The Divine Comedy
Picador, $32.99 pb, 526 pp
Dante’s salvific journey
During a visit to Adelaide in 2013 as a keynote speaker at the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies ‘Re-imagining Italian Studies’ conference, Professor Martin McLaughlin (Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies and Fellow of Magdalen College) made the following observation about Clive James’s translation of The Divine Comedy:
There are many innovations in Clive James’s version that make it stand out as being fit for purpose in our century: he is the first to incorporate information normally found in footnotes into the text itself; he is the first to use a flexible quatrain rather than blank verse or terza rima as his metre; and he is the first to pay explicit attention to poetic tempo and texture.
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