Originally released on 3 CDs in abridged form. Now available on 4 CDs unabridged. "I have been in the Heaven that takes up most of his light, and saw things there that those who descend from that height cannot speak of or forget..." Led by his guide Beatrice, Dante leaves the Earth behind and soars through the heavenly spheres of Paradise. In this third and final part of The Divine Comedy, he encounters the just rulers and holy saints of the Church. The horrors of Inferno and the trials of Purgatory are left far behind. Ultimately, in Paradise, Dante is granted a vision of God's Heavenly court - the angels, the Blessed Virgin and God Himself. With music of the period.
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The Divine Comedy is a complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion," wrote T.S. Eliot."The last canto of the Paradiso is to my thinking the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach."
The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world literature, and its climactic section, the Paradiso, is perhaps the most ambitious poetic attempt ever made to represent the merging of individual destiny with universal order.Having passed through Hell and Purgatory, Dante is led by his beloved Beatrice to the upper sphere of Paradise, wherein lie the sublime truths of Divine will and eternal salvation, to at last experience a rapturous vision of God.
"A spectacular achievement," said poet and critic Archibald MacLeish of John Ciardi's version of Dante's masterpiece."A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world literature, and its climactic section, the Paradiso, is perhaps the most ambitious poetic attempt ever made to represent the merging of individual destiny with universal order.Having passed through Hell and Purgatory, Dante is led by his beloved Beatrice to the upper sphere of Paradise, wherein lie the sublime truths of Divine will and eternal salvation, to at last experience a rapturous vision of God.
"A spectacular achievement," said poet and critic Archibald MacLeish of John Ciardi's version of Dante's masterpiece."A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College. He is the author of Peppers, a book of poetry, and his translations include Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, along with Dante’s Inferno and Purgatory, published by the Modern Library.
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1256. He entered public life in 1295, later becoming one of the six governing magistrates of Florence. He repeatedly opposed the machinations of Pope Boniface VIII, who was attempting to place all of Tuscany under Papal rule, and in 1301 was banished from Florence. Dante would never again enter his native city, spending his remaining years with a series of patrons in various Italian courts. He completed The Divine Comedy shortly before his death in 1321. Gustave Doré (1832-83) was one of the most popular and prolific French illustrators of the mid 19th century. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1256. He entered public life in 1295, later becoming one of the six governing magistrates of Florence. He repeatedly opposed the machinations of Pope Boniface VIII, who was attempting to place all of Tuscany under Papal rule, and in 1301 was banished from Florence. Dante would never again enter his native city, spending his remaining years with a series of patrons in various Italian courts. He completed The Divine Comedy shortly before his death in 1321. Gustave Doré (1832-83) was one of the most popular and prolific French illustrators of the mid 19th century. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great translation,
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This review is from: Paradise [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)
I haven't read Esolen's Inferno, but his translation of Purgatory was superb--not just the translation itself but the notes, which I'm fairly certain Esolen wrote. After translating the Inferno, the Purgatory, and then the Paradise, Esolen was stimulated to write a magnificent interpretative introduction to the Paradise which is one of the best pieces I've ever read on Dante.Esolen's Introduction to the Paradise ranks with Erich Auerbach's essays on Dante in Mimesis and Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, and I prefer it to T. S. Eliot's famous essay on Dante; it is a classic. Esolen's introduction to the Paradise in this edition is alone worth the price of the book, and I would characterise it as a must-read for anyone interested in Dante and his Comedy. As with the previous volumes of the Comedy, in the Paradise Esolen again proves himself to be a sensitive and judicious translator, and the notes are again excellent.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Medieval vision of the afterlife,
This review is from: Paradise [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)
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.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Epic storytelling in poetry,
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This review is from: Paradise (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)
If you want epic storytelling and great poetry - this is the real thing! And the Anthony Esolen translation is the best by far. Highly recommended! Paradise (Modern Library Classics)
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Canto Twenty, Canto Thirty, Ovid Met, Primum Mobile, Santa Chiesa, Spirito Santo, Canto Ten, Canto Eight, Canto Twelve, Canto Sixteen, Canto Eleven, Canto Four, Saint John, Canto Two, Canto Five, Canto Three, Holy Spirit, Canto Nineteen, Canto Thirteen, Saint Francis, Holy Ghost, Canto One, Canto Seventeen, Saint Peter, Holy Church Browse Sample Pages:
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Canto Twenty, Canto Thirty, Ovid Met, Primum Mobile, Santa Chiesa, Spirito Santo, Canto Ten, Canto Eight, Canto Twelve, Canto Sixteen, Canto Eleven, Canto Four, Saint John, Canto Two, Canto Five, Canto Three, Holy Spirit, Canto Nineteen, Canto Thirteen, Saint Francis, Holy Ghost, Canto One, Canto Seventeen, Saint Peter, Holy Church Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
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