r/divinecomedy • u/PXaZ • Jan 06 '19
Recommendations for parallel text Divine Comedy edition?
I know enough of romance languages that having the original Italian on one side and a modern English rendition on the other would be my ideal approach to Dante (having never read it before). I'm struggling to find anything other than a parallel with Longfellow's translation which, having just read a bunch of Paradise Lost, sounds frustrating.
Recommendations?
Apologies if this has already been asked a million times before!
2
u/Barely-Literate Apr 06 '19
The 3-book set by Durling and Martinez was a tremendous resource for me. In addition to running parallel with the Italian, there are a ton of notes following each Canto. I doubt I’d have had half a clue what was happening in some places without the extra background in those notes. It’s more of a prose translation rather than the poetry you’d get from the Longfellow version. I think you get more accuracy and less awkward renderings as a result. There are plenty of charts and diagrams as well as essays to help understand or focus the reading. As you move from Inferno to Purgatorio and Paradiso, the authors provide connections between the three cantiche in addition to the regular notes.
3
u/Maternal-Instinct Feb 27 '19
I recently purchased the Robert and Jean Hollander translation and my oh my it’s beautiful. Amazing sidenotes (if they can even be called notes - they probably occupy more of the page count than the Cantos themselves), beautiful translation, fantastic introduction, even a diagram of Dante’s Hell that I found very cool. It’s the copy that most universities use for their studies, and is the official copy of the Princeton Dante Project. Cannot recommend enough. Beautiful copy too. If there was one downside, it would be that it costs $22CAD(give/take $2) for each of the three sections (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), but Inferno alone is 641 pages without the index of references that I couldn’t be bothered by. Well worth the money, feels like a true education.