The Divine Comedy (Norton Translation) [NOOK Book]

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Overview

Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise -- the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation.

Now, for the first time, John Ciardi's brilliant and authoritative translations of Dante's three soaring canticles -- The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso -- have been gathered together in a single volume. Crystallizing the power and beauty inherent in the great poet's immortal conception of the aspiring soul, The Divine Comedy...

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Overview

Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise -- the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation.

Now, for the first time, John Ciardi's brilliant and authoritative translations of Dante's three soaring canticles -- The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso -- have been gathered together in a single volume. Crystallizing the power and beauty inherent in the great poet's immortal conception of the aspiring soul, The Divine Comedy is a dazzling work of sublime truth and mystical intensity.

This title contains The Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.

Editorial Reviews

Charles Martin
The best I have ever come across.
Harper's Monthly
As a crown to his literary life, Longfellow combines his exquisite scholarship and his poetic skill and experience in the translation of one of the great poems of the world.
More Reviews (7) Fewer Reviews
John Ahern
As a translation into triple rhyme I believe that Palma's work will become the translation of choice for most readers.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I find Michael Palma's Inferno to be one that I'm having a hard time improving.
North American Review
Longfellow, in rendering the substance of Dante's poem, has succeeded in giving also -- so far as art and genius could give it -- the spirit of Dante's poetry.
Richard Wilbur
I think highly of Michael Palma's Inferno....Readers will find it admirably clear and readable.
William Dean Howells
Here at last that much suffering reader will find Dante's greatness manifest, and not his greatness only, but his grace, his simplicity, and his affection... Opening the book we stand face to face with the poet, and when his voice ceases we may well marvel if he has not sung to us in his own Tuscan.
— The Nation
X. J. Kennedy
His wonderfully readable translation comes close to perfection. I'm tempted to call it a miracle.
Library Journal
Dante's Divine Comedy remains an invitation and challenge for modern poets and translators how to provide an aid for scholars but also to suggest something of Dante's greatness as a poet. Recent verse translations include those of Allen Mandelbaum (1980), Robert Pinsky (1994), Marc Musa (1995), and Peter Dale (1997), and Robert Durling has created a good prose version (1996). Palma, a poet who has provided English renditions of the poetry of Alfredo De Palchi, Guido Gozzano, and Diego Valeri, among others, takes up the challenge with commendable results. Like Dale, and unlike the rest, he attempts to capture Dante's terza rima, which is a challenge in rhyme-poor English. However, Palma's diction and syntax capture the range and vigor of the Inferno more accurately than that of his colleagues. Palma includes a minimum of notes to identify major figures and explain his reading of selected lines. This edition includes the Italian on the facing page. A superb translation; highly recommended for all libraries. T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, GA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

  • BN ID: 2940000710982
  • Publisher: Neeland Media
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Sales rank: 506,928
  • File size: 513 KB

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from book:
CANTO III The gate of Hell.— Virgil leads Dante in.—The punishment of those who had lived without infamy and without praise. — Acheron, and the sinners on its bank. — Charon. — Earthquake. — Dante swoons. " Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is the way into the eternal woe; through me is the way among the lost people. Justice moved my lofty maker: the divine Power, the supreme Wisdom and the primal Love made me. Before me were no things created, save eternal, and I eternal last. Leave every hope, ye who enter ! " ' These words of obscure color I saw written at the top of a gate; whereat I: " Master, their meaning is dire to me." And he to me, like a person well advised: " Here it behoves to leave every fear; it behoves that all cowardice should here be dead. We have come to the place where I have told thee that thou shalt see the woeful people, who have lost the good of the understanding." 2 i. v. 8. "Creation," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "is the joint act of the whole Trinity." S. T. i. 45. 6. This is indicated in these verses by the enumeration of the attributes ascribed respectively to the three persons of the Trinity, according to the common teaching of the doctors of the Church. Id. i. 39. 8. And when he had put his hand on mine with a cheerful look, wherefrom I took courage, he brought me within to the secret things. Here sighs, laments, and deep wailings were resounding through the starless air; wherefore at first I wept thereat. Strange tongues, horrible utterances, words of woe, accents of anger, voices high and faint, and sounds of hands with them, were making a tumult which whirls always inthat air forever dark, like the sand when the whirlwind breathes. And I, who had my head girt with horror, said: " Master, what is that whic...

Table of Contents

How to Read Dante ix
Translator's Note xix
The Inferno 3
Introduction 5
Cantos 16
The Purgatorio 271
Introduction 273
Cantos 286
The Paradiso 583
Introduction 585
Cantos 596

Interviews & Essays

Conversation with ANTHONY ESOLEN, translator of Dante’s INFERNO
1. What attracted you to Dante’s work?

Dante is arguably the greatest poet who ever lived; I think only Homer and Shakespeare deserve mention in the same breath. It is hard to find a poet whose art is as severe, as precisely chiseled, and as intellectually well-defined as is Dante's, yet at the same time his art possesses a kaleidoscopic complexity that staggers the imagination. Each of these qualities is rare enough. To find them at once in the same author, writing an epic about the ultimate questions, is–well, all I can say is that we will not see his like again.
2. What made you interested in doing translations?

Once, when I was a graduate student attending a party given by a professor of German, I met a young man who said he was studying Georgian, the language spoken by the natives of the Caucasus mountains. "Why on earth would you do that?" I asked, thinking I'd come upon another harmless academic snob. His answer shamed me. "One of the greatest living poets in the world lives in Georgia. He writes epics in Georgian, and I want to translate them into English so that other people can read them." Of all the things that academics do–some good, some bad, many simply vain and useless–I could hardly think of anything of greater value than to devote your talent to so humbling a task. Then, years later, my wife Debra suggested the same thing to me, and that is when I started work on Lucretius.
3. Is Dante difficult to render well in English? What were some of the challenges you faced as a translator, and what are youtrying to achieve with this translation?

Dante is difficult, period. I think, though, that once you get over the issue of rhymes, English is actually a pretty good language into which to translate the Commedia. (I love German, but I do shudder to think of Hell in the Teutonic tongue!) English is a peculiar language, after all: it contains its good stock of short, brusque, German or Middle French words, enriched by an enormous stock of words derived directly from Latin or from the Romance languages. So the vocabulary, with all its subtle semantic and tonal shades, helps a lot, as does that most supple tool, English iambic pentameter.
What was I trying to achieve? I want to make people fall in love with Dante–really fall in love with him, and not just pretend to in order to score points at a literary soiree. For that, you need swift and vigorous but also musical verse. And I'm hoping that that's what I've provided.
4. Why iambic pentameter?
Nothing else will do. Free verse won't do; non-metrical (that is to say, free but not too free) verse won't do, either. Music must somehow be translated into what retains traces of the music. Iambic pentameter is the natural meter of English narrative poetry, imitating most faithfully the rhythms of our speech, and it is capable of extraordinary variation (consider the uses to which Shakespeare put it in his plays). We are fortunate to have it.
5. What kind of research did you do for this translation, and how did you go about doing it?

For the translation, I consulted many Italian editions of Dante, especially those whose notes brought out most clearly the meanings of his coinages or of strange dialectal words. As for the rest of the book, let's just say that for a year I had twenty volumes of Aquinas cluttering up the office.
6. Why has the INFERNO been so influential and admired over the ages and in our own time?

Well, for a while Dante did go out of fashion: too medieval, you know. With the important exceptions of Milton and Blake, he really did not have many admirers among English writers from the Tudors to the end of the eighteenth century. The English Romantics and their Victorian followers rediscovered his greatness–or at least they found the story of Dante and Beatrice to harmonize with their own beautiful, dreamy, half-sickly love of the chivalric past. That was in England; in Italy, Dante has been the poet who defined both language and nationhood. But I think that modern readers are attracted to Dante because they find in him what the modern world cannot offer: a cogent and coherent vision of the universe.
7. Why, in this new translation, did you include the “sourcebook” that presents Dante’s most important religious sources?

I'm a professor by trade and know what sorts of ancillary material I would want, and have wanted, in books I assign the students to read. Also, I think that you miss much of the joy of a work of art when you cannot walk a little way into the world that gave it birth.
8. What do you want readers to take away from this new translation?
A love for Dante, and maybe a clearer view of that great peak of intellectual and artistic achievement: the Middle Ages.
9. What are you working on now?

Don't tell my editor, but I'm taking a break! Actually, I'm going to be writing the introduction and the notes to my translation of Paradiso, while revising the completed translation. Purgatorio is finished and ready to be printed.
10. What other languages do you speak fluently and/or translate?

How fluently I speak it, I'd best let the natives judge, but I do speak German too, and read French, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and some (New Testament, which is the easy stuff) Greek. I've translated Lucretius (De Rerum Natura; Latin) and Torquato Tasso (Gerusalemme Liberata; Italian), and one of these days I'm going to make good on a threat to translate into English verse a passel of Anglo-Saxon poems not named "Beowulf".

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
( 199 )

Rating Distribution

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(88)

4 Star

(40)

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2 Star

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(26)

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 201 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted September 19, 2006

    dante is great, ciardi is not

    i have read a different translation of dante's inferno and found it to be nothing short of amazing. this translation, however, is nothing more than a glorified 'spark notes' translation. much is lost in ciardi's extremely over simplified translation. i would suggest this to a high school freshman who just wants to get though it. to a well-read student of literature, though, this reading is unfulfilling and meaningless.

    8 out of 16 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted February 20, 2011

    I was disappointed

    The book, of course, is a classic but I was very disappointed in the translation and added notes. I find Charles Eliot Norton to be very big on himself. I would recommend (for anyone wanted to read The Divine Comedy) to find a different translation.

    3 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 12, 2009

    EBOOK SCAM

    Do not buy the eBook. It is not the John Ciardi translation.

    3 out of 8 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 14, 2007

    it depends...

    how you like John Ciardi's version depends on whether you want an easier ead or not. he gives you a summary of the canto in the Inferno that i read by him which was very helpful for my first time, but he does leave out some details to make it more simple. if you want the more complex versions that involve a better translation, i would go for a different translater.

    3 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 20, 2006

    The Greatest piece of classic liturature.

    I must say that Dante has gone past the norm of classical lit. He takes you through a world beyond what we can comprehend. He shows us what happens after our life. Written during his own last days he brings a whole new thinking to the after-life by allowing us to visualize what these places are like. I recommend this to everyone. A GREAT PIECE OF LITURATURE!

    2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 15, 2005

    unnecessarily florid...

    I generally find Mandelbaum's translations to be excessively wordy and this work is no exception. It is as if his sole goal is to sound grand. And he succeeds, in this at least, but often the verbosity detracts from the meaning of what the reader is reading... too many pretty words jammed together so tightly that the screen they're supposed to form form winds up opaque. I'd suggest the Longfellow translation for a more pared approach that still manages to maintain Dante's magnificence, or even Ciardi - the people I've spoken to seem to have a love/hate opinion about his work, but I find it alluring.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 11, 2012

    Wonderful, But....

    We are reading this translation of The Inferno in class (translated by J.C.), and it is wonderful.

    However, I am confused Barnes and Noble......

    Are you allowing for the same comments that are posted on one translation to be automatically posted on all the other versions? This isn't helpful, because readers may wish to compare one translation to another by reading the reviews...... That's what I was trying to do, to see which version of The Divine Comedy I wished to buy, but couldn't. I realize that I should probably post this in some forum online, and I will eventually. And of course, what I could be seeing is the result of spammers, but I don't think this is likely.

    Anyway, I absolutely believe that this is a wonderful translation and would highly recommend it.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted February 9, 2011

    booooo

    tootally sucks

    1 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 28, 2010

    This is not the John Ciardi Translation

    I just downloaded the this ebook, and this is not the John Ciardi translation!

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted October 9, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    9781593082765

    Excellent translaton

    I have read The Divine Comedy two times before, with difficulty, although it is a great story. This translation is the best I have seen, making this classic much easier to understand and stick with. My 14 year old granddaughter asked me about the book and was my incentive to buy it and read it again. To understand the characters you do have to keep flipping back and forth from the footnotes and the text, so to make it easier for her I have written the footnotes along the sides of the pages where they belong. So much mythology and ancient ways of living are incorporated into the book that it makes today's children uninterested in reading it because of the research needed. But as a classic it is worth the work and very stimulating to try to understand. Don't know if this makes any sense to you or not, but again a great translation.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 17, 2008

    Do Not Order

    This story is nothing more than one man trying to justify tearing apart others lives and the choices they make that he personally does not agree. While giving his own sins lighter punishments & less hellish placement in the inferno. Many of his characters were still alive at the time he wrote this which is evidenced by the fact that after its publication Dante was panished from his home.
    The producer of this CD version "Blackstone Audio" is highly flawed. Several of audio CD's had no information on them - they are blank. Others were covered in a sticky glue that had to be cleaned before they would play. If you must have this for a class order a version from a different company!

    1 out of 8 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 26, 2007

    Awesome

    Simply awesome...a must read.

    1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 12, 2007

    Really Divine

    As a freshman in High school, I fully uderstood what Dante, one of the greatest Italian poet, was reaching out for to say. And to who said it wasn't wonderful, you may want to do research on Catholicism, which Dante was a Catholic!

    1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 19, 2004

    Dante = God

    Dante is not only one of the best poets of all time, he is also one of the hardest to translate. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, Dante is one of the authors you leave to higher reading levels.

    1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 16, 2001

    Abandon hope.

    This is a great disappointment. The reader lacks any dramatic range, natters on and on like a dotty old aunt through convoluted ideas, dialogue, and scenery. It is often a challenge to know which character is speaking, owing partly to very understated transitions provided by the translator. The publisher never does confess who the translator was, and fails to provide any supporting/critical materials such as the accompanying booklets in Penguin's Iliad and Odyssey readings which added so much depth to those (4 and 5 stars, respectively). I really wanted to enjoy this, but find I am loading each successive cassette more out of stubbornness than hopeful expectation.

    1 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 27, 2012

    Thomas paine

    good

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 29, 2012

    The divine Comedy everyone should read!

    All three books were amazing to have such insigh in Dantes books!

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  • Posted January 26, 2012

    more from this reviewer

    Review

    Although extremely dense, Dante's Divine Comedy is an incredible work of imagination and biblical scripture knowledge.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 16, 2011

    Dante is brilliant

    I don't approve of the translation

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  • Posted September 23, 2011

    Dante

    Epic!

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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