A masterful translation and exhaustive commentary of Dante's Paradise with facing Italian text.

Volume 5. Paradise: Italian Text with Verse Translation
Volume 6. Paradise: Notes and Commentary

Mark Musa's vivid two-volume verse translation of and commentary on the Paradiso completes Indiana's six-volume edition of the Divine Comedy. Musa has revised his earlier version, long cited as the most accessible and reliable of the English translations. The first volume presents his translation and the Italian text on facing pages; the second volume comprises his lifetime study of the Paradiso, in which Musa examines and discusses the critical commentary of other Dante scholars and presents his own ideas and interpretations.

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Musa's final additions to his Indiana Masterpiece Editions of Dante's Divine Comedy provide a fitting culmination to a lifetime of thinking about, studying, and teaching the poem. As with the earlier two-volume releases in the set—vols. 1-2, the Inferno text and commentary (CH, Oct'97, 35—0804); vols. 3-4, the Purgatory text and commentary (2000)—the first in this pair offers a revised version of Musa's well-known translation of The Divine Comedy (1984), and the second provides a detailed textual and interpretive commentary based on thorough familiarity with both canonical and contemporary scholarship, in English and Italian alike. The many virtues of both translation (clarity, readability, accuracy) and commentary (comprehensiveness, erudition, critical acumen) earn Musa's six-volume masterwork a place of honor alongside the established achievements of John Ciardi and Allen Mandelbaum—and the ongoing work of Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, and of Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez—in the pantheon of distinguished recent American versions of Dante's monumental (though perhaps, alas, eternally elusive) masterpiece. Summing Up: Essential. All collections; all levels.January 2006