The Divine Comedy Part 3: Paradise (Penguin Classics) (v. 3) [Mass Market Paperback]

Dante Alighieri (Author), Dorothy L. Sayers (Translator), Barbara Reynolds (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1995

In "Paradise", having plunged to the uttermost depths of Hell and climbed the Mount of Purgatory, Dante ascends to Heaven, continuing his soul's search for God, guided by his beloved Beatrice. As he progresses through the spheres of Paradise he grows in understanding, until he finally experiences divine love in the radiant presence of the deity. Examining eternal questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, Dante exercised all his learning and wit, wrath and tenderness in his creation of one of the greatest of all Christian allegories.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Italian (translation)

About the Author

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and belonged to a noble but impoverished family. He was married when he was around twenty to Gemma Donati and had four children. He met Beatrice, who was to be his muse, in 1274, and when she died in 1290 he sought distraction in philosophy and theology, and wrote La Vita Nuova. He worked on the Divine Comedy from 1308 until near the time of his death in Ravenna in 1321. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote novels, poetry, and translated Dante for the Penguin Classics. She died in 1957. Barbara Reynolds was Lecturer in Italian at Cambridge University and subsequently Reader in Italian Studies at Nottingham, and Honorary Reader at Warwick. She has written books, both on Italian authors and on Dorothy L. Sayers.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140441050
• ISBN-13: 978-0140441055
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 4.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #124,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence. His family, of minor nobility, was not wealthy nor especially distinguished; his mother died when he was a child, his father before 1283. At about the age of 20 he married Gemma Donati, by whom he had three children. Little is known of Dante's formal education-it is likely to have included study with the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Franciscans in Florence, and at the university in Bologna. In 1295 he entered Florentine politics and in the summer of 1300 he became one of the six governing Priors of Florence. In 1301, the political situation forced Dante and his party into exile. For the rest of his life he wandered through Italy, perhaps studied at Paris, while depending for refuge on the generosity of various nobles. He continued to write and at some point late in life he took asylum in Ravenna where he completed the Divine Commedia and died, much honoured, in 1321.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Medieval vision of the afterlife, April 30, 2007

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Michael A Neulander "Political Philosophy" (VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Divine Comedy Part 3: Paradise (Penguin Classics) (v. 3) (Mass Market Paperback)

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
"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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars DANTE THROUGH DOROTHY: IT DOESN'T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS, August 10, 2006

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C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer" (among us humans) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Divine Comedy Part 3: Paradise (Penguin Classics) (v. 3) (Mass Market Paperback)

please read the life and works of Dorothy L. SAyers to appreciate fully the effort she made here, her final writing, posthumously completed (no, not with any seance, which she adequately lambasted in her detective stories).

Her total translation of the Commedia is worth the price of admission (Do not abandon all hope, as she will bring you home to the beatific vision).

There are several translations of varying usefulness and grace, but Dorothy is the rock upon which to stand when comparing the rest.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Kindle version is inferior., November 23, 2011

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N. Vonnahme (Fairbanks, Alaska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Divine Comedy & Paradise: Paradise v. 3 (Kindle Edition)

Dante deserves 5 stars and the translators 4, but the current Kindle edition deserves 1. It seems to have been sloppily OCRed with little editorial attention. Problems include,

1. Ugly formatting (compared to the paper book). The verse numbers intrude into the text, the useful page headings are gone (except where they've been accidentally and intrusively included), and the indentation is inconsistent. On most devices it is hard to get lines to not wrap, but in the paper book this is handled well.

2. Typos/errors. Especially in the italicized comments at the beginning of each chapter. Clumsy, no attention to detail.

3. No table of contents and no good way to navigate between text, notes, and glossary. There should be *more* hyperlinking opportunities in the electronic text. But instead it's clumsier to use than the actual book, which responds well to thumb and finger. Also on the Kindle Touch anyway it's impossible to look up a phrase, for example to google "mosaic of Justinian at San Vitale" which was mentioned in the notes.

I can't believe I paid $9.59 for such a barbarically edited book. Where are your standards, Penguin? It's distracting and disappointing.