Description
Prue Shaw’s absorbing, highly accessible introduction to the Commedia promises to be the essential edition for years to come
Dante’s epic story of a man’s journey from darkness to the revelation of divine light is one of the greatest works of Western literature. Because of its length and its language, it is viewed as forbidding. Undergraduate courses often cherry-pick from the Inferno and barely glance at Purgatorio and Paradiso.
In The Essential Commedia, Prue Shaw fillets the epic to create an absorbing tour of all three realms of the afterlife. Extensive passages, astutely excerpted, are offered in translation alongside the original, making it easy to read Dante in English, Italian or both. The translation into modern, idiomatic English avoids archaisms, padding and syntactic contortions. With no loss of rigour, a complex text is rendered accessible by a teacher whose decades of experience enable her to highlight those aspects of the poem readers will appreciate.
Reviews
"At last, the greatest of all Italian poets and everything you need to know about him in one fat volume of lucidity and lightly worn learning." — Howard Jacobson, 'Books of the Year 2025', New Statesman
"The Essential Commedia isn’t a standard translation but a radically abridged version of the text, with chunks of the poem (in Italian and in Shaw’s translation) set like jewels into a running commentary made up of narrative bridges, historical context, interpretation, and occasional witty asides. It all fits into one volume… and Shaw—a first-rate British Dante scholar—provides a momentum of her own." — Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker
"Those who have previously quailed or failed before the Commedia will relish Prue Shaw’s new version. It cleverly runs its commentary in and out of the text, and (whisper it quietly) is not afraid to cut or summarize the boring bits. And for the first time, I understood the Paradiso." — Julian Barnes
Also By: Dante Alighieri 
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E Book, 2014
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Ebook
9781324096214
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£25.64
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