Customer Reviews

Inferno (Bantam Classics)

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I was very pleased with this edition of Inferno, Dante's controversial verse of man's sins. First, the translation was smooth and stayed true to the essence of the story, even though any translation can lose some of the quality of the words. However, there are also facing pages of the original Italian as well. With a short summary of each Canto and a few powerful pencil sketches scattered here and there, this is a very well put together edition. The notes are in the back of the book, which I prefer, so as they don't detract from the story while reading it. There's also a map of Hell and of the Universe according to Dante. Altogether, this is a very informative edition and one of my favorites.

Dante Alighieri's three part epic The Divine Comedy ranks highly among the literature of the world. Written in early Italian and rhymed in terza rima, it's 100 cantos display impressive allegory and use of scholastic philosophy. In INFERNO, the first volume, the narrator finds himself "half of our life's way" (around 35 years old) and lost in a forest at night. When day breaks, three savage animals bar his escape. The Roman poet Virgil (best known for his AENEID) appears and tells him that Heaven has sent him to lead Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and finally Heaven to bring him out of his spiritual malaise.

Dante's Hell differs from the traditional view of everyone together amongst flames. Here the dead receive different punishments based on their sins. Thus, the lustful are caught up eternally in a whirlwind, and astrologers and magicians have their heads reversed (so those who tried to fortell the future can only see their past). Nowhere, however, does anything seem wrong. The dead are placed into Hell not by an unjust God, but by their own decisions and actions. INFERNO is a slow beginning, most of the grace and beauty of the Comedy lies in the subsequent volumes, PURGATORIO and PARADISO. However, this first volume has a solid role in the allegorical significance of the Comedy. Dante wrote not just a simple story of quasi-science fiction, but a moving allegory of the soul moving from perdition to salvation, the act which the poet T.S. Eliot called "Mounting the saint's stair". While INFERNO may occasionally lack excitement on the first reading, the next two volumes thrill and upon reading them one can enjoy INFERNO to the fullest.

I believe that the best translation of INFERNO to get is that of Allen Mandelbaum, which is published by Bantam (ISBN: 0553213393). Mandelbaum's verse translation melds a faithful rendering of the Italian with excellent poetry, and has been praised by numerous scholars of Dante, including Irma Brandeis. Here's an example from Canto XIII, where the poet and Virgil enter a forest where the trees are the souls of suicides:

"No green leaves in that forest, only black;
no branches straight and smooth, but knotted, gnarled;
no fruits were there, but briars bearing poison"

Mandelbaum's translation also contains an interesting introduction by Mandelbaum, extensive notes (which are based on the California Lectura Dantis), and two afterwords. The first of these, "Dante in His Age" is an enlightening biography of Dante and how he came to write the Comedy while in exile. The second "Dante as Ancient and Modern" examines Dante both as a wielder of classical knowledge and as a poet working in a new and distinctly late-Medieval style (the "dolce stil nuovo") which broke poetry out of the grip of Latin and made it something for people of every class.

At the rate I'm going, I'll be in one of those circles of hell eventually, but since I'll be in such good company (all of late 13th century Florence, for starters) I don't think I can complain. In spite of Voltaire's opinion, I believe Dante is still read today, as was in Voltaire's time, because people find something of value in this, his most famous poem. The entire "Commedia" consists of two more books, the "Purgatorio" and the "Paradiso," which I have not read. I'll read them eventually, but, for the time being, I am quite happy with the "Inferno." The Florentine poet grabs Virgil as a guide that will take him out of the dark woods where Dante found himself wandering because he had lost the way of his life, and together they will go in a journey through Hell because the divine Beatrice has commanded that Dante must be led, so his eyes and heart can be opened and he can be saved. If this is true, I hope she is wrong, because I would like to talk to Dante, and if he goes to Paradise I would have no chance at all.

The "Inferno" is one of the most important poems ever written. Doomed lovers, murderers, traitors, liars, Dante's political enemies (including a Pope), righteous heathens, all of them have Hell as their final address. Dante talks to many of them, and they tell him their stories. I loved this poem. I found Odysseus where he belongs (with the liars), and Dido and Cleopatra, together in suicide. Most of all, I found an arrogant, self-centered Florentine poet who truly believed that the world revolved around him and wrote a monument of Western Literature just to prove it: I had to like Dante and his poem. The only reason I give this version four stars is because I do not think it is as good as the verse translation by Laurence Binyon. I have read both by now, and the old Binyon rendition of Florentine Italian into English is simply beautiful, where Mandelbaum's more businesslike version is clear if rather unpoetic. I wish a Binyon's version were available, but his translation of the Commedia seems to be out of print and I am the only person I know that has the "Divine Comedy" translated by Laurence Binyon. Still, I read the Mandelbaum for class and I enjoyed it almost as much as my favorite one. Whichever translation you choose (Ciardi's is in rhyme verse, too, while Musas's is not) I think you will enjoy this dark, wonderful journey that Dante took in 1300. If he is right about his poetic vision of the netherworld, most of us will be there in one circle or another, with medieval Florentines all around us. Enjoy.

Professor Allen Mandelbaum, a lecturer on Italian literature, has given one of the finest and most accurate translations of Dante in the modern era. In the 19th century Longfellow was very accurate (Longfellow's mastery of ancient Italian is quite impeccable) and probably the standard-bearer, and a later notable poetic translation emerged from John Ciardi; in 1982 the mantle passed on to Mandelbaum.

One of Mandelbaum's virtue is his accuracy and excellent reading of the text, as well as his fine ear. Few modern translators of Italian or classical poetry has as good an ear as Mandelbaum: his translation rings consistently true. It is a blank verse ring, no doubt, but it rings nonetheless. He takes few liberties with the text, but there is a quality to his verse. Mandelbaum's Inferno would take the palm over many other modern versions.

Another virtue of this special Bantam edition is Barry Moser's ink/pencil drawings. Moser is a renowned illustrator; his drawings are consistently appropriate and distinguished. The notes are excellent too: not too long but very informative and adequate for the lay reader, up-to-date for its time (and probably still is), written in exemplary, scholarly but unpedantic prose. Italian scholar Gabriel Maruzzo teamed with Mandelbaum for it. Besides the introduction Mandelbaum provides two additional long illuminating essays: "Dante in His Age" and "Dante as Ancient and Modern".

Bantam gives us Dante's Italian text on the left and the Mandelbaum translation on the right. The Bantam paper quality is somewhat cheap and pulpy, but the typography is lovely. Perhaps someone might give us a durable hardback edition of this Bantam Classic someday? Everything else is exemplary. Bravo!

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.

Many writers have imagined what the underworld is like, from ancient times to our own - but no one has ever matched Dante's nightmare, written as a warning to a Renaissance Florence that would face the Great Plague only a generation later.

We begin as Dante is met by the ancient poet Virgil, his guide on this first leg of a tour of the afterlife (Purgatorio and Paradiso follow - Inferno, regarding sin, despair, and a little gossip of Dante's time, is of course the most powerful and popular of the trilogy). He meets the righteous heathens who were not exposed to Christianity but may have hope of heaven eventually, and further on those guilty of relatively minor sins like adultery and gluttony. But soon enough they reach that famous gate after which all hope is to be abandoned. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

This is a fascinating document of the ethics of the time, and it's interesting to compare Dante's morality to our own in the 21st century. For Dante premeditated intent is everything, which means that a hotheaded murderer is on a higher level of hell than, for instance, a deliberate flatterer - something I think it's safe to say most of us would violently disagree with. It's also quite interesting to watch Dante himself change, as he moves from compassion (he actually meets some departed friends, especially in the less tortuous upper levels) to occasional viciousness (as he not surprisingly meets departed enemies, especially in the unspeakable lower levels).

This is also a horror story of the first rate. If you doubt this a reading of, for instance, Ugolino's account of his starvation with his sons and grandsons near the end should change your mind in a hurry - and there are many other examples. Aside from Virgil's presence there is very little relief as the punishments become more and more horrific.

If you have a glimmer of fear for your immortal soul and a good imagination, this is potentially nightmare inducing stuff that's likely to keep you good for quite some time to come.

I paid an absolute fortune for this edition while studying in Perugia, Italy (apparently the dollar isn't doing so well these days, hence the price), but I would say it was worth it. My first time reading Dante (recreationally, to boot!), I was entraced by the beautiful language of the translation. In his story, Dante makes several obscure references to unknown historical figures of his age. This edition features the Italian text on the left side of the page, and english on the other. This was great to help me improve my Italian, or if I wasn't sure of the meaning of a word, I was able to work out another translation. The notes at the end of the book served to inform without dumbing it down. Don't be confused--these are not cliffnotes at the end, simply clarifications. As a Dante novice, I fell in love with this edition and quickly recommended it to all my friends. In fact, after I finished, I ran back to the Italian bookstore to purchase Purgatorio and Paradiso, each equally as expensive as Inferno. As far as the story goes, it is very highly praised. It is completely beautiful, and truly helps you grasp more Italian context, as well as to catch the many literary and pop culture references to Dante that exist today. It's just so amazing, it is quickly understandable why it is so unbelieveably popular.

I've read THE DIVINE COMEDY in the original Italian and I highly recommend poet and scholar Allen Mandelbaum's acclaimed (facing page) translation (in 3 inexpensive mass-market paperbacks from Bantam: INFERNO: 0553213393 / Purgatorio (Bantam Classics): 055321344X / Paradiso (Bantam Classics): 0553212044). Originally published in hardcover by the University of California Press, these free-verse English works carry the melancholic tone and the humanity of the original more faithfully than several other translations I've read. The maps/charts/notes for these mass market paperbacks are excellent (if relatively brief) and will likely satisfy the reader with a general interest in World Literature.

There is no end of commentary out there, extending back to Dante's own time (700 years worth!). Many Italian Studies professors lament that Dante's most famous work gets duller with each volume. I disagree, in part. Though the INFERNO is undoubtedly the most dramatic, I believe that the PURGATORY is the most satisfying, because it is so recognizably human. The PARADISE is not my favorite as I've never been enthusiastic about theology, though the PARADISE (and THE DIVINE COMEDY in toto) may be best appreciated as a microcosm of medieval European thought. One must also appreciate the difficult conditions under which this masterpiece was composed -- in exile -- no doubt a much more trying experience in early 14th century "Italy" than in our time. You don't have to agree with Dante to admire him and his art. The man suffered, and you can feel it. I believe the intensity of feeling in the poem is, in part, what distinguishes it from many other well-known epic poems which demonstrate more artifice than humanity.

N.B.: Mandelbaum's complete translation of THE DIVINE COMEDY is also available in a single-volume, portable cloth-hardcover edition, though the single-volume is in English with no facing-page original Italian (and with notes by Peter Armour): Everyman's Library, ISBN 0679433139. The Divine Comedy: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso (Everyman's Library)
If you find you love Mandelbaum's translation and Barry Moser's haunting ink-wash illustrations, you can search for the original (bilingual) editions from the Univ. of CA Press.

If you're looking for a different translation of The Divine Comedy, many scholars agree that the following free-verse English-language versions are currently the pick of the crop (and also more expensive than the Mandelbaum/Bantam Classics):

Robert Durling's INFERNO and PURGATORIO translations with excellent, brief notes (and beautiful maps and cover illustrations) -- Oxford Univ. Press. Durling is currently working on his translation of the PARADISO;

Charles S. Singleton's scholarly translation/notes for the Inferno/Purgatory/Paradise are expensive (though you might find inexpensive used copies), and probably best appreciated by Dante aficionados -- Princeton Univ. Press;

At this time I have not yet read the recent translations by the Hollanders, which are said to be fantastic. I believe much of the praise is for the accompanying notes which condense Hollander's voluminous knowledge. I've read some of the notes and they are very impressive. Robert Hollander is another esteemed Dante scholar.

Dedicated students of Dante will want to check out Princeton's online Dante database (the Princeton Dante Project [PDP] and Dartmouth College's online Dante database, the Dartmouth Dante Project [DDP], both directed by Robert Hollander.

If you're looking for an attempt at capturing the rhyme of the original Italian (terza rima), a Norton Critical Edition of Michael Palma's rhyming translation of the Inferno (Norton Critical Editions) (edited by Giuseppe Mazzotta) is available (ISBN-10: 039397796X ; ISBN-13: 9780393977967). The NCE is loaded with great supplementary material (annotation, backgrounds, criticism, etc.).

Other attempts at capturing the Dante's rhyme scheme: Longfellow (edited by the Bondanellas of Indiana Univ.), Dorothy Sayers or Laurence Binyon (L.B.'s is out-of-print but available through used booksellers).

John A. Scott's UNDERSTANDING DANTE (The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante Studies) may be the best and most comprehensive one-volume guide in English to Dante Alighieri and his work. I've read much on Dante and found it fascinating and highly informative--but more significantly, it's been highly praised by a number of notables in the field. ISBN-10: 0268044511.

To those who care about the difference this translation is put into rhyming verse. It doesn't say that on the book or in the product description, but I myself ended up getting a different copy. To me at least it takes away from the severity of the images presented. The book itself though is well put together and the perfect kind of book for students to read. It has pictures and the original Italian text, but if one is looking for something a little more explanatory to all the hidden meanings in Dante's words I'd recommend Mike Musa's translation.

Having read three different translations of Dante's Divine Comedy, Mandelbaum's is far superior. I like that the original is printed on the left pages, and the english translation is printed on the right; It makes it easier to cross reference and compare if needed. Great read, but focusing more on the physical presentation, this edition is the best one out there.