Dante Alighieri

"The Purgatorio, the middle section of Dante's great poem about losing, and subsequently finding, one's way in the middle of one's life is, unsurprisingly, the beating heart of the Divine Comedy, as this powerful and lucid new translation by the poet D. M. Black makes wonderfully clear. After days spent plumbing the depths of hell, the pilgrim staggers back to the clear light of day in a state of shock, the sense of pervasive dread and deep bewilderment...

This first volume of this new Divine Comedy presents the Italian text of the Inferno and, on facing pages, a new prose translation (the first in twenty-five years). The editor's translation brings a new power and accuracy to the rendering of Dante's extraordinary vision of Hell, with all its terror, pathos, and sardonic humor, and its penetrating analyses of the psychology of sin and the ills that plague society. The introduction and notes are designed...

"'The Divine Comedy' begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity. Allen Mandelbaum's astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece that genius whom...