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Title: Purgatorio : A New Verse Translation by W.S. Merwin, Dante ISBN: 0-375-40921-1 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 28 March, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: among the most brilliant poetry ever written
Comment: I think the reason the Inferno is the most popular canzone of Dante's Divine Comedy is just that it's where to start with Dante's amazing incredible eternal epic. Also the Inferno has more shoot-em-up sort of action than the other 2, Purgatorio & Paradiso. Purgatory is of such poetic brilliance; it's full of poetic philosophy from Dante's critical genius, & beautiful scenes, interesting spirits -- a feeling wholly different from the grimness of the Inferno. & W. S. Merwin too is brilliant & masterful enough for a repartee with the medieval guru. Merwin is a poet & translator whose verbal & syntactical decisions you can trust. He renders Purgatorio with great exciting faithfulness to Dante's original language, with mellifluous music, with merit worthy of the high praise this has gotten from Robert Pinsky, Harold Bloom, & others. The Comedy is notoriously difficult to translate, & this is one of the best translations of Purgatorio into English ever, I'm sure.
Rating: 5
Summary: A beautiful translation of a beautiful poem.
Comment: One of the greatest literary tragedies is that so many readers believe that the Divine Comedy, or that even Dante himself, is no more than the Inferno. Such ignorance leads to a vast reading public who have never experienced the most immediately human section of the Comedy: the Purgatorio. Unlike Inferno, which is full of characters whom we either revile or pity, Purgatorio introduces us to spirits who, like most of us, try to do the right thing, but aren't always successful. If we look down upon the shades in Hell, we identify with the shades in Purgatory, and it is in this understanding that the Purgatorio gains its beauty. An absolute must read for anyone with any interest in literature, history, theology, spirituality, philosophy, psychiatry, or beauty.
As for Merwin's translation, he has managed to take a giant step in solving the problem that I mentioned above. His translation does justice to the original not only in its accuracy, but in its poetry, which is so important to Dante's works. I have read two other translations of Purgatorio (Mandelbaum and Ciardi), and this is, by far, the most readable and the most engaging of the three. Merwin captures the hopeful but unfilled tone of the poem with considerable grace while still maintaining the structural and thematic tension that are crucial to an understanding of Dante's works. As for the scholarly aspects of the work, scholastics, clearly, were not Merwin's intent. His explanatory notes are minimal (which is preferable to Mandelbaum's copious, and sometimes condescending glosses) and the foreword is more an exploration of the art of translation than of Dante's work. Not that this is a bad thing. Understanding Merwin's reservations concerning translation, and the difficulties of performing it, makes his version of Purgatorio all the more human and touching. But, any reader seeking critical commentary should look elsewhere (and by elsewhere I mean a supplemental source as passing over this translation just because it lacks scholarly material would be criminal). Whether for readers experiencing Purgatorio for the first time, or for Dante aficionados, I can't recomend this volume highly enough. First, Pinsky's Inferno, then Merwin's Purgatorio, now, if only someone would do Paradiso similar justice!
Rating: 4
Summary: Beautiful Forward
Comment: I will confess that I haven't had a chance to read Merwin's entire translation of Dante's _Purgatorio_, though I have read about a third to this point. I will say, though, that I have read his Forward, and I found it to be one of the more moving testaments to the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual impact that the _Commedia_ has had on readers, poets and non-poets alike, through the ages. There isn't much new information for the Dante scholar--Merwin acknowledges that his notes are largely based on Singleton's--but this is a translation written out of love, not necessarily scholarship. This is Merwin's editon for the lover of both poets and poetry
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Title: The Inferno of Dante : Bilingual Edition by Robert Pinsky, Dante ISBN: 0374524521 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 30 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Poets' Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses by Peter Hawkins, Rachel Jacoff, Peter S. Hawkins ISBN: 0374528403 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 03 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
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Title: Dante: The Poetics of Conversion by John Freccero, Rachel Jacoff ISBN: 0674192265 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 1988 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi, Dante Alighieri, Archibald T. MacAllister ISBN: 0451527984 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: 12 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings by Matthew Arnold, Stefan Collini ISBN: 052137796X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 18 February, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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