the vibrancy it had when I read poems of Wordsworth or Browning.

John Ciardi, with a poetic talent that seems to be unmatched -- except for what I?ve read of W.S. Merwin's "Paradiso XXXIII," -- creates a poetic flow that feels, tastes, and even smells Italian. A poetic flow that delightfully contrasts Fagles', whose poetic flow is limited by popular styles and even phrases of the 20th century.

Instead of trying to lift Dante to the 20th century, Ciardi gracefully carries us to the early 14th century.

Instead of assuming that Dante is arcane, old fashioned, and in need of John's own poetic help, he believes that the original Italian is fresh, exciting, and poetically graceful.

The translation of Dante would have been diluted if Ciardi were to try and bring the 14th century to us through the modernization of the language, symbolism, and even the geography of Dante's world. (Fagles even geographically modified his "Odyssey" at one point to rename a Greek river the Nile because readers may get 'confused'.)

I?m glad that Ciardi tries to bring us back in time when the universe was cosmically full of life, where even the stars were more than the mere byproducts of abstract forces, chance, that can only be systematically analyzed and dissected.

The medieval worldview is far richer than the purely logical and scientific mindset that?s now common. By bringing Dante to us unfiltered by that mindset, Ciardi helps move us towards the bright and vibrant medieval world.

I strongly recommend John Ciardi's poetic translation of "The Divine Comedy," a lot is missed when reading only "The Inferno." The whole work is amazingly balanced.

Which in Italian means, roughly, "To translate is to betray." This review speaks entirely to translations, not to Dante, who is for God to review.
John Ciardi's translation is wonderful. To my taste it is the best verse translation we have. Its notes are just adequate. The Italian text is not supplied.
Now, Dante translations come in various schools: original metre, English metre, prose divided as verse, straight prose. Dante's original metre (terza rima) is not at home in English, though Chaucer's (somewhat approximate) first English translation uses it, as does Dorothy Sayers (whose Dantean scholarship is superb when she is not being Lord Peter Whimsy). Her heroic attempt is to my mind a waste of time. Nor, to me, does pure prose (such as the magnificent Singleton, work). The Divine Comedy is a poem, and prose does not follow the climaxes, hesitations, and rythms faithfully enough. So we are left with English metre, and with prose structured as verses (cantos). For readers who know some Italian, or Latin, or even French or Spanish, the latter would be my choice, so long as the Italian is supplied on the facing page--you can then hear Dante's own voice while understanding it. For this I would recommend the Durling translation (Oxford). It is wonderfully done and superbly annotated (though Singleton's notes are even more majestic)--which will deal with the common Dante complaint, "Who are all these people?". If you want to read directly in English verse, Ciardi is your man. Additional reading would be Dorothy Sayers' "Further Readings on Dante" (Harper). Or, buy Ciardi for his verse and Singleton for his notes and Italian text. AND, PLEASE don't read JUST the Inferno. Read Purgatorio and Paradiso too. You must! Inferno is just a part. If you dedicate your life's leisure to this poem you will have made a perfectly sound choice.
A note about Dante's Italian. In the Comedy it is extremely challenging. This is not at all because it is old, nor because it is poetry. Though my own Italian is by no means exemplary, I quite easily read Dante's approximate contemporaries, Ariosto, Tasso (a lovely poet) or even older poets such as the charming lady La Compiuta Donzella. With Dante in the Italian I must have a crib (I use Durling's edition, as above), though I can read it straight from the Italian after I have been through it with English across the page. However, it would be more correct to say that Dante's language is difficult than that his Italian is. The other poets are writing primarily about chivalry, war, and love (Dante, elsewhere, most definitely writes above love--far too much, Beatrice will comment in Heaven). In The Comedy, Dante presents his reader with very knotty thoughts and very unexpected images, out on the far frontiers of language. At one point in the Inferno, among the thieves, he presents souls being eaten by serpents, in effect excreted as serpents, then returning to their own form to be again eaten by serpents. (Hackers beware! God's identity theft is more comprehensive than yours.) The image is exceedingly dense. I have great respect for translators such as Ciardi or Durling who can grasp it in Italian and then present it in English. With all respect for Love, this is just more complex. You really do not quite read Dante unless you read the Italian, but to read the The Comedy in Italian without aid is, undeniably, a test.

Ciardi, a noted poet and educator in the post-World War II era --and an Italian American -- remains after many years the most accessible Dante translator to the modern American ear. Of the generation of great American writers who reshaped our language, he was a lively fully engaged fellow and not prisoner of any ivory tower, despite his peerless credentials. Line by line, stanza by stanza, it shows. The Comedy requires many talents and understanding life and people is not the least of them.

"Dante was a drummer," Ciardi aptly notes in his introduction, and Ciardi's meter and rhyme scheme give a good English facsimile of Dante's incessant, intoxicating drum beat -- his famous 11 beat terza rima. You simply cannot do it in English, where most words end in hard consonants, not open vowels as in Italian. Yeah some people have tried -- always a noble aim -- but unless you're Superman don't climb Everest without oxygen. Purism will never get most of us through a first reading of this poem or for that matter through a few readings after. Music is what you need and Ciardi expertly lays it down.

About the poem? I've read it 7 times through, in different translations (Ciardi thrice) over 40 years and am just getting started. I do Ciardi between the others because I love my good modern Yankee language, soon drown without it. Ciardi really understands it -- from the jive of the street punk to the most austere scholar or saint -- its all here -- Dante's whole world talking to you like everybody you ever met.

Think about this: Dante wrote this book around 1320, and it still sells and thrills readers today. In an age as temporal as ours, when ideas and fashions seem to come and go as fast as the dot.com craze, his writing will be around as long as intelligent people gain pleasure from reading.

The author's vision of the three stages of the afterlife is so beautifully realized; I actually felt waves of primal fear during several of the Inferno Cantos. In these medieval pages, the tortures of the damned seemed viscerally real, and soul chilling in their horror. As I read, I could almost feel myself becoming lighter as Dante and Virgil made their way up.

For my money, Ciardi's translation is the best. His style is both poetic and dramatic, and while he strives to make the text accessible to a modern reader, he does not make the mistake of cheapening the genius of Dante by making a "modern" translation. Ciardi lets the full weight of the medieval mind come through in the language and the result is vivid and extremely visual.

I really benefited from Ciardi's notes as well, which begin each Canto with a brief synopsis of what is happening, and then after each Canto a more detailed explanation of the various levels, themes, and points of interest. And, of course, all the various characters and personalities that Dante encounters in his journey toward and into Heaven are explained (if the reader does not have an extremely solid grasp of Medieval European politics (and how many of us do?), his notes are invaluable.

Of course you should read this book, and I highly recommend this translation. --Mykal Banta

This is, simply, the best translation of the greatest piece of literature ever written. Not even the works of Shakespeare can surpass Dante's towering epic and its multi-layered, symphonic grandeur. Ciardi's translation, as one other reviewer here has already stated, almost sounds Italian. It is fluid, accessible, and beautiful and doesn't attempt to painstakingly preserve Dante's terza rima, a rhyme scheme that is beyond the scope of the English language (in Italian, everything seems to rhyme with everything else). This work moved me unlike any other--Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is told with shocking genius and flawless detail. Every word is golden, every line contains a whole universe beneath its simple facade. The love, the effort, the genius, and the authenticity that went into this gloriously panoramic poem are without rival--nothing can compete with The Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy" was written in Toscan by the Florentinian Dante Aligheri 700 years ago and is one of the most important texts ever written. Dante Aligheri is, along with Miguel de Cervantes, Willian Shakespeare and the Portuguese Luis de Camões, one of the most important writers of History, but we have to remember that Dante Alligheri was born some 250 years before each one of the latter.

"The Divine Comedy" was first published in the beginning of the 14th century and narrates a vision Dante Alligheri had of his visit to Hell (Dante's Inferno), the Purgatory and to the Heavens (Paradiso), where he is guided by the Latin poet Virgil and later on by his muse, Beatrice, deceased some years before. His narrative is full of devout catholic sentiments and he spares no expenses in narrating the torments perpetrated in Hell, described in details, where each ring or level is reserved for each different earthly infraction that the penitent has commited when alive. The company of Virgil, a permanent resident of the first hell ring, the Limbo, is a magistral coup by Dante Aligheri and adds lustre to the text.

Virgil leads Dante too through the Purgatory, where, contrary with what happens in the Inferno where there is no salvation, the souls are suffering with a view to a future life in Heaven. Dante is the first and only human being that put his feet into this after life regions, and things get increasingly intense and sometimes dangerous to him. Also to be noted is the disposition of Dante to here and there sting his earthly political opponents, which were not few, banning them to hellish confines.

The final visit to the supreme heavenly region, where he meets Beatrice, is suffused with catholic symbology, fully explained by Dante, who embroiders the descriptions with all the richness of his language. You end the book asking for more, and sensing intensively the powerful richness of Dante's vocabulary. I hope you enjoy the Divine COmedy as much as I did. Good reading.

While I have a number of translations of Dante's "Divine Comedy," I wanted a newer one which would be easier to read in more or less modern English. This one suited my needs now.

Ciardi is a poet rather than a Dante scholar, and his translation reflects that approach, but I found it very useful, especially with the extensive introductions and notes he provides. I would recommend this work to anyone who is new to Dante's contribution to Western literature.

I did an essay on this in first-year university, and when I picked up a random translation at the library, I dreaded having to read something so thick. I was afraid of having to read some clunky translation with prose that would be difficult to understand, but I was pleasantly surprised when I began reading, I just couldn't put it down.

Ciardi did an amazing job with this translation: Dante's work flows so smoothly and beautifully on the page. I doubt you can find a translation that is so easy to read while maintaining a style and language that is true to what the original author wanted to convey.

While it is true that 'Inferno' is the most interesting book of the three, it is not complete if you only read one; reading the whole work leads to a better understanding of his message regarding spirituality. It evokes such images and allegories that are vivid, imaginative and moves the reader. As biased as "The Divine Comedy" is (and it is; you'll understand this better when you read the work, or Ciardi's helpful footnotes), this is nothing short of true literary art.

I highly recommend this work, and this specific translation especially. Even if you don't follow the faith, the beauty of the poetry is not to be missed.

. . .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,The and
bang BANG: A Novel ISBN 9781601640005