Discover this fresh, pacy, modern translation of an enduring literary classic.
Halfway through life, you find yourself lost, unsure of the right path. Greed, deception and pride have led you away from the ideals and dreams you cherished in younger days. How do you go on?
This is the starting point of one of the most extraordinary and important journeys in western literature, a stunningly ambitious flight of imagination and philosophy which has reverberated down the years since Dante Alighieri first wrote it down in the fourteenth century. The Divine Comedy is a vision of the afterlife, the three regions of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, through which the narrator must journey in order to better understand the workings of the universe, the love of God, and his place in the world.
Poet and translator Steve Ellis translated the Inferno in 1994, and it was greeted with great acclaim. Now Ellis's translation of the entire poem is published here for the first time, and Dante's epic can be experienced afresh and in new glorious life and colour, the physicality and immediacy of Dante's verse rendered in English as never before.
A NEW TRANSLATION BY STEVE ELLIS
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy, circa 1265. During his time of exile Dante wrote the three poems which form The Divine Comedy. Steve Ellis, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, studied in Florence as part of his doctorate at the University of London. He holds a BA (in English and Art History) and a PhD (in Comparative Literature) from the University of London (UCL). Born in York, he has previously taught at several colleges in London and in Florence before moving to Birmingham in 1984 and his research interests lie primarily in the field of modernist literature leading up to World War II (especially the work of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) and in the modern reception of medieval writers (Dante, Chaucer). His poetry, collected in Home and Away (1987) and West Pathway (1993), is notable for its lyrically incisive views of the unsettling implications of everyday events; long sociocultural perspectives are opened in the course of shrewd considerations of modestly anecdotal material. Samples of his work are included in the popular anthology Poetry with an Edge (1988, edited by Neil Astley). He completed a verse translation of Dante's Hell in 1991. The English Eliot: Design, Language, and Landscape in Four Quartets (1991) is a notable work of criticism. His critical works include Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T.S Eliot, as well as a range of books on medieval and modern writing. His translation of Dante's Hell (Inferno) was originally published in 1994.
