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(Hardcover)
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
The Divine Comedy begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.
Allen Mandelbaum’s astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets.
This Everyman’s edition–containing in one volume all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso–includes an introduction by Nobel Prize—winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli's marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations.
The finest of all Christian allegories, The Divine Comedy ranges over the whole culture -- theological as well as literary -- of the Middle Ages.
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January 08, 2010: Excellent translation of a classic work. Good reminder of the evil that Dante saw in his own time and why. However as you read through it you begin to creatively consider a book about the characters from the last 100 years that might inhabit hell in our own time. Different cast of characters.
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March 21, 2008: This book is great. It describes everything so brilliantly! The best parts are the inferno and purgatory. And the whole idea that Vergil wants to save Dante from hell because he is fallowing reason instead of faith is great! I recomend this to everyone.