INFERNO by Dante Alighieri

"Love, which absolves no beloved one from loving,
seized me so strongly with his charm
that, as thou seest, it does not leave me yet."

―from THE DIVINE COMEDY: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso (in one volume) by Dante Alighieri

THE DIVINE COMEDY, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity. Mandelbaum’s astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets. This Everyman’s edition–containing in one volume all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso–includes an introduction by Nobel Prize—winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli's marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations. READ more here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/229205/the-divine-comedy/

"It is so bitter death is hardly more so. But to set forth the good I found I will recount the other things I saw. How I came there I cannot really tell, I was so full of sleep when I forsook the one true way. But when I reached the foot of a hill, there where the valley ended that had pierced my heart with fear, looking up, I saw its shoulders arrayed in the first light of the planet that leads men straight, no matter what their road. Then the fear that had endured in the lake of my heart, all the night I spent in such distress, was calmed."
―from INFERNO by Dante Alighieri

The epic grandeur of Dante’s masterpiece has inspired readers for 700 years, and has entered the human imagination. But the further we move from the late medieval world of Dante, the more a rich understanding and enjoyment of the poem depends on knowledgeable guidance. Robert Hollander, a renowned scholar and master teacher of Dante, and Jean Hollander, an accomplished poet, have written a beautifully accurate and clear verse translation of the first volume of Dante’s epic poem, the Divine Comedy. Featuring the original Italian text opposite the translation, this edition also offers an extensive and accessible introduction and generous commentaries that draw on centuries of scholarship as well as Robert Hollander’s own decades of teaching and research. The Hollander translation is the new standard in English of this essential work of world literature. READ an excerpt here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/225152/the-inferno/