The Divine Comedy, Volume 2: Purgatory (Musa Translation) »

DANTE ALIGHIERI was born in Florence, Italy in 1265. His early poetry falls into the tradition of love poetry that passed from the Provencal to such Italian poets as Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's friend and mentor. Dante's first major work is the Vita Nuova, 1293-1294. This sequence of lyrics, sonnets, and prose narrative describes his love, first earthly, then spiritual, for Beatrice, whom he had first seen as a child of nine, and who had died when Dante was 25. Dante married about 1285, served Florence in battle, and rose to a position of leadership in the bitter factional politics of the city-state. As one of the city's magistrates, he found it necessary to banish leaders of the so-called "Black" faction, and his friend Cavalcanti, who like Dante was a prominent "White." But after the Blacks seized control of Florence in 1301, Dante himself was tried in absentia and was banished from the city on pain of death. He never returned to Florence. We know little about Dante's life in exile. Legend has it that he studied at Paris, but if so, he returned to Italy, for his last years were spent in Verona and Ravenna. In exile he wrote his Convivio, kind of poetic compendium of medieval philosophy, as well as a political treatise, Monarchia. He began his Comedy (later to be called the Divine Comedy) around 1307-1308. On a diplomatic mission to Venice in 1321, Dante fell ill, and returned to Ravenna, where he died.

MARK MUSA is a graduate of Rutgers University (B.A., 1956), the University of Florence (Fulbright, 1956-58), and the John Hopkins University (M.A., 1959; Ph.D., 1961). He is a former Guggenheim fellow and the author of a number of books and articles. Best known for his translations of the Italian classics (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and the poetry of the Middle Ages) as well as his Dante criticism, he holds the title of Distinguished Professor of French and Italian and is Director of the Center for Italian Studies at Indiana University. He translated and edited The Divine Comedy, Vol. I: Inferno and Vol. III: Paradise, translated and edited with Peter Bondanella The Portable Machiavelli, and, most recently, translated and edited The Portable Dante, all published by Penguin Books.

In the second volume of his definitive translation of The Divine Comedy, Mark Musa again brings his poetic sensitivity and skill as a translator and annotator to the difficult task of making Dante's masterpiece vital for English-speaking readers. In Purgatory, Dante contemplates the origins of sin as he struggles up the terraces of Mount Purgatory on his arduous journey toward God. In Musa's fine idiomatic translation—complete with prose introductions, bibliography, and glossary—Dante becomes the universal poet, sublime, grim, intellectual, simple, humorous, tender, and ecstatic.

London Review of Books

A superlatively readable new translation.