Paradiso

Dante Alighieri

Doubleday, 2007 - Broj stranica: 915

Robert and Jean Hollander’s verse translation with facing-page Italian offers the dual virtues of maximum fidelity to Dante’s text with the feeling necessary to give the English reader a sense of the work’s poetic greatness in Italian. And since Robert Hollander’s achievements as a Dante scholar are unsurpassed in the English-speaking world, the commentaries that accompany each canto offer superb guidance in comprehension and interpretation. This translation is also the text of the Princeton Dante Project Web site, an ambitious online project that offers a multimedia version of the Divine Comedy and links to other Dante Web sites. On every count, then, this edition of Paradiso is likely to be a touchstone for generations to come, and it completes one of the great projects of literary translation and scholarship of our time.

O autoru

Born Dante Alighieri in the spring of 1265 in Florence, Italy, he was known familiarly as Dante. His family was noble, but not wealthy, and Dante received the education accorded to gentlemen, studying poetry, philosophy, and theology. His first major work was Il Vita Nuova, The New Life. This brief collection of 31 poems, held together by a narrative sequence, celebrates the virtue and honor of Beatrice, Dante's ideal of beauty and purity. Beatrice was modeled after Bice di Folco Portinari, a beautiful woman Dante had met when he was nine years old and had worshipped from afar in spite of his own arranged marriage to Gemma Donati. Il Vita Nuova has a secure place in literary history: its vernacular language and mix of poetry with prose were new; and it serves as an introduction to Dante's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, in which Beatrice figures prominently. The Divine Comedy is Dante's vision of the afterlife, broken into a trilogy of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Dante is given a guided tour of hell and purgatory by Virgil, the pagan Roman poet whom Dante greatly admired and imitated, and of heaven by Beatrice. The Inferno shows the souls who have been condemned to eternal torment, and included here are not only mythical and historical evil-doers, but Dante's enemies. The Purgatory reveals how souls who are not irreversibly sinful learn to be good through a spiritual purification. And The Paradise depicts further development of the just as they approach God. The Divine Comedy has been influential from Dante's day into modern times. The poem has endured not just because of its beauty and significance, but also because of its richness and piety as well as its occasionally humorous and vulgar treatment of the afterlife. In addition to his writing, Dante was active in politics. In 1302, after two years as a priore, or governor of Florence, he was exiled because of his support for the white guelfi, a moderate political party of which he was a member. After extensive travels, he stayed in Ravenna in 1319, completing The Divine Comedy there, until his death in 1321.

Robert Hollander is the author of a dozen monographs, editions, and translations and some six dozen articles on Dante, Boccaccio, and other writers. A member of Princeton's Department of Romance Languages and the former chairman of its Department of Comparative Literature, he has received the Gold Medal of the city of Florence in recognition of his Dante scholarship.

Jean Hollander, poet, teacher, and director of the Writers Conference at the College of New Jersey.

Bibliografski podaci

• Naslov: Paradiso
• Autor: Dante Alighieri
• Preveo/la: Robert Hollander, Jean Hollander
• Suradnik: Robert Hollander
• Izdanje: ilustrirano
• Izdavač: Doubleday, 2007
• Izvornik iz: Michigansko sveučilište
• Digitalizirano: 22 svi 2008
• ISBN: 0385506783, 9780385506786
• Duljina: Broj stranica: 915