â€œUnder Jamesâ€™s uncanny touch, seven long centuries drop away, and the great poem is startlingly fresh and new.â€â€”Stephen GreenblattThe Divine Comedy is

The Divine Comedy

â€œUnder Jamesâ€™s uncanny touch, seven long centuries drop away, and the great poem is startlingly fresh and new.â€â€”Stephen Greenblatt

The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive Jamesâ€™s translationâ€”decades in the makingâ€”gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent, and compulsively readable lyric poem. For the first time ever in an English translation, James makes the bold choice of switching from the terza rima composition of the original Italianâ€”a measure that strains in Englishâ€”to the quatrain. The result is â€œrhymed English stanzas that convey the music of Danteâ€™s triple rhymesâ€ (Edward Mendelson). Jamesâ€™s translation reproduces the same wonderful momentum of the original Italian that propels the reader along the pilgrimâ€™s path from Hell to Heaven, from despair to revelation.
Country USA
Manufacturer Liveright
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2014-02-10
Format Kindle eBook

The Divine Comedy