Purgatorio

(Paperback)

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Following the Hollanders' widely acclaimed English rendering of Inferno, PURGATORIO, the second canticle in Dante's immortal DIVINE COMEDY, enters English in the best'the clearest, most accurate, most readable-translation in decades, with unsurpassed scholarship in its introduction and with extensive notes. PURGATORIO relates in thirty-three cantos Dante's progress, still with Virgil as his guide, up the mountains of purgatory, where souls expiate their sins before they enter heaven. As hell has circles, purgatory has terraces, one above the other, each representing one of the seven mortal sins. In each, an appropriate type of penance is practiced, and the spirit ascending the mountain must cleanse itself of each sin of which it is guilty. Jean and Robert Hollander's verse translation with facing-page Italian offers the dual virtues of maximum fidelity to Dante's text with the poetic feeling necessary to give the English reader a sense of the work's poetic greatness in Italian. And since Robert Hollander is a master teacher whose achievements as a Dante scholar are unsurpassed in the English-speaking world, the introduction and commentaries that accompany each canto offer superb guidance in essential matters of comprehension and interpretation. In addition to its inherent excellence, this transla*'on is also the text of the Princeton Dante Project website (www.princeton.edu/dante), an ambitious project that offers a multimedia version of the DIVINE COMEDY and links to other Dante websites. On every count, this edition of PURGATORIO is the literary and scholarly translation likely to be the one that survives for the greatest period in the new millennium.

Reviews

The Hollanders have rendered both the supple lyricism and the rich imagery of the Purgatorio with an admirably informed expertise. . . . A model for all translators. The Literary Review

The Hollanders translation . . . seems the most accessible and the closest to the Italian. . . . The provision of informative notes . . . is impeccable . . . with ample commentary easily and unobturisvely available at the end of each canto. --Tim Parks, The New Yorker

The Hollanders translation is probably the most finely accomplished and may well prove the most enduring. --R.W. B. Lewis, Los Angeles Times

Author Bio

Jean Hollander is a poet, teacher, and director of the Writers' Conference at the College of New Jersey. Robert Hollander, her husband, has been teaching Dante's Divine Comedy to Princeton students for forty years, and is the author of a dozen books and more than seventy articles on Dante, Boccaccio, and other Italian authors. He has received many awards, including the gold medal of the city of Florence, in recognition of his work on Dante. They are at work on their translation of Paradiso, the conclusion of the Divine Comedy.