By its very title, 'The Divine comedy' announces its theological purpose. For those not so inclined, the 'Inferno' offered many subsidiary pleasures - compelling narrative drive (both in the adventure of two men descinding into hell, and in the stories of the people they meet); an overpowering visual sense, both in the grand design of Hell's geography and the plan of its punishments, and in the individual details of the sinner's torments; and the endearing characterisation of the heroes, Virgil the stern, noble guide, and Dante, the clumsy, gossipy Everyman.

'Purgatory' has fewer of these delights. Here, it is impossible to avoid the doctrine. Every vast visual set-piece (the Angel fighting off the snake in the Valley of the Princes; the Holy Pageant that stuns the Pilgrim in Eden, complete with griffin-drawn chariot; the masque involving violence to said chariot by eagles, foxes, seven-headed monsters and giants) are all so allegorically pre-determined, each feature a religious symbol, that they lack the dramatic force that would have made their images truly poetic.

The plan of Purgatory - the AntePurgatory where those who left repentance to the last moment must wait; the mountain itself, where seven terraces represent the Deadly Sins to be purged; the crowning Earthly Paradise, or Eden, the gateway to Heaven - bears no real comparison, for the reader, to Hell: one's sympathy naturally inclines towards the eternally damned, and one almost resents the complaints of the saved complaining of their discomforture. The stories told the Pilgrim are also of a lesser order - perhaps proving pure evil to be more (aesthetically) attractive than contrition.

There are some moments when genuine terror intrudes - the visions of violation and tempting lust dreamt by the Pilgrim; the baptism of fire he must pass before entering Eden; the show-trial with Beatrice; while tortuous similes and evocations of nature are framed in poetry of intricate beauty (see Borges remarkable essay on the infinite metaphor in Canto 1).

Mark Musa, like most American annotators, has not heeded the lessons of Charles Kinbote, and his commentary to 'Purgatory' is almost loopily overwritten. He is an amiable, enthusiastic and informative guide, and if his translating choices are sometimes questionable, he has the grace to offer other alternatives. His explanation of the purpose of each image or scene makes it easier to follow the poem with greater understanding (if not necessarily enjoyment). But because he concentrates on every line with such minute detail, he frequently misses the wider design, and so, when he is puzzled by lines that don't fit his view of the Comedy, he has a tendency to blame Dante rather than himself.

This is the second volume of Alighieri Dante's classic Divine Comedy. It tells the tale of Dante's journey through Purgatory, led by his guide, Virgil. Having passed through the depths of Hell (the Inferno) in the first volume, Dante and Virgil ascend the mountain of Purgatory, passing its many allegorical characters and observing the penances they must fulfill. The Divine Comedy is a beautiful, epic poem that takes the reader through a wide emotional spectrum and many vivid, picturesque scenes from Dante's fictional afterlife.

This translation was wonderful. Each of the 33 Cantos (Chapters) is set up in this sequence: 1) a short summation by the translator, 2) the poem, and 3) notes on names, characters, and items referenced by Dante. The translator, Mark Musa, even explains in his notes when he has a differing interpretation of a word or phrase than other translators' have had.

Dante used so many references to Greek mythology and events that were common knowledge to educated people of the 13th-14th Century that this poem, without notes, is entirely esoteric and fully appreciated only by the most erudite modern-day readers. Mark Musa brings every reader up to par with his thorough, easily-read notes; thereby making this classic poem a very entertaining and profound experience.

Inferno is the most famous of the trio of volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy. But don't stop there. Purgatory is a beautiful work, illustrating the rise of the human soul through Purgatory's nine ledges. I found it beautiful how the souls were not hurrying. They waited patiently, yet eagerly.

Musa's translation makes all the difference. The language is accessible, but not irreverent or vulgar. A routine I found helpful was to read the introduction to each canto, read the canto, then read all the notes, checking back to reinforce meanings or double check a name or place.

The Pilgrim's journey through this volume is heavily illustrative of God's grace, and yet the idea of each person's responsibilities to God are clear.

Don't stop reading after Inferno. These stirring translations by Musa make it possible to read, understand and love the whole Divine Comedy.

The "New Life" was occasioned by Dante's integration of his meeting of the divine Beatrice and the meaning she held for him in his own psyche. As such, it is an indispensable precursor to understanding his "Commedia" trilogy. This work is fascinating because through it we experience Dante's growth, from your run-of-the-mill medieval troubadour praising courtly love, to a man raised to the heights of ecstasy by way of his soul's true guide, Beatrice. A Jungian might say Beatrice was Dante's anima, projected onto a flesh-and-blood woman. But Beatrice is no malicious deciever (as Jung described); she is more akin to Goethe's meaning at the end of "Faust II"--"The eternal feminine/lures to perfection" or Joyce's tranfiguration at the sight of the maiden "gently stirring the water with her foot" in the "Portrait." Dante's work is brilliant not only because it reveals the spiritual urge lying beneath the veneer of romantic love (a collective illusion that our culture still labors under) but because Dante guides us through his own inner journey, from goo-goo-eyed adulator weeping because love 'hurts so good,' through his psychological turn within to question his own need for a woman's "pity," and on to his final integration of the feminine within, no longer dominated by his own unconscious need and able to follow Her from the depths of his own soul to the heights of glory. Mark Musa is also the translator of the highly touted Indiana Critical Edition of the "Commedia." But I found his translation occasionally stilted and unpoetic, when a few changes would have smoothed both verse and prose. The footnotes were nearly useless, their content was often obvious or uninformative. And they are very awkard to use: they are denoted in the text by an * rather than a number and keyed in the Appendix by page number. Unfortunately, only about half the pages are actually numbered, making the system cumbersome indeed. That said, I end with this: Read it and weep. And revel in its majesty.

La Vita Nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum, a work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over approximately a ten-year period. The Vita Nuova brought together Dante's poetic efforts from before 1283 to about 1292-93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante's most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of La Divina Commedia.

The Vita Nuova, which Dante called his libello, or little book, is a remarkable work. It contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a fifth canzoni is left dramatically interrupted by the death of Beatrice (perhaps Bice Portinari, a woman Dante met and fell in love with in 1274 but who died in 1290). In Beatrice, Dante created one of the most celebrated women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante's thoughts and career, Beatrice underwent enormous changes in his hands--sanctified in the Vita Nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented again in the Convivio, only to be returned with more profound comprehension in La Divina Commedia as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the "vulgar herd" to Paradise.

The prose commentary provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course, conceivable that some were actually written for occasions other than those alleged). The story, however, is simple enough and tells of Dante's first sight of Beatrice when both were nine years of age, her salutation when they were eighteen, Dante's expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante's anguish that she is making light of him, his determination to rise above the anguish and sing only of his lady's virtues, anticipations of her death in that of a young friend, the death of Beatrice's father, and Dante's own premonitory dream, and finally, the death of Beatrice, Dante's mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice's final triunph and apotheosis, and, in the last chapter, Dante's determination to write at some later time about Beatrice, "that which has never been written of any woman."

Yet, with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose, the Vita Nuova is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality. Names are rarely used...Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante's "best friend," Dante's sister is referred to as "she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood." On the one hand, Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other, he seem to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which Dante arranged poems written over a ten-year period and the generality of his poetic language are indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of the local poets.

The Italian of the Vita Nuova is Dante's own gorgeous Tuscan dialect, a limpid, ethereal and luminous Italian that seems as though it could have been written yesterday. In chapter XXX of the Vita Nuova, Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. In fact, Dante dedicated the Vita Nuova to Cavalcanti--to his best friend (primo amico).

Anyone who can, should definitely read this beautiful book in its original Italian, but those who cannot can still enjoy the beauty of Dante in a good translation. The book isn't as difficult or intimidating as La Divina Commedia and it makes a beautiful introduction to those who love Dante but just want to enjoy a little less of him in the beginning.

It's hard not to assign 5 stars to this early work of the author of the Divine Comedy. In any serious Dante course, a professor will usually pick the Vita Nuovo as an introduction to Dante's work. The work is not at all intimidating -- rather, it's quite accessible to the modern reader. Dante, in his youth, writes a series of love tributes to Beatrice, his ultimate guide in the Divine Comedy. Anyone who is contemplating reading the Divine Comedy should start here and read this first as mandatory background to the Commedia. Dante rules!

The masterpiece of one of the greater Italian writers of the twentieth century. The search of the own roots and the sense of the own life returning to the origin countryside after emigration in America. Also one meaningful testimony on Italy during and after the second world war (and on the point of view of an Italian on the U.S. in that time). Still today a book a lot being involved.

The Italian philosopher, Fransesco Petracha (1304-74), who was responsible for the recovery of many Latin manuscripts, who was one of the primary causes of the revival of Latin letters, and who, like Dante, wrote much of his poetry in the vulgar tongue, is one of the greatest poets of all time and one of the most influential men in the history of the western world. Of the poems he wrote in his native Italian, 366 have survived under the name "Canzoniere" (short-song). Roughly 45 of the 366 poems are provided here in an excellent, faithful translation which steers clear of that cancerous and faulty element in poetry--the rhyme. They were carefully selected for their content, so the discouraging number of 45 poems seems bigger when the editor's subtle discretion is taken into account. The basis of these poems--like Dante's Beatrice and Catallus' Lesbia--rests mostly upon Petrach's undying love for Laura, but at times his verse resounds with political and religious themes, and with praises of Rome's past and the Italy of his own time. Every poem will be an enjoyable read; they are always profound and inspiring in their glorification of feminine beauty; and the vivid and picturesque allusions to nature are always soothing and edifying. One may easily see, after reading Petrach's "Canzoniere," Horace handing Petrach his pen and Virgil his laurel crown, for they were as real to him as the lines of his poetry. They guided him through the fields of Italy and lent him breaths of inspiration along the way. Petrarch was anything but a mean and vulgar poet; he deservedly stands out as great amongst the greatest. Also included are some short prose works (letters) which throw some significant light upon the life and character of Petrach. This conveniently sized collection of the poet laureate's works is thoroughly recommended.

Perhaps the Seattle teacher should learn what the word "editor" means: Bloom's role in this series is an EDITOR, not a WRITER. What Bloom does in this, and many other series, is sort through chaff to find the wheat of criticism, and presents it to his readers so that they will have a rounder view of the literature at hand. As always, some of this work is above the heads of all but the finest readers, but in Bloom's collection there is very little of the self-serving nonsense that passes for criticism these days. Kudos to Bloom Brontosaurus!

Truely a classic. A must read for everyone who can even remotely claim to know literature. Read it--now--you won't regret it.

It is very difficult to review so superb a work but i will try:in short there are two basics things in the Divina Commedia that attract the reader:one is a very comprehensive descripition of medieval society,history,religion and science made by a first class scholar like Dante Alighieri,the other is a most penetrating and revealing analysis of the "ethernal" human being with all the good and the bad everyone of us experiences in his daily life.In the Commedia every aspect of life is examined and accounted for.But i think that the real magic of Dante is the almost super-natural ability to express his views in the most exquisitely crafted verses of Italian literature.Try for example to read Dante and Virgilio encounter with Ulysses or with Paolo and Francesca and you will be almost lifted by the author powers of dramatic rendering of life to another plane of existence and knoweldge.I adore Dante and hope everyone loves him too!Best Italian book ever written!