Paradiso

Description

After INFERNO and PURGATORIO, here is the last cantica (part) of the Divine Comedy, in a new translation by acclaimed translator Robin Kirkpatrick Having plunged to the uttermost depths of Hell and climbed the Mount of Purgatory in parts one and two of the Divine Comedy, Dante ascends to Heaven in this third and final part, continuing his soul's search for God, guided by his beloved Beatrice. As he progresses through the spheres of Paradise he grows in understanding, until he finally experiences divine love in the radiant presence of the deity. Examining eternal questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, Dante exercised all his learning and wit, wrath and tenderness in his creation of one of the greatest of all Christian allegories.

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and belonged to a noble but impoverished family. He married Gemma Donati in his twenties and had four children. He met Beatrice, who was to be his muse, in 1274, and when she died in 1290 he sought distraction in philosophy and theology, and wrote La Vita Nuova. He worked on the Divine Comedy from 1308 until near the time of his death in Ravenna in 1321. Robin Kirkpatrick is a poet and widely-published Dante scholar. He has taught courses on Dante's Divine Comedy in Hong Kong, Dublin, and Cambridge where is Fellow of Robinson College and Professor of Italian and English Literatures.

"A masterly translation." Judith Thurman, The New Yorker "Kirkpatrick brings a more nuanced sense of the Italian and a more mediated appreciation of the poem's construction than nearly all of his competitors." -The Times (London) "We gain much from Kirkpatrick's fidelity to syntax and nuance. . . . His introduction . . . tells you, very readable indeed, pretty much all you need for a heightened appreciation of the work." -The Guardian "Likely to be the best modern version of Dante . . . The perfect balance of tightness and colloquialism." -Bernard O'Donoghue "This version is the first to bring together poetry and scholarship in the very body of the translation-a deeply informed version of Dante that is also a pleasure to read." -David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania