Paradiso (English and Italian Edition)

I started a project several months ago to re-read the Divine Comedy. I stalled out halfway through Purgatory. (I expect it will not be the last time that happens to me.) Then I learned that Stanley Lombardo — whose Inferno I'd read and enjoyed a few years ago — had finished the other two canticles. Lombardo is a wonderful translator, one of the few I'd be willing to shell out money for sight unseen. And with his help I was finally able to finish my project.If you've only read the Inferno, you're missing out on a challenging and thrilling experience. It's true that Inferno is the juiciest part, but Purgatory has its own cast of fascinating characters, and Paradise, though it operates on a far more abstract plane than the other two, has a number of stunningly beautiful images. Near the end, Dante looks downward toward the earth to see how far he's come; and then suddenly the universe turns inside out, and the God who contained everything has become a single point of light from which everything else radiates. Another few cantos and Dante stares directly into this point of light and sees a breathtaking vision of the Triune God.Lombardo has, as expected, rendered all this in graceful and lucid verse, mostly unrhymed; he employs Dante’s rhyme scheme for the last triplet or two in each canto to provide closure. Alison Cornish has provided an introduction and hundreds of useful notes. Hackett usually does a careful job with their Kindle titles, and they have done so here. The Italian text is placed at the end — “facing pages” never works for ebooks, though many publishers still try to make it fit — and the notes are hyperlinked to the English text in both directions.(If anybody's listening, this would make a great audiobook as well.)

Study

Dr Lombardo’s many translations are often compared to the language found in modern movies. I don’t find them quite that coarse; he (wisely in my view) doesn’t pretty up what is in the original. The cadence and ease of style make these a joy to read and the facing Italian let’s the reader check out the original where desired.In earlier works, Lombardo honed his choices by performing the works orally. Perhaps a little less academic or formal, this method leads to highly readable classics. His love of these texts shines through.One note: the book I received did not come with a book jacket, contrary to the photo on amazon.

A learned and fluent translation that keeps you close to Dante's original.

As expected