Synopses & Reviews
The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James’s new translation—decades in the making—presents Dante’s entire epic poem in a single song. While many poets and translators have attempted to capture the full glory of The Divine Comedy in English, many have fallen short, according to Clive James, the best-selling author of Cultural Amnesia. Victorian verse translations established an unfortunate tradition of reproducing the sprightly rhyming measures of Dante but at the same time betraying the strain on the translator’s powers of invention. For Dante, the dramatic human stories of Hell were exciting, but the spiritual studies in Purgatory and the sublime panoramas of Heaven were no less so. In this incantatory, new translation, James—defying the convention by writing in quatrains—tackles these problems head-on and creates a striking and hugely accessible translation that gives us The Divine Comedy as a whole, unified, and dramatic work.
Review
"Clive James's translation of is a remarkable achievement: not a scowling marble Dante of sublime set pieces but a living, breathing poet shifting restlessly through a dizzying succession of moods, perceptions and passions. Under James's uncanny touch, seven long centuries drop away, and the great poem is startlingly fresh and new." Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University, author of The Swerve
Review
"This is the translation that many of us had abandoned all hope of finding. Clive James's version is the only one that conveys Dante's variety, depth, subtlety, vigor, wit, clarity, mystery and awe in rhymed English stanzas that convey the music of Dante's triple rhymes. This book lets Dante's genius shine through as it never did before in English verse, and is a reminder that James's poetry has always been his finest work." Edward Mendelson, Columbia University
Review
"A vigorous, poetic paraphrase of the Comedy." Library Journal
Review
"Daring... Deciding that Dante's terza rima is too strained in English, he uses robust, rollicking quatrains... James' revitalizing translation allows this endlessly analyzed, epic, archetypal 'journey to salvation' to once again stride, whirl, blaze, and sing. Anyone heretofore reluctant to pick up will discover that James' bold, earthy, rhythmic and rhyming, all-the-way live English translation fulsomely and brilliantly liberates the profound humanity of Dante's timeless masterpiece." Booklist
Synopsis
Renowned poet and critic Clive James presents the crowning achievement of his career: a monumental translation into English verse of Dante's .
Synopsis
is the precursor of modern literature, and this translation--decades in the making--gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent and compulsively readable lyric poem. Written in the early fourteenth century and completed in 1321, the year of Dante's death, is perhaps the greatest work of epic poetry ever composed.
About the Author
Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence to a family of minor nobility. He entered into Florentine politics in 1295, but he and his party were forced into exile in a hostile political climate in 1301. Taking asylum in Ravenna late in life, Dante completed his Divine Commedia, considered one of the most important works of Western literature, before his death in 1321.Born in Australia, Clive James lives in Cambridge, England. He is the author of Unreliable Memoirs; a volume of selected poems, Opal Sunset; the best-selling Cultural Amnesia; and the translator of The Divine Comedy by Dante. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He lives in Cambridge, England.