|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
Review
--Chicago magazine
"The English Dante of choice."--Hugh Kenner.
"Exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths."--Robert Fagles, Princeton University.
"Tough and supple, tender and violent . . . vigorous, vernacular . . . Mandelbaum's Dante will stand high among modern translations."--The Christian Science Monitor
"Lovers of the English language will be delighted by this eloquently accomplished enterprise."
--Book Review Digest
Book Description
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mandelbaum's translation of this poetic masterpiece soars,
By
This review is from: Inferno (Mass Market Paperback)
Dante Alighieri's three part epic The Divine Comedy ranks highly among the literature of the world. Written in early Italian and rhymed in terza rima, it's 100 cantos display impressive allegory and use of scholastic philosophy. In INFERNO, the first volume, the narrator finds himself "half of our life's way" (around 35 years old) and lost in a forest at night. When day breaks, three savage animals bar his escape. The Roman poet Virgil (best known for his AENEID) appears and tells him that Heaven has sent him to lead Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and finally Heaven to bring him out of his spiritual malaise.Dante's Hell differs from the traditional view of everyone together amongst flames. Here the dead receive different punishments based on their sins. Thus, the lustful are caught up eternally in a whirlwind, and astrologers and magicians have their heads reversed (so those who tried to fortell the future can only see their past). Nowhere, however, does anything seem wrong. The dead are placed into Hell not by an unjust God, but by their own decisions and actions. INFERNO is a slow beginning, most of the grace and beauty of the Comedy lies in the subsequent volumes, PURGATORIO and PARADISO. However, this first volume has a solid role in the allegorical significance of the Comedy. Dante wrote not just a simple story of quasi-science fiction, but a moving allegory of the soul moving from perdition to salvation, the act which the poet T.S. Eliot called "Mounting the saint's stair". While INFERNO may occasionally lack excitement on the first reading, the next two volumes thrill and upon reading them one can enjoy INFERNO to the fullest. I believe that the best translation of INFERNO to get is that of Allen Mandelbaum, which is published by Bantam (ISBN: 0553213393). Mandelbaum's verse translation melds a faithful rendering of the Italian with excellent poetry, and has been praised by numerous scholars of Dante, including Irma Brandeis. Here's an example from Canto XIII, where the poet and Virgil enter a forest where the trees are the souls of suicides: "No green leaves in that forest, only black; Mandelbaum's translation also contains an interesting introduction by Mandelbaum, extensive notes (which are based on the California Lectura Dantis), and two afterwords. The first of these, "Dante in His Age" is an enlightening biography of Dante and how he came to write the Comedy while in exile. The second "Dante as Ancient and Modern" examines Dante both as a wielder of classical knowledge and as a poet working in a new and distinctly late-Medieval style (the "dolce stil nuovo") which broke poetry out of the grip of Latin and made it something for people of every class.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Visit to the Inferno,
By JMack (Chicago) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Inferno (Mass Market Paperback)
Perhaps the part of this classic literature that has struck me the most is the imagery used to describe the inferno. Dante does not hold anything back in the description of this journey through the afterlife. While it is often suggested that the plot of this classic is lacking, the desciption of the place people can see only in nightmares is both vivid and disturbing. At times, the reader can almost feel the same cold feelings as Dante in this cold, dark place. While this book is hardly as casual read for the average person, the imagery description make this a "must read' for fans of great literature.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Words, and Pictures too,
By calvados2000 (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Inferno (Mass Market Paperback)
Mandlebaum's verse is beautiful: he manages to keep up an iambic 11-syllable line throughout the work just like Dante. His notes add a great deal to the text, by providing extensive references to the material Dante covers (they even point out the location of the epigraph to "Proufrock"). The Mass Market Paperback edition has the Italian on the opposite side of every page as well, so it will doubtless be useful to those lucky enough to be able to read Dante in the "linguo volgro". Plus, this edition has pictures too! How many other editions (save those with Dore's work) give you a PICTURE of Cerebrus?
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
|
