The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso (John Ciardi Translation)

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.

7 out of 13 people found this review helpful.

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.

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.

2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

EBOOK SCAM

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

2 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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.

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.

booooo

tootally sucks

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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.

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 6 people found this review helpful.

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.

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.

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.

The divine Comedy everyone should read!

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

Review

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

Dante is brilliant

I don't approve of the translation

Dante

Epic!

Blahhhhhh

Sooooo bad

Amazing read.

This translation is awesome, it has plain english part and then the poetry parts. So anyone can enjoy the book and understand what is going on. A great buy, you will be glad you did.

Do Not Buy

The illustrations go on top of text and mesh together from page to page obscuring the written word. A huge mess. Pity, since G. Dore is the best illustrator ever. NOT RECOMMENDED-DO NOT BUY.

The next step on the journey to Paradise

Dorothy Leigh Sayers continues her excellent translation of the Divine Comedy with the second stage of the journey. Having passed through the center of the Earth, Dante and Virgil emerge on the shores of an island in the Southern Hemisphere, the only mass of land in that hemisphere of the world. (Remember that the Comedy was written in the medieval period.) This is the island of Purgatory, where souls who have died in grace go to purge themselves of their sins before final entry into the appropriate circle of heaven. Along with DLS' idiomatic translation, we have an excellent explanation of how Purgatory functions in the doctrine of the Church, as well as the notes that explain to modern readers the references that were common knowledge in Dante's time and place.