By Dante Alighieri.
Commenced 16 Apr 2007; completed 01 June.
This is a very long review, as is befitting a long epic text.
La Divina Commedia, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, has been on my must-read list for the better of two years, and now I’ve read it. The translation and accompanying commentary is by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Walters, who finished the translation after Sayers’ death. Sayers translated it in a similar poetic meter and rhyme as in the original Italian, and I understand that this is the best English translation of La Divina Commedia.
How to begin to describe this massive poem, such an important text for European civilization and the Christian faith? Dante Alighieri is a Roman Catholic poet from Florence, who lived during the mediæval age and wrote the Comedy in the early 1300s. La Divina Commedia is Dante’s personal vision of the Christian supernatural spheres of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. It is a poem in three canticas — Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, themselves divided into cantos or “chapters” — where Dante goes through a journey from the depths of unbelief and desolation, to redemption and enlightenment of God. This journey takes him through those three supernatural spheres, with Virgil (the poet of the Aeneid) and Beatrice (Dante’s childhood sweetheart) as his guides, and he meets and converses with numerous deceased souls. Not only is the Comedy a ‘literal’ story of and journey through those spheres, it is also an allegory of one soul’s progression from unbelief to redemption and revelation of the truth of God.
The Comedy is a formidable text: it is narrated in a formal mediæval prosody, it deals with heavy theological and moral topics, it can be interpreted at many levels. It can be very daunting to the casual reader. (That’s why it took me so long to muster the guts and determination to tackle it.) But these qualities, plus the truths it illuminates, make the Comedy the powerful and compelling message it is. On my part, I read it primarily on the ‘literal’ level — that kept me sufficiently occupied. Even so, I don’t think I fully grasp its breadth and magnitude. So there’s little I can say about the actual text; instead, I’ll discuss my experience of reading La Divina Commedia, perhaps it’ll be helpful to people who are thinking of tackling it!
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