Purgatory (Dante, tr. Sayers)

The second volume of Sayers's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, published by Penguin Books in 1955 and, like the first, widely sold. It renders the Purgatorio in terza rima with notes on each canto and a long introduction, in which she advised readers to set aside the distinction between prose and poetry and to approach the Comedy as they would a serious and intelligent novel, since in Dante's century the allegorical poem was the dominant literary form. Where Dante gives the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel his own language, Sayers renders the passage in a Southern Scots dialect, a choice some readers have found jarring.