What do You think about The Portable Dante (1995)?
You can read Musa straight trough, nice notation as needed, including great intros to each canto, not over bearing, he has the poetics carry the poem...his best translation is Paradiso! Also includes Vita Nuova at the end which I'd recommend reading first as it is shorter, tighter, but still plays the poetic games so loved by Dante as well as being a series inter-linked love poems to Beatrice...and in this translation of V.N.(unlike the earlier Oxford & Indiana press ones) he imbeds the Latin (with footnoting) which is more to the "real" style of the poem (i.e., it wasn't Italian or translated).
—CX Dillhunt
I was reading a discussion online not too long ago concerning Dante's Inferno and was reminded that while I may have read bits and pieces over the years, I've never actually read it myself. Or, for that matter, the other two parts of the Divine Comedy, Purgatory and Paradise. So I resolved to try to find a good English translation and have at it. I read some good reviews of this translation by Mark Musa, picked it up, and figured a week of vacation in the mountains was a good week to plow through it. I found the translation (free verse) to be very readable. There were also good notes on each page (thankfully no flipping back and forth to the end of the book) that gave details on the (now) obscure personalities and issues involved. I'm sure there are editions with much more detail but for a lay reader like me, I thought this edition hit it about right. Enough to let me know who was who but not bogging me down. As to the work itself, how do you rate a book like this? It's a classic of western literature. I found Hell and Purgatory more interesting than his section on Paradise but that's probably as much a comment on me as it is on Dante. This edition also contains Dante's Vita Nuova but I didn't read that. The Divine Comedy was 585 pages. That was enough Italian literature for me this week, thank you very much. I'll save Vita Nuova for another day.
—Mike
This collection contains the Laurence Binyon translation of The Divine Comedy. Harold Bloom recommends it as the translation closest to reading Dante in the native Italian. Since I don't read (or speak) Italian, I could hazard an opinion, though I would say that it appears to be the most poet of the translations I have seen, which would be the Longfellow and Mandelbaum translations. These two translation are available online at http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/new/com...My suggestion, if you are willing to invest the time, is to read the Mandelbaum and Binyon translations together. In my opinion, its worth the investment of time. Dante is pure creative genius. His extraordinary imagination seems limitless as he describes is journey through Hell, then Purgatory (fittingly, I became mired in the Purgatory section and had to put it down for a bit. I have taken back up the reading of the Purgatory section and am now in sight of Paradise).You read the Binyon for the breathtaking poetry and Mandelbaum to keep from getting lost in the sometimes tortured grammatical structures.
—Pig_bodine
