The Divine Comedy (Annotated)

A New Translation in Poetic Prose | Complete Inferno, Purgatorio & Paradiso | Dante Alighieri | Erato Press

By: Dante Alighieri

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Seven hundred years old. Still the most ambitious journey in literature.

In 1308, a Florentine poet in exile began writing about a man who walked through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in the course of three days. He was writing about himself. He was writing about Florence, about the papacy, about the men who had wronged him, about the woman he had loved at nine years old and never forgotten. He was also writing about the structure of existence, the nature of justice, and what it means to have lived. The Divine Comedy is all of these things simultaneously — and it has never stopped being read because it has never stopped being true.

Inferno — Midway through the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight path had been lost. Thirty-four cantos descending through nine circles of Hell. Dante moves through his world's worst nightmares — its frauds, its murderers, its traitors — and places his enemies there by name. It is an act of extraordinary vindictiveness and extraordinary artistry. Both at once.

Purgatorio — The mountain of Purgatory, where the souls work upward toward redemption. The most human of the three canticles — the one where change is still possible, where the dead are neither damned nor saved, where the poem becomes something close to hope.

Paradiso — Heaven, rendered in light and music and mathematics. The canticle that most readers find difficult and most scholars find inexhaustible. Dante pushes language until it breaks — because what he is trying to describe cannot be described, and he tries anyway.

✦ Complete and unabridged — all three canticles, all one hundred cantos, in a new translation in poetic prose that preserves the literary power of the original without the artificial constraints of rhyme.

This edition also contains:

✦ Dante Alighieri: Exile, Vision, and the Architecture of Eternity — a full critical biography of Dante: the political disaster that produced the greatest poem in Italian literature, the years of wandering, the death in Ravenna, and the extraordinary posthumous life of a work its author never saw completed

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Medieval literature and epic poetry (Homer, Virgil, Milton) ✦ Literary adventure on a cosmic scale ✦ Classic European literature in new, accessible translations ✦ Fiction and poetry that takes questions of justice, love, and meaning seriously

He put his enemies in Hell and his beloved in Heaven and himself in both. That is either the supreme act of artistic ego or the only honest thing a poet can do. After seven hundred years, the question remains open.