Authors: Allen Mandelbaum (Editor), Charles Ross (Editor), Anthony Oldcorn
ISBN-13: 9780520212701, ISBN-10: 0520212703
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of California Press
Date Published: February 1999
Edition: 1st Edition
Anthony Oldcorn, Professor and Chair of Italian Studies at Brown University, and Charles Ross, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University, have joined with National Book Award winner Allen Mandelbaum, who is W.R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest University and Professor of the History of Literary Criticism at the University of Turin, as General Editors of the California Lectura Dantis.
The California Lectura Dantis is the long-awaited companion to the three-volume verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum of Dante's Divine Comedy. Mandelbaum's translation, with facing original text and with illustrations by Barry Moser, has been praised by Robert Fagles as "exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths," and by the late James Merrill as "lucid and strong . . . with rich orchestration . . . overall sweep and felicity . . . and countless free, brilliant, utterly Dantesque strokes." Charles Simic called the work "a miracle. A lesson in the art of translation and a model (an encyclopedia) for poets. The full range and richness of American English is displayed as perhaps never before."
This collection of commentaries on the first part of the Comedy consists of commissioned essays, one for each canto, by a distinguished group of international scholar-critics. Readers of Dante will find this Inferno volume an enlightening and indispensable guide, the kind of lucid commentary that is truly adapted to the general reader as well as the student and scholar.
Author Biography: Anthony Oldcorn, Professor and Chair of Italian Studies at Brown University, and Charles Ross, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University, have joined with National Book Award winner Allen Mandelbaum, who is W.R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest University and Professor of the History of Literary Criticism at the University of Turin, as General Editors of the California Lectura Dantis.
Introduction: Dante in His Age | 1 | |
Canto I | The Hard Begin | 9 |
Canto II | Dante's Authority | 25 |
Canto III | The Gate of Hell | 36 |
Canto IV | A Melancholy Elysium | 50 |
Canto V | The Fierce Dove | 63 |
Canto VI | Florence, Ciacco, and the Gluttons | 84 |
Canto VII | The Weal of Fortune | 101 |
Canto VIII | Fifth Circle: Wrathful and Sullen | 111 |
Canto IX | The Harrowing of Dante from Upper Hell | 123 |
Canto X | Farinata and Cavalcante | 136 |
Canto XI | Malice and Mad Bestiality | 150 |
Canto XII | The Violent against Their Neighbors | 165 |
Canto XIII | The Violent against Themselves | 178 |
Canto XIV | Capaneus and the Old Man of Crete | 185 |
Canto XV | The Canto of Brunetto Latini | 197 |
Canto XVI | From Other Sodomites to Fraud | 213 |
Canto XVII | Geryon's Downward Flight; the Usurers | 225 |
Canto XVIII | Introduction to Malebolge | 238 |
Canto XIX | Simoniacs | 262 |
Canto XX | True and False See-ers | 275 |
Canto XXI | Controversial Comedy | 287 |
Canto XXII | Poets as Scoundrels | 297 |
Canto XXIII | The Painted People | 306 |
Canto XXIV | Thieves and Metamorphoses | 316 |
Canto XXV | The Perverse Image | 328 |
Canto XXVI | Ulysses: Persuasion versus Prophecy | 348 |
Canto XXVII | False Counselors: Guido da Montefeltro | 357 |
Canto XXVIII | Scandal and Schism | 368 |
Canto XXIX | Such Outlandish Wounds | 378 |
Canto XXX | Dante among the Falsifiers | 392 |
Canto XXXI | The Giants: Majesty and Terror | 406 |
Canto XXXII | Amphion and the Poetics of Retaliation | 413 |
Canto XXXIII | Count Ugolino and Others | 424 |
Canto XXXIV | Lucifer | 432 |
Bibliographical Note and Suggestions for Further Reading | 441 | |
Contributors | 449 | |
Index | 453 |