Divine Comedy

Hell, Purgatory, Heaven

Alighieri Dante

Dante's masterpiece is a foundation stone of European poetry. It was a profound influence on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and in our own day has inspired Seamus Heaney. It is simple in style yet complex in its layers of meaning, episodic in manner yet architectonic in its over-arching vision. It is simultaneously a journey through life and a spiritual biography, a portrait of the internecine Italy of Dante's time and a pilgrim's progress through the tripartite afterworld of Catholic mythology. Paradoxically, it is also a devotional work and one of the strangest love poems ever written. It is without doubt one of the supreme works of world literature.

Peter Dale has established a reputation as one of this country's leading translators for his Francois Villon: Selected Poems, and more recently for his witty and accurate versions of Jules Laforgue. His great achievement here has been to produce a version of "The Divine Comedy" in modern English that echoes Dante's "sweet new style", while keeping to the poet's demanding "terza rima" verse pattern. It is a reader's edition – accurate, clear and compelling. It is also Peter Dale's crowning achievement as a translator.

About the Author

Dante Alighieri was a major Italian poet of the Late Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comed?a and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered the most important poem of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. He defied poetic convention by writing in vernacular Italian instead of Latin – this made his work accessible to a wider, more diverse audience and set a precedent that Petrarch and Boccaccioto would follow.

Back to the list of books