The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

robert m. durling ronald l. martinez

In the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri set out to write the three volumes which make the up The Divine Comedy. Purgatorio is the second volume in this set and opens with Dante the poet picturing Dante the pilgrim coming out of the pit of hell. Similar to the Inferno (34 cantos), this volume is divided into 33 cantos, written in tercets (groups of 3 lines). The English prose is arranged in tercets to facilitate easy correspondence to the verse form of the Italian on the facing page, enabling the reader to follow both languages line by line. In an effort to capture the peculiarities of Dante's original language, this translation strives toward the literal and sheds new light on the shape of the poem. Again the text of Purgatorio follows Petrocchi's La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata , but the editor has departed from Petrocchi's readings in a number of cases, somewhat larger than in the previous Inferno , not without consideration of recent critical readings of the Comedy by scholars
such as Lanza (1995, 1997) and Sanguineti (2001). As before, Petrocchi's punctuation has been lightened and American norms have been followed. However, without any pretensions to being "critical", the text presented here is electic and being not persuaded of the exclusive authority of any manuscript, the editor has felt free to adopt readings from various branches of the stemma. One major addition to this second volume is in the notes, where is found the Intercantica - a section for each canto that discusses its relation to the Inferno and which will make it easier for the reader to relate the different parts of the Comedy as a whole.

Genres classicspoetryfictionliteraturereligionitalian literaturefantasyphilosophymedievalitaly

704 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1321

Series

La Divina Commedia

Places

purgatory,

This edition

Format: 704 pages, Hardcover
Published: April 17, 2003 by Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195087413
ASIN: 0195087410
Language: English

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Virgilio (publius Vergilius Maro)

an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period...
Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (c.1265 - 1321), commonly known as Dante, was an Italian poet of the Middle Ages. He was born in Florence; he died and is buried in Ravenna. The name Dante is, according to the words of Jacopo Alighieri, a hypocorism for Durante. In contem...