Robert and Jean Hollander’s verse translation with facing-page Italian offers the dual virtues of maximum fidelity to Dante’s text with the feeling necessary to give the English reader a sense of the work’s poetic greatness in Italian. And since Robert Hollander’s achievements as a Dante scholar are unsurpassed in the English-speaking world, the commentaries that accompany each canto offer superb guidance in comprehension and interpretation. This translation is also the text of the Princeton Dante Project Web site, an ambitious online project that offers a multimedia version of the Divine Comedy and links to other Dante Web sites. On every count, then, this edition of Paradiso is likely to be a touchstone for generations to come, and it completes one of the great projects of literary translation and scholarship of our time.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Inferno
“The Hollanders’ translation . . . seems the most accessible and the closest to the Italian. . . . The provision of informative notes . . . is impeccable . . . with ample commentary easily and unobtrusively available at the end of each canto.” —Tim Parks, The New Yorker
“The Hollanders’ translation is probably the most finely accomplished and may well prove the most enduring.” —R.W.B. Lewis, Los Angeles Times
“A distinguished act of poetry and scholarship in one and the same breath, the Hollander Dante, among the strong translations of the poet, deserves its own honored place.”
—Robert Fagles
“The new version of Dante’s Inferno, by an internationally famous Dante scholar and his wife, the poet Jean Hollander, is accompanied by a detailed, brilliant commentary that is itself worth the price of the volume. For the student of Dante this book is not only an indispensable guide, it is also an intellectual feast.” —Bernard Knox, New York Review of Books
“The Hollanders act as latter-day Virgils, guiding us through the Italian text that is printed on the facing page. Their English . . . helps us come to terms with a foreign poem that is perhaps the most magnificent ever written.” —The Economist
“The Hollanders’ translation . . . seems the most accessible and the closest to the Italian. . . . The provision of informative notes . . . is impeccable . . . with ample commentary easily and unobtrusively available at the end of each canto.” —Tim Parks, The New Yorker
“The Hollanders’ translation is probably the most finely accomplished and may well prove the most enduring.” —R.W.B. Lewis, Los Angeles Times
“A distinguished act of poetry and scholarship in one and the same breath, the Hollander Dante, among the strong translations of the poet, deserves its own honored place.”
—Robert Fagles
“The new version of Dante’s Inferno, by an internationally famous Dante scholar and his wife, the poet Jean Hollander, is accompanied by a detailed, brilliant commentary that is itself worth the price of the volume. For the student of Dante this book is not only an indispensable guide, it is also an intellectual feast.” —Bernard Knox, New York Review of Books
“The Hollanders act as latter-day Virgils, guiding us through the Italian text that is printed on the facing page. Their English . . . helps us come to terms with a foreign poem that is perhaps the most magnificent ever written.” —The Economist
About the Author
ROBERT HOLLANDER (Princeton ’55) taught Dante's Divine Comedy to Princeton undergraduates for thirty years and is the author of some twenty-two books and seventy-five articles on Dante, Boccaccio, and other Italian authors. He recently retired from Princeton, where he was the chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature. He has received many awards, including the gold medal of the city of Florence in recognition of his work on Dante. JEAN HOLLANDER, his wife, is a poet, teacher, and director of the Writer's Conference at the College of New Jersey.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hollander's Version,
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This review is from: Paradiso (Hardcover)
I know there are countless versions of Dante's epic, however, Hollander does the best job in not only translation, but also in immersing the reader into Dante's world.
Hollander gives the reader the original Italian novel on one side, with a well developed English translation on the right. Hollander also has a passionate and thorough introduction with helpful notes all over the text. Hollander's version is also the best version I've come across, since it not only has the original Italian printed right next to it, and not only do the notes help the reader follow the story, but he also sets the type so that it mirror's Dante's. Now I know that this edition might be a bit pricey, but if you can afford it, buy it. I own four versions of Dante's Devine Comedy and I can't tell you how I wish I would have had someone point me to Hollanders translation in the beginning. I've also asked other professors who are in the field of English Literature and Italian and they all seem to agree that Hollander is the best so far.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
italian dante, english dante, academic dante, in beautiful print,
By drollere (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paradiso (Hardcover)
the third installment of the hollander/hollander translation of dante was published last fall (2008), and it represents the single edition of this great poem to have in english.
for decades i have been a dante enthusiast who felt inconvenienced by the choice between the bilingual but unaligned sinclair or singleton prose editions on one hand and the many ambitious and admirable but not entirely trustworthy english poetic editions on the other. i have never felt satisfied with either solution and wearied of trying to match prose to verse or wondering which brilliancies in the english verses were also in the italian. the hollanders' edition resolves every complaint. the english and italian march side by side and a glance from one to the other can answer any doubts about the english or any difficulty with the italian. the poem can be read straight through, or consulted with the notes for a deeper understanding. the "critical apparatus" -- in the form of outlines (really cribs) and endnotes to each canto, a name index, a character/topic index and bibliography in each of the three volumes -- is thoughtful, ample and up to date, providing both an anatomization of the poetic content and connections and a thorough introduction to academic opinion and exegesis. (i should mention that the printed version is complementary to the princeton dante project web site, where maps, images, audio recordings in both english and italian and a searchable library of dante's works are available.) some reservations about the accuracy of the translation have been expressed in other reviews, but my judgment is that this is a superior text by the standards of any bilingual edition of any text available in comparative literature. the translation is not rigorous verse but more accurately broken prose, apparently with an ear to singleton's important 20th century edition. within the decision to keep the translation as compact as practicable by striving for word for word equivalences, points where the word choices seem awkward are often informed by an interpretive subtext, or simple english sense, that a literal translation would obscure. english cannot easily imitate both the languorous vowel music and alternately compacted, looping or crystalline italian syntax, much less the twists of late medieval idiom and turns of allusion and symbol, but in my judgment the translation provides a praiseworthy level of fidelity. where it fails, it fails clearly. finally, in the hardbound editions at least, these are splendidly sturdy, handsome volumes; the printing is crisp, the paper is warm and substantial, the binding and boards are rock solid; the layout is airy, with plenty of room for notes and mark ups. this is a study edition better than any i have seen, a high minded publisher investment in a three volume set that is unlikely to become a bestseller, but is a book the translators and editors can see as a high point of their careers. a must have for every literate and scholarly home library.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent work,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Paradiso (Hardcover)
Paradiso (Hardcover)
~ Robert Hollander (Author), Jean Hollander The Hollander translation and commentary are quite scholarly and absorbing. To think I got the hardcover for the cost of a paperback is a plus!
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