Purgatorio

Dante Alighieri

Jun 2016 · La Divina Commedia Book 2 · Sold by Bantam Classics

About this ebook

"The enjoyment of The Divine Comedy is a continuous process," observed T.S. Eliot.  "It is not necessary to understand the meaning first to enjoy the poetry...our enjoyment of the poetry makes us want to understand the meaning."  
Arguably the greatest single poem ever written, The Divine Comedy presents Dante Alighieri's all-encompassing vision of the three realms of Christian afterlife.  In the Purgatorio, Dante struggles up the terraces of Mount Purgatory, still guided by Virgil, in continuation of his difficult ascent to purity.

"The clean force of the original comes through with astonishing success," said poet and translator Dudley Fitts in praise of John Ciardi's rendition of the Purgatorio.  "Dante cannot speak in English, perhaps; but Ciardi has given us the next best thing--a credible, passionate persona of the poet, stripped of the customary guards of rhetoric and false decoration, strong and noble in utterance."

About the author

Robert Hollander taught Dante’s Divine Comedy to Princeton students for forty-two years, and is the author of a dozen books and more than seventy articles on Dante, Boccaccio, and other Italian authors. He is Professor in European Literature Emeritus at Princeton and the founding director of both the Dartmouth Dante Project and the Princeton Dante Project. He has received many awards, including the gold medal of the city of Florence and the gold florin of the Dante Society of America, in recognition of his work on Dante. Jean Hollander has taught literature and writing at Brooklyn College, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the College of New Jersey, where she was director of the Writers’ Conference for twenty-three years.