NEW RESOURCES: THE GREATEST POEM?
Why Dante's The Divine Comedy is the Best Contender
An Epic Tale of Heaven, Hell and Undying, Unearthly Love
DANTE ALIGHIERI IS IN MY OPINION THE GREATEST POET OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. He is not the oldest (that honor probably goes to the ancient Greek poet Homer), but he is the most formidable, the one who created a three-book masterpiece titled The Divine Comedy, a narrative poem of his journey through the three stages of the underworld and beyond that are ready to receive the dying soul -- Hell (or Inferno), Purgatory, and Paradise.
The 14,000-line epic written in 1321 depicts the state of the soul after death. T. S. Eliot called it the most beautiful poetry ever written. And it marked the birth of the Italian language, making that tongue the medium of all future poetry in Italy: one that everyone could read and understand.
Dante gets started on his travels through the afterlife when he finds himself in a midlife crisis, lost in a dark wood, symbolic of the confusion of his soul at that point in his life. Unsure of which way to turn, he is greeted by his guide for the phantasmagorical journey, the great Roman poet Virgil, whose epic, The Aeneid, ranks with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as foundational works of Western Europe and, by extension, our own culture.
Virgil is helping Dante not by his personal devices, but because he has been summoned by Beatrice, the love of Dante's life, whom he has barely met, let alone interacted with, but who holds his heart in her hands, from age 9, when he first glimpsed her, to her untimely death.
This dominant motif alone shows how foolhardy it is to try to summarize the magnificance of Dante's poem in a text like this, but there are many translations into English to help you find your way through the monumental work. I prefer the American translator Allen Mandelbaum's powerful and mellifluous blank-verse version, which held me rapt, as I read a chapter of Paradiso, the culminating entrance into Paradise, each morning while staying outside Assisi, Umbria, in Italy. It was a memorable and enriching experience that I hope you can share.
Below is an article about some of your translation choices. Of course, you can simply scroll through options online, and settle on which version strikes your fancy. In any case, enjoy.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/which-dante-translation-is-best
