Renowned poet and critic Clive James presents the
crowning achievement of his career: a monumental translation
into English verse of Dante’s The Divine
Comedy.
The Divine Comedy is the
precursor of modern literature, and this translation—decades
in the making—gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent
and compulsively readable lyric poem. Written in the early
fourteenth century and completed in 1321, the year of
Dante’s death, The Divine Comedy is perhaps the
greatest work of epic poetry ever composed.
Divided into
three books—Hell, Purgatory and
Heaven—the poem’s allegorical vision of the
afterlife portrays the poet’s spiritual crisis in terms of
his own contemporary history, in a text of such vivid life
and variety that modern readers will find themselves
astounded in a hundred different ways. And indeed the
structure of this massive single song is divided into a
hundred songs, or cantos, each of which is a separate poetic
miracle. But unifying them all is the impetus of the Italian
verse: a verbal energy that Clive James has now brought into
English.
In his introductory essay, James says that
the twin secrets of Dante are texture and impetus. All the
packed detail must be there, but the thing must move. It
should go from start to finish with an unflagging rhythm. In
the original, the basic form is the terza rima, a
measure hard to write in English without showing the strain
of reaching once too often for a rhyme. In this translation,
the basic form is the quatrain. The result, uncannily, is
the same easy-seeming flow, a wonderful momentum that
propels the reader along the pilgrim’s path from Hell to
Heaven, from despair to revelation.
To help ensure
that no scholastic puzzles get in the road of appreciation,
James has also adopted the bold policy of incorporating key
points from the scholarship into the text: uploading them
from the footnotes, as it were, and making them part of the
narrative, where they can help to make things clear.
For its range of emotion alone, Clive James’s
poetic rendering of The Divine Comedy would be
without precedent. But it is also singled out by its sheer
readability. The result is the epic as a page-turner, a work
that will influence the way we read Dante in English for
generations to come.
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