Ebook: The Divine Comedy: Inferno: Commentary

Charles S. Singleton’s edition of the Divine Comedy, of which this is the first part, provides the English-speaking reader with everything he needs to read and understand Dante’s great masterpiece.

The Italian text here is in the edition of Giorgio Petrocchi, the leading Italian editor of Dante. Professor Singleton’s prose translation, facing the Italian in a line-for-line arrangement on each page, is smooth and literate. The companion volume, the Commentary, marshals every point of information the reader may require: vocabulary; grammar; identification of Dante’s characters; historical sources of some of the incidents and, where pertinent, excerpts from those sources in their original languages and in translation; profound clear analysis of the Divine Comedy’s basic allegory. There is a complete bibliography of every aspect of Dante studies.