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The divine comedy
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- 'Finally I realised that I had been practising for this job every time I wrote a quatrain . . . I had spent all this time - the greater part of a lifetime - preparing my instruments.' The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James's vivid translation - his life's work and decades in the making - presents Dante's entire epic poem in a single song. While many poets and translators have attempted to capture the full glory of The Divine Comedy in English, many have fallen short. Victorian verse translations established an unfortunate tradition of reproducing the sprightly rhyming measures of Dante but at the same time betraying the strain on the translator's powers of invention. For Dante, the dramatic human stories of Hell were exciting, but the spiritual studies of Purgatory and the sublime panoramas of Heaven were no less so. In this incantatory translation, James - defying the convention by writing in quatrains - tackles these problems head-on and creates a striking and hugely accessible translation that gives us The Divine Comedy as a whole, unified, and dramatic work.
- About The Author
- Clive James was the author of more than forty books. As well as essays, he published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing, verse and novels, plus five volumes of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week Was In June, North Face of Soho and The Blaze of Obscurity. As a television performer he appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV, most notably as writer and presenter of the Postcard series of travel documentaries. He published several poetry collections, including the Sunday Times bestseller Sentenced to Life, and a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, which was also a Sunday Times bestseller. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature. He holds honorary doctorates from Sydney University and the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013, an Officer of the Order of Australia. He died in 2019.
- Product Details
-
- ISBN
- 9781447244226
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Picador, (04 June 2015)
- Number of Pages
- 560
- Weight
- 382 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 197 x 130 x 38 mm
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