New Releases by Dante Alighieri

The Divine Comedy of Dante- Paradise

This startling new translation of Dante''s Inferno is by Ciaran Carson, one of contemporary Ireland''s most dazzlingly gifted poets. Written in a vigorous and inventive contemporary idiom, while also reproducing the intricate rhyme-scheme that is so essential to the beauty and power of Dante''s epic, Carson''s virtuosic rendering of the Inferno is that rare thing—a translation with the heft and force of a true English poem. Like Seamus Heaney''s Beowulf and Ted Hughes''s Tales from Ovid, Ciaran Carson''s Inferno is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.

This translation of Dante''s lyrics follows the Barbi format and contains 118 poems. It seeks to follow the central issue of Dante''s aesthetic: championing vernacular poetry. Dante relied on his vernacular and so these translations rely on the common language of today''s speech, free verse, and open form, so as to give English readers an experience of Dante that is as contemporary to us as his poetic moment was to him. The original Italian appears on the facing pages of the text.

A text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse. Referred to by Dante as his libello, or "little book", The New Life is the first of two collections of verse written by Dante in his life. La Vita Nuova is a prosimetrum, a piece containing both verse and prose, in the vein of Boethius'' Consolation of Philosophy. Dante used each prosimetrum as a means for combining poems written over periods of roughly ten years - La Vita Nuova contains his works from before 1283 to roughly 1293. The collection and its style fit in with the movement called Dolce Stil Novo. The prose creates the illusion of narrative continuity between the poems; it is Dante''s way of reconstructing himself and his art in terms of his evolving sense of the limitations of courtly love (the system of ritualized love and art that Dante and his poet-friends inherited from the Provençal poets, the Sicilian poets of the court of Frederick II, and the Tuscan poets before them). Sometime in his twenties, Dante decided to try to write love poetry that was less centered on the self and more aimed at love as such: he intended to elevate courtly love poetry, many of its tropes and its language, into sacred love poetry. Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of love - transparent to the Absolute, inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor.

A Latin treatise on secular and religious power by Dante Alighieri, who wrote it between 1312 and 1313. The great Italian poet turns his hand to political thought and defends the reign of a single monarch ruling over a universal empire. He believed that peace was only achievable when a single monarch replaced divisive and squabbling princes and kings.

The poem discusses "the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward",[4] and describes Dante''s travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.