Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Dante’s salvific journey

by
December 2014, no. 367

The Divine Comedy by Dante, translated by Clive James

Picador, $32.99 pb, 526 pp

Dante’s salvific journey

by
December 2014, no. 367

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.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.