Language Notes
Text: English, Italian (translation)

ANNOTATION

This title contains The Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world literature, and its climactic section, Paradiso, is perhaps the most ambitious poetic attempt ever made to represent the merging of individual destiny with universal order. Having passed through Hell and Purgatory, Dante is led by his beloved Beatrice to the upper sphere of Paradise, wherein lie the sublime truths of Divine will and eternal salvation, to at last experience a rapturous vision of God.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Dante's Divine Comedy has inspired artists from Giotto down to the present. Perhaps among the most beautiful illustrations are those of the 15th-century Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo, who illuminated a Paradiso manuscript for the library of the King of Naples, now in the British Library as Yates-Thompson MS 36. Pope-Hennessy, the noted British art historian, presents reproductions of di Paolo's 61 illuminations in a large format and in full color. He includes a lucid historical introduction and a commentary on the content of each of the miniatures. This book also includes Charles Singleton's prose translation of the Paradiso . This is a wonderful gift for the student of Dante and the lover of art.-- T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.

Christian Science Monitor

Tough and supple, tender and violent . . . vigorous, vernacular . . . Mandelbaum's Dante will stand high among modern translations.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

The English Dante of choice. — Hugh Kenner

A spectacular achievement...A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original."
 — Archibald MacLeish

Exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths. — Robert Fagles