Customer Reviews

The Divine Comedy: Volume 3: Paradiso (Penguin Classics) (v. 3)

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Kirkpatrick (referred to as K. here) is an incredible tour de force in this translation to the Paradiso. Amazon allows you to preview the translation, and if that passes your muster, you will be richly rewarded by a treasure of knowledge on Dante and the Paradiso. K. tends to be a literalist concerning the meter, thus this meter always sounds like the original. That of course sometimes makes you blink, but then the original Paradiso would do the same; the difference here is that K. is helping you along with notes and comments to explain it along. I personally found two readings of the book valuable; the first with K.'s notes and the second without.

If you'd like a looser translation, Hollander & Hollander's translation fills that bill, but I'd still get this version if just for K's insight.

"The Paradiso," Kirkpatrick notes in his introduction to it, "represents our existence as it would be if we fully acknowledged the influence love exerts on us. Of course, free will and desire can make us go disastrously astray. The Inferno offers tragic evidence of this. In the Purgatorio, however, Dante begins to express his charcteristically confident understanding of human nature. Sin is not an ineradicable disease. It is simply a misconception or perversion of love." If that does not invite the yet-alive reader on, what will?

If Durling is read first for his translation and the Hollanders referred to especially for detailed notes and commentary, Kirkpatrick may be turned to for the brilliance of his orientation to each part of Dante's Comedy. Further enriching Kirkpatrick's approach is his commitment to study Dante not only as a past master of literature and critc of his world, but to do so in conversation with those for whom "the issues that for Dante were always alive continue to live and produce their own exhilirating results" today, as noted in his acknowledgements.