DLS’s edition gives the reader as much guidance, illustration, explanation and interpretation as s/he would ever need, and more. The poet is creating a whole landscape, geography and cosmology, distilling all that Christian tradition and classical literature had to say about the world, the underworld and the afterlife into a traveller’s tale. ![]() DLS’s vigour, clarity and sheer love for the Divine Comedy are a huge encouragement to the timid. However, let’s hear it for a bit of good old-fashioned scholarship. Her edition for Penguin Classics is a classic in its own right, having been kept in print alongside a much more recent edition, that no doubt takes advantage of modern scholarship. We merrily misquote ‘Abandon hope all ye…’ (H F Carey’s standard English translation has ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here’.) Paolo and Francesca, Count Ugolino, Dante’s idealised love Beatrice – all these characters and more have detached themselves from the poem and acquired a life of their own, having inspired the poets I HAVE read, from Chaucer through Milton and Byron to Eliot.Įmbarking upon Dante seemed too daunting, and would have remained so, until I became curious to know just how DLS had tackled it. ![]() This piece reflects on the experience of having one of my best-loved authors, Dorothy L Sayers, as a guide in this new reading venture.ĭante’s work is like Hamlet, the Psalms and Shakespeare’s Sonnets – it is amazing how much language, imagery and allusion from the Divine Comedy can be absorbed by one’s consciousness without having read it. There is time enough to absorb it at leisure, to put it down for a while and pick it up again – after all, it has taken me decades to get this far with one of the immense literary achievements of all time. This is a report on a work in progress: Dorothy L Sayers’ edition and translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy runs to 3 volumes and over 1000 pages, and I’m nowhere near halfway through it yet. ![]() Dante: The Divine Comedy, translated by Dorothy L Sayers
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