Library Journal
Prolific translator Raffel (Distinquished Professor Emeritus of Arts & Humanities, Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette) has produced a new verse translation of the complete Divine Comedy, joining those of John Ciardi, Mark Musa, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, and others. Raffel, whose recent translations include The Canterbury Tales and Das Nibelungenlied, offers a serviceable version of Dante, observing Dante's rhyme scheme and basic rhythms. His choice of diction, however, is a bit staid, flattening some of Dante's idiomatic registers. The overall effect is somewhat ponderous. Raffel's version also includes an introduction by Paul J. Contino (great books, Pepperdine Univ.) and extensive informational notes by Henry L. Carrigan Jr. (senior editor/assistant director at the press and an LJ reviewer). As with the translation, these are serviceable but offer no great insight into the text. VERDICT A competent translation that does not supersede any of the others that are currently available. While Raffel is a good poet and his translation is accurate, Musa's and Pinsky's translations remain the preferred choices for general readers and students owing to their fluency and vigor.—T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, GA
Publishers Weekly
Do we really need yet another translation of Dante’s world-famous journey through the three parts of the Catholic afterlife? We might, if the translator is both as eminent, and as skillful, as Clive James: the Australian-born, London-based TV personality, cultural critic, poet and memoirist (Opal Sunset) is one of the most recognizable writers in Britain. James’s own poetry has been fluent, moving, sometimes funny, but it would not augur the kind of fire his Dante displays. Over decades (in part as an homage to his Dante-scholar wife, Prue Shaw), James has worked to turn Dante’s Italian, with its signature three-part rhymes, into clean English pentameter quatrains, and to produce a Dante that could eschew footnotes, by incorporating everything modern readers needed to know into the verse—from the mythological anti-heroes of Hell through the Florentine politics, medieval astronomy, and theology of Heaven. Sometimes these lines are sharply beautiful too: souls in Purgatory “had their eyelids stitched with iron wire/ Like untamed falcons.” Even in Heaven, notoriously hard to animate, James keeps things clear and easy to follow, if at times pedestrian in his language: “I want to fill your bare mind with a blaze/ Of living light that sparkles in your eyes,” says Dante’s Beatrice, and if the individual phrases do not always sparkle, it is a wonder to see the light cast by the whole. (Apr.)
Booklist
“Daring… Deciding that Dante’s terza rima is too strained in English, he uses robust, rollicking quatrains… James’ revitalizing translation allows this endlessly analyzed, epic, archetypal ‘journey to salvation’ to once again stride, whirl, blaze, and sing. Anyone heretofore reluctant to pick up The Divine Comedy will discover that James’ bold, earthy, rhythmic and rhyming, all-the-way live English translation fulsomely and brilliantly liberates the profound humanity of Dante’s timeless masterpiece.”
Stephen Greenblatt
“Clive James's translation of The Divine Comedy is a remarkable achievement: not a scowling marble Dante of sublime set pieces but a living, breathing poet shifting restlessly through a dizzying succession of moods, perceptions and passions. Under James's uncanny touch, seven long centuries drop away, and the great poem is startlingly fresh and new.”
Edward Mendelson
“This is the translation that many of us had abandoned all hope of finding. Clive James's version is the only one that conveys Dante’s variety, depth, subtlety, vigor, wit, clarity, mystery and awe in rhymed English stanzas that convey the music of Dante’s triple rhymes. This book lets Dante’s genius shine through as it never did before in English verse, and is a reminder that James’s poetry has always been his finest work.”
Library Journal
Prolific author, journalist, and British television personality James offers a modern verse translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. This is the product of 40 years of thought and conversation with his wife, Prue Shaw, a noted Danteist and romance-language philologist. Working from the premise that the greatness of Dante's poetry resides in its command of verse and language, James seeks a version in idiomatic English rather than attempting to replicate the elements of Dante's rhyme, meter, and other verbal features. His goal is to make the whole of the work, not just the more lurid parts of the Inferno, interesting to contemporary readers. Poetically, the results are very good English verse, but much of Dante's verbal symbolism and structural patterns is lost. James eschews footnotes or other scholarly apparatus, instead working the identity of various significant figures into the body of his text. VERDICT James offers here a vigorous, poetic paraphrase of the Comedy rather than a translation. Those interested in something closer to the formal properties of the original should stick with translations by Allen Mandelbaum, Mark Musa, Robert Pinsky, or Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander.—Thomas Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, GA
