The Divine Comedy

‘A fresh, impressive new translation of The Divine Comedy that is both easy-going and lucid‘ Best Books of 2013, Sunday Times The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James‘s new translation - his life‘s work and decades in the making - presents Dante‘s entire epic as a whole, unified, and compulsively readable lyric poem. For Dante, the dramatic human stories of Hell were exciting, but the spiritual studies of Purgatory and the sublime panoramas of Heaven were no less so. In his incantatory new version, James - defying the convention by writing in quatrains - creates a striking and hugely accessible translation that reproduces the same wonderful momentum of the original Italian and propels the reader along the pilgrim‘s path from Hell to Heaven, from despair to revelation. ‘Wonderfully unstuffy and injects fresh life back into the poem‘ Mary Beard, Books of the Year 2013, Observer ‘An extraordinary verse-rendering . . . The result is a revelation‘ Robert McCrum, Guardian ‘An outstanding achievement . . . Clive James has now given us a translation worthy of this and any other time; and a great piece of literature in its own right‘ Evening Standard