Audible
English language
Published Oct. 8, 2013 by Audible Studios.
Renowned poet and critic Clive James presents the crowning achievement of his career: a monumental translation into English verse of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and this translation - decades in the making - gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent and compulsively listenable lyric poem. Written in the early 14th century and completed in 1321, the year of Dante’s death, The Divine Comedy is perhaps the greatest work of epic poetry ever composed.
Divided into three books - Hell, Purgatory and Heaven - the poem’s allegorical vision of the afterlife portrays the poet’s spiritual crisis in terms of his own contemporary history, in a text of such vivid life and variety that modern readers will find themselves astounded in a hundred different ways. And indeed the structure of this massive single song is divided into a hundred songs, or …
Renowned poet and critic Clive James presents the crowning achievement of his career: a monumental translation into English verse of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and this translation - decades in the making - gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent and compulsively listenable lyric poem. Written in the early 14th century and completed in 1321, the year of Dante’s death, The Divine Comedy is perhaps the greatest work of epic poetry ever composed.
Divided into three books - Hell, Purgatory and Heaven - the poem’s allegorical vision of the afterlife portrays the poet’s spiritual crisis in terms of his own contemporary history, in a text of such vivid life and variety that modern readers will find themselves astounded in a hundred different ways. And indeed the structure of this massive single song is divided into a hundred songs, or cantos, each of which is a separate poetic miracle. But unifying them all is the impetus of the Italian verse: a verbal energy that Clive James has now brought into English.
For its range of emotion alone, Clive James’s poetic rendering of The Divine Comedy would be without precedent. But it is also singled out by its sheer readability. The result is the epic as a page-turner, a work that will influence the way we read Dante in English for generations to come.
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Divine-Comedy-Audiobook/B00FMYXB96
The implications of this book are beyond my years, but its story-telling is wonderful and it is the finest piece of classic literature I have read to date.
I won't even try to praise The Divine Comedy because there's nothing I can say that more learned people haven't already said, most likely in much better prose than I can. This is a great translation in poem format.
BUT
I just could not reconcile myself to the style of narration. The narrator, who has a wonderful voice, chose to apply a breathless, "this is so meaningful" narration style that was off-putting and distracting. I listened to the end of "Inferno", couldn't listen to anymore of the narration style, and I'm now on the search for another audio book version with a different narrator because I. Will. Finish. This. Poem!
Classic tale of the poets travel through the circles of hell. Not sure how this compares to other translations, but felt concise. A short but challenging read.
Psychedelic, strange, extremely physical, and bodily. Dante is the spiritual counterpart of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg,
I feel like you need to take a course in 13th-century Italian politics before reading this book, otherwise you're just reading Dante talk shit about random people.
My edition had no notes or explanations, so I was super confused most of the time and had to stop to google about Guelphs, Ghibellines, and other references that would have been instantly recognizable to a medieval reader but... not to me.
Still, the descriptions of the torture were really interesting, especially when Dante talks about someone you actually know. I also found it super interesting that the book mixes Greco-Roman mythology with Christianity and modern(for the time) subjects.
Overall, it is definitely a book that I will read again when I have more context.
