In the Library
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri, 1320
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 8 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Henry Francis Cary
- Original
- Original it
- Chapters
- Chapters 100
- Length
- Length 108k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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All hope abandon ye who enter here.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Divine Comedy
A poem whose reputation as the most learned and forbidding work in the Western canon hides the fact that it is, on the ground, a vivid first-person account of a frightened man walking through Hell and meeting the dead.
The Divine Comedy carries a reputation for being the most intimidating poem ever written, a thicket of medieval theology and thirteenth-century Italian politics so dense that you supposedly need a degree and a stack of commentaries before you can read a single canto. There is real difficulty here and this guide will be honest about exactly where it lives, but the reputation badly misrepresents the experience of the thing. What you are actually opening is a gripping travelogue narrated in the first person by a man who tells you, in the very first lines, that he woke in a dark wood in the middle of his life and was terrified, and then describes everything he saw on the strangest journey anyone ever took.
If you like this, try
Paradise Lost
John Milton
Milton builds his own cosmos with the same ambition, but chooses rebellion over pilgrimage.
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The Aeneid
Virgil
Dante's guide through Hell wrote this, and you can feel why he was chosen.
£1.99
Faust (Part I)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe sends another soul through damnation and redemption, with the wager Dante never needed.
£1.99
About the book
Midway along the road of life, the path simply gives out: the poet wakes in a dark wood, no memory of how he strayed, three beasts barring the way back. What saves him is a descent. Down through nine circles of Hell he goes, past popes and Florentine neighbors fixed forever in weather Dante built to fit their sins, the lustful blown like starlings on an endless wind, the traitors locked in ice. Virgil walks him through the dark; Beatrice, the girl he loved and lost when she died at twenty-four, waits to carry him up. This is the astonishment of it: a single exiled poet mapped the entire afterlife, Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, and set his own grief at its center, all in the Florentine speech he was helping to invent. He climbs until language nearly fails him, and then names what he sees: the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.