Lectura Dantis, Inferno: A Canto-by-Canto Commentary

✍ Scribed by Allen Mandelbaum (editor); Anthony Oldcorn (editor); Charles Ross (editor)

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 473
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The California Lectura Dantis is the long-awaited companion to the three-volume verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum of Dante's Divine Comedy. Mandelbaum's translation, with facing original text and with illustrations by Barry Moser, has been praised by Robert Fagles as "exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths," and by the late James Merrill as "lucid and strong . . . with rich orchestration . . . overall sweep and felicity . . . and countless free, brilliant, utterly Dantesque strokes." Charles Simic called the work "a miracle. A lesson in the art of translation and a model (an encyclopedia) for poets. The full range and richness of American English is displayed as perhaps never before."

This collection of commentaries on the first part of the Comedy consists of commissioned essays, one for each canto, by a distinguished group of international scholar-critics. Readers of Dante will find this Inferno volume an enlightening and indispensable guide, the kind of lucid commentary that is truly adapted to the general reader as well as the student and scholar.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Introduction. Dante in His Age
Canto I. The Hard Begin
Canto II. Dante's Authority
CANTO III. The Gate of Hell
CANTO IV. A Melancholy Elysium
CANTO V. The Fierce Dove
CANTO VI. Florence, Ciacco, and the Gluttons
CANTO VII. The Weal of Fortune
CANTO VIII. Fifth Circle: Wrathful and Sullen
CANTO IX. The Harrowing of Dante from Upper Hell
CANTO X. Farinata and Cavalcante
CANTO XI. Malice and Mad Bestiality
CANTO XII. The Violent against Their Neighbors
CANTO XIII. The Violent against Themselves
CANTO XIV. Capaneus and the Old Man of Crete
CANTO XV. The Canto of Brunetto Latini
CANTO XVI. From Other Sodomites to Fraud
CANTO XVII. Geryon's Downward Flight; the Usurers
CANTO XVIII. Introduction to Malebolge
CANTO XIX. Simoniacs
CANTO XX. True and False See-ers
CANTO XXI. Controversial Comedy
CANTO XXII. Poets as Scoundrels
CANTO XXIII. The Painted People
CANTO XXIV. Thieves and Metamorphoses
CANTO XXV. The Perverse Image
CANTO XXVI. Ulysses: Persuasion versus Prophecy
CANTO XXVII. False Counselors: Guido da Montefeltro
CANTO XXVIII. Scandal and Schism
CANTO XXIX. Such Outlandish Wounds
CANTO XXX. Dante among the Falsifiers
CANTO XXXI. The Giants: Majesty and Terror
CANTO XXXII. Amphion and the Poetics of Retaliation
CANTO XXXIII. Count Ugolini and Others
CANTO XXXIV. Lucifer
Bibliographical Note and Suggestions for Further Reading
Contributors
Index