Divine Comedy, Cary's Translation, Hell [Kindle Edition]

Dante Alighieri (Author)

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Product Description

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 166 KB
• Publisher: Public Domain Books (August 7, 2004)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000JMKW9S
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,123 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #48 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Poetry

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars No formatting, December 21, 2009

By 

Anne Mason (California) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Divine Comedy, Cary's Translation, Hell (Kindle Edition)

There's no line breaks in this work, which is essential to reading the poetry. You don't know where one line ends and the next line begins.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unreadable due to lack of formatting, March 17, 2011

By 

David A. Lessnau (USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Divine Comedy, Cary's Translation, Hell (Kindle Edition)

As another reviewer here said, there's no formatting in this Kindle edition. This is supposed to be poetry. Each line is supposed to be on its own line. Instead, it's all run together into a big blob. I read Dante's "Divine Comedy" way back in high school and wanted to read it again. But, that's not going to happen with this version. It's absolutely unreadable and worthless. Solely because of the formatting, I have to rate this version at an unreadable 1 star out of 5. I'll keep looking for a readable version (even the Project Gutenberg versions don't work).

4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Medieval vision of the afterlife, August 10, 2010

By 

Michael A Neulander "Political Philosophy" (VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Divine Comedy, Cary's Translation, Hell (Paperback)

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history. Norton edition has great articles to help explain the work and is a great translation. The other great translation is by Mark Musa. "The Divine Comedy" describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and another of his works, "La Vita Nuova." While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin or Greek (the languages of Church and antiquity). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be comedic in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, the progression of Dante's pilgrim from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: Each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternate meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem (see the "Letter to Can Grande della Scala"), he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory (the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical). The structure of the poem, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of "L'Inferno", allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" added later in the 16th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were of everyday or vulgar subjects, while High poems were for more serious matters. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of man, in the low and vulgar Italian language and not the Latin language as one might expect for such a serious topic.

Paradiso
After an initial ascension (Canto I), Beatrice guides Dante through the nine spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, similar to Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see. Thus, the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's own personal vision, ambiguous in its true construction. The addition of a moral dimension means that a soul that has reached Paradise stops at the level applicable to it. Souls are allotted to the point of heaven that fits with their human ability to love God. Thus, there is a heavenly hierarchy. All parts of heaven are accessible to the heavenly soul. That is to say all experience God but there is a hierarchy in the sense that some souls are more spiritually developed than others. This is not determined by time or learning as such but by their proximity to God (how much they allow themselves to experience him above other things). It must be remembered in Dante's schema that all souls in Heaven are on some level always in contact with God.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.