A review by ianbanks
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

5.0

I've never read The Divine Comedy before: I was drawn to this edition because it was translated by Clive James, who is a magnificent author in his own right.

The warning signs were in front of me when I read the introduction: Mr James was hoping to give the reader an authentic experience by doing away with foot/ endnotes and was instead fleshing out the biographical details of the characters that Dante meets on his journey.

Big mistake: Dante appears to have met anybody who was anybody in Italian history in his travels throughout Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Expecting a casual reader to not need some sort of reference guide is overestimating your audience in a big way. Or this member of it, anyway.

(Sidenote: anybody who has ever taught me or been in a class with me will be surprised to hear me say that. However, since I stopped needing to take notes or pay attention I have undergone a dramatic seachange in my attitude towards reference material. Somewhere along the way I became the sort of reader who is always putting down a book to look something up or find some other details to help flesh out my understanding of a text. That's the difference between set reading and reading for pleasure.)

But once I made it through Hell and was part-way through Purgatory, I found myself checking my history books and Wikipedia a little less often. Mostly because the names were starting to make sense in context and I could start enjoying the book as a book.

And there is a lot to enjoy. Apparently, James has taken a novel approach to the text and translated it into quatrains and used some modern language in places. As I said above, I haven't read the Comedy before and I am not a classicist (although I'm a snob, if that helps) so I didn't have a lot of baggage when it came to reading this. I knew it was a poem, though, so I was just grateful that I wasn't dealing with that fell beast known as the "prose translation."

This does make it more accessible to readers but I am not going to be the person to tell you if it makes it a lesser reading experience. I didn't care: when I finally stopped looking stuff up and started to read it properly, I loved it. It's immediate and exciting and filled with the gossipy details of a history written close to the time it happened.

And it works as poetry: translations are hard to manage on a regular basis when it's just prose that you're dealing with. Poetry is a different order of magnitude altogether - poetry that is 700 years old next year is an even more tricksy beast to tame and to make it readable and current is an astonishing task.

Just don't forget a reference book.