The Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise

I thought I was going to receive the Deluxe Harvard Edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but instead I received the Deluxe Harvard Edition of Plato, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Likely an honest mixup as the covers are basically identical. It’s still a cool book, but I do wish I had received what I ordered.

This is a difficult book to read at best. The translation (by A.S.Klein) was not too archaic and while I have just received the book, it is a piece of literature worth reading one or twice in a lifetime. Nice heavy vellum stock pages.... too bad that the typeface was NOT LARGE PRINT as advertised.

The translation I received is from 1946. The language is very stilted and archaic. I have a translation from the '70s of Inferno and needed Purgatorio and Paradiso. Sadly, I still do.

I love book. Book good.

I must confess that the large format makes reading the formal translations a bit easier on the eyes. The volume also includes a preface and section introductions/interpretations in contemporary english which make the text much more approachable. And the woodcut illustrations are simply gorgeous - it's worth getting the book just for these. They really bring to life the imaginations from when they were created in the 19th century all the way back several hundred years more to when Dante wrote the text. They also help to explain the perceptions that our predecessors had of religion, sin, and piety. This is a terrific volume - highly recommended. One tangential note - if you like the illustrations in this you should also check out "Barlow's Inferno", published a few years ago. Wayne Douglas Barlow synthesizes interpretations of hell from many cultures and periods into illustrations of terror and frightful beauty. Barlow is the spiritual inheritor of Dore's vision.

This a great CD, with all of Dante's Divine Comedy, read very expressively by the actor Claudio Carini. All files are in mp3 format. Its a great way to become familiar with this work in the original italian. A free copy of the text can be downloaded from various sites on the internet. I bought the CD in Italy. Greatly recommended.