Inferno (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry)
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Books › Poetry › European › Italian
ISBN: 0486442888 / Publisher: Dover Publications, August 2005
The first stop on Dante's famous journey from Hell to Purgatory to Paradise, this 14th-century allegorical poem blends vivid and shocking imagery with graceful lyricism. Translated by the beloved 19th-century poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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<div>"Here at last that much suffering reader will find Dante's greatness manifest, and not his greatness only, but his grace, his simplicity, and his affection." — William Dean Howells, <i>The Nation</i><br>"As a crown to his literary life, Longfellow combines his exquisite scholarship and his poetic skill and experience in the translation of one of the great poems of the world." — <i>Harper's Monthly</i><br>Enter the unforgettable world of <i>The Inferno</i> and travel with a pair of poets through nightmare landscapes of eternal damnation to the very core of Hell. The first of the three major canticles in <i>La divina commedia</i> (The Divine Comedy), this fourteenth-century allegorical poem begins Dante's imaginary journey from Hell to Purgatory to Paradise. His encounters with historical and mythological creatures — each symbolic of a particular vice or crime — blend vivid and shocking imagery with graceful lyricism in one of the monumental works of world literature.<br>This acclaimed translation was rendered by the beloved nineteenth-century poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A skilled linguist who taught modern languages at Harvard, Longfellow was among the first to make Dante’s visionary poem accessible to American readers.</div>
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