Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Vol. 1: Inferno

by Mark Musa

English, Italian (translation)
Original Italian

352 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1996

Reviews

[Joanne Swenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dante’s description of who shows up in hell is hilarious — until I look in my mirror. Brave social commentary.

[Ash F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scary! Hope this doesn’t happen to me

[Rolf Yngve · Rating 5 out of 5]

A six volume, facing-pages, Italian - English translation of the entire Divina Commedia di Dante published by Indiana University Press. Musa ignores any attempt to mimic the terza rima in the English translation. The result is a clarifying english syntax, and the language becomes an echo of the common Italian Dante employed.

But the really wonderful element of this work is Musa's often witty and always complete apparatus. Dante's work itself is a strange and wonderful window to the renaissance mind, caught between classical mythology, christian-catholic belief, and the renaissance understanding of the physical, sociological and political universes. Musa's apparatus revealed the nature of the Divina Commedia to me in a way that now nurtures my own work.

I needed to study Dante again. But Musa made my study so pleasurable and so approachable, I found myself reading it on the plane. Bravo, Maestro!

[Maureen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the book very interesting and insightful. I read the Penguin edition, and I am so thankful for the notes. They helped to explain much of what I didn't know concerning Dante's references to various people who lived during that time.