内容简介
This brilliant new verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
captures the consummate beauty of the third and last part of
Dante's Divine Comedy. The Paradiso is a luminous poem of love and
light, of optics, angelology, polemics, prayer, prophecy, and
transcendent experience. As Dante ascends to the Celestial Rose, in
the tenth and final heaven, all the spectacle and splendor of a
great poet's vision now becomes accessible to the modern reader in
this highly acclaimed, superb dual language edition. With extensive
notes and commentary.
作者简介
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy in 1265. His early
poetry falls into the tradition of love poetry that passed from the
Provencal to such Italian poets as Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's friend
and mentor. Dante's first major work is the Vita Nuova, 1293-1294.
This sequence of lyrics, sonnets, and prose narrative describes his
love, first earthly, then spiritual, for Beatrice, whom he had
first seen as a child of nine, and who had died when Dante was 25.
Dante married about 1285, served Florence in battle, and rose to a
position of leadership in the bitter factional politics of the
city-state. As one of the city's magistrates, he found it necessary
to banish leaders of the so-called "Black" faction, and his friend
Cavalcanti, who like Dante was a prominent "White." But after the
Blacks seized control of Florence in 1301, Dante himself was tried
in absentia and was banished from the city on pain of death. He
never returned to Florence. We know little about Dante's life in
exile. Legend has it that he studied at Paris, but if so, he
returned to Italy, for his last years were spent in Verona and
Ravenna. In exile he wrote his Convivio, kind of poetic compendium
of medieval philosophy, as well as a political treatise, Monarchia.
He began his Comedy (later to be called the Divine Comedy) around
1307-1308. On a diplomatic mission to Venice in 1321, Dante fell
ill, and returned to Ravenna, where he died.