Both these books consider how Dante’s Divine Comedy has been transmitted to and through later readers but they do so in radically different ways. One explores the poem’s influence on a selection of later writers and artists. The other republishes a single, historically important translation which the introduction flags as ‘An American Voice for Dante’. This republication is introduced by a scholarly introduction and accompanied by interpretative illustrations. I’ll look at both books in terms of what I think they can offer non-specialist literary readers, though it’s only fair to say that the republication of Charles S. Singleton’s translation seems … Continue Reading

I wish I could remember exactly what Edward Wilson-Lee said on today’s The Verb about the way rhyme worked in Keats’ sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ – something about how by folding ideas together the rhymes created a kind of palimpsest of impressions transcending the movement of time. I thought it was beautifully put and gelled with my own much more inarticulate feelings. It’s the way syntax, metre and rhyme work together in Dante’s Commedia, for example, that make me feel it’s vital to read key cantos in the original, however gropingly dependent on parallel texts you may … Continue Reading

Three things keep drawing me back to Dante’s Commedia: the skill, inventiveness and human depth of his story-telling, his lyrical genius, and the beauty of his terza rima meter. His use of terza rima can only be enjoyed in Italian, which for me involves heavy dependence on English translations and on the notes and glosses in modern Italian given in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi’s editions of the Commedia for Zanichelli and Oscar Mondadori. In this essay I want to focus on comparing how the narrative and lyrical aspects of the poems come through in Ned Denny’s freely adaptive poetic version, … Continue Reading

After Dante: Poets in Purgatory is both a presentation of the whole Purgatorio section of Dante’s Commedia, and an anthology of sixteen poets’ different approaches to carrying it across into English. Only two really wrench it into new contexts but, as the word ‘after’ indicates, all approach the task as poets making poetry, allowing themselves more inventive freedom than, say, Robert Durling or Jean Hollander in their parallel text translations. For readers who already know the Purgatorio, or the whole Commedia, I think the diversity of the different poets’ approaches will make for richly varying interest. For those who don’t, … Continue Reading

Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri, translated by D. M. Black, preface by Robert Pogue Harrison,
NYRB Classics, Paperback, 488 pp, £15.99

You can read my review on the London Grip here.

Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, Dante: A Very Short Introduction; OUP, £7.99, pbk, 144pp.

Hainsworth and Robey have to work within the limits of the Very Brief Introduction format. Their first pages rise brilliantly to the challenge. Swift-moving, decisive, sensitive and suggestive, plunging straight into a discussion of two famous encounters in the Inferno, and illustrating points with well-chosen references, this opening would have made me feel I knew why Dante’s ideas still matter, why he’s a giant among poets, and why people so praise his dramatic gifts in particular, even if I hadn’t read a word of him before.

Of course … Continue Reading

Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity; W. W. Norton, 398pp, hbk, £20.00;
ISBN 9780871407429
Published 29 April 2014

If I could recommend only one book on Dante it would be this one by Prue Shaw.

Her scholarship is profound and I think she must be a brilliant teacher: she shows an unusual ability to enter imaginatively into the minds of people who don’t have her knowledge. This book isn’t just “approachable”; it comes to meet you, seizes your hands and whisks you away to a glittering party where you’re involved in the conversation as if you were an old friend.

Shaw’s writing style … Continue Reading

You can read my review of Peter Hainsworth and David Robey’s Dante: A Very Short Introduction, OUP, £7.99, pbk, 144pp. by clicking here .

Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity; W. W. Norton, 398pp, hbk, £20.00

You can link to this review on the Manchester Review website here.

I used to think highly of Sisson’s poetry; I can remember being excited when Anchises and Exactions came out in the late seventies. I don’t know how I’d find his own poems if I read them again now, but I’ve just read his translation of Dante’s Purgatorio and was deeply disappointed. I did it because I wanted a more continuous reading process than you can get from the John Sinclair parallel text, which involves constant movement between the languages and interruption by the pages of commentary after each canto. What startled me in Sisson’s version was how heavily the line … Continue Reading