The Divine Comedy
For For readers who want the whole poem in one volume: Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in one hundred cantos. The three parts also stand as works of their own here.
Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia is a poem of one hundred cantos in three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, written in Italian in terza rima between roughly 1308 and Dante's death in 1321. He wrote it in exile. A Florentine politician of the White Guelf faction, Dante was condemned in 1302 and never allowed to return to his city, and the poem was composed in the years of wandering that followed. He called it simply a comedia, a story that begins in misery and ends in joy; the word divina was attached by later readers. The choice of the Italian vernacular rather than Latin was itself a statement that the whole journey of the soul could be told in the speech of ordinary people.
The poem opens with its narrator lost in a dark wood at the midpoint of life, unable to climb the mountain of virtue on his own. Guided first by the Roman poet Virgil, he descends through the nine circles of Hell, climbs the terraces of Mount Purgatory, and is then led by Beatrice through the heavenly spheres to a vision of God. Its central conviction is that sin is love disordered and that salvation is love rightly ordered. Hell is the fixed state of souls who have made a disordered love their own; Purgatory is the slow retraining of desire; Paradise is love perfected in the vision of "the love that moves the sun and the other stars." Dante works this out through concrete encounters with named figures, popes and poets, neighbors and enemies, so that moral theology becomes a drama of recognition. The poem draws on Scripture, Augustine, Aquinas and the classical tradition, and its layered structure invites reading on several levels at once, from the literal journey to the moral and spiritual pilgrimage of every Christian. It also pairs a severe judgment on corruption in church and state with a deep trust in grace, intercession and the transforming power of beloved persons, above all Beatrice and the Virgin Mary.
Seven centuries on, the poem remains the supreme imaginative account of the soul's ascent in the Western tradition, shaping writers from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot and countless readers who have found in it a map of their own disordered loves. It continues to matter because it refuses to separate doctrine from desire: it trains the imagination to see sin as bondage, repentance as labor, and heaven as the satisfaction of what the heart was made for.
Who should read this: Readers willing to give a long, demanding poem slow attention, ideally with a good commentary beside them, and anyone seeking a formative encounter with the medieval Christian imagination. It is not for those wanting a quick devotional or a plain doctrinal summary, nor for readers who will not wade through the dense political and theological references of the first two canticles to reach the third.
Editions
External off-site sources
Free downloads
- OTHER Divina Commedia (Project Gutenberg)Trans. Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow's blank-verse translation of the whole Comedy as a Project Gutenberg e-text (released 1997). The three canticles are also on Gutenberg separately (#1001-1003). The easiest way to read the Longfellow on screen.
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E.JHTGK0.JReport - OTHER Divina Commedia (CCEL)Trans. Henry Wadsworth LongfellowLongfellow's translation of the whole Comedy at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, readable online and as a download in several formats. The same text as the Gutenberg edition, in CCEL's reading layout.
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E.G9H8C7.KReport - PDF Divina Commedia (Internet Archive) PDTrans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1867Page images of the one-volume Longfellow translation of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, copyright 1867), from the University of California's copy: the printed book, for readers who want its pages.
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E.H9QZJA.JReport - 🎧 AUDIO Divina Commedia (LibriVox)Trans. Henry Wadsworth LongfellowA free LibriVox audiobook of Longfellow's translation of the whole Comedy, read by volunteers (about 12 hours 23 minutes), from the Gutenberg text.
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E.HNWP3F.PReport - 🎧 AUDIO Divina Commedia (LibriVox)Trans. Courtney LangdonA free LibriVox dramatic reading of Courtney Langdon's translation of the whole Comedy, with different volunteers voicing the speakers (about 13 hours, 101 sections).
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E.D5TFDZ.BReport - OTHER Divina Commedia (Project Gutenberg)Trans. Henry Francis CaryHenry Francis Cary's blank-verse translation of the whole Comedy with Gustave Doré's illustrations, as a Project Gutenberg e-book (2005). Cary's Miltonic verse is stately and somewhat harder going than Longfellow's.
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E.8NQMC0.1Report - OTHER Divina Commedia (Project Gutenberg)Trans. Henry Francis CaryCary's translation of the whole Comedy as a plain Project Gutenberg e-text (1997), without the illustrations; the canticles are also separate (#1005-1007).
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E.1AGNTN.QReport - PDF Divina Commedia (Internet Archive) PDTrans. Henry Francis Cary · 1909Page images of Cary's translation, The Vision of Dante Alighieri; or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), from the University of Toronto's copy.
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E.X1Q8B4.PReport - PDF Divina Commedia (Internet Archive) PDTrans. Charles Eliot Norton · 1920Page images of Charles Eliot Norton's prose translation of the whole Comedy in one volume (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1920]), from the University of Toronto's copy. Plain prose; a good choice for following the sense of every line.
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E.W6MX79.4Report - PDF Divina Commedia (Internet Archive) PDTrans. Melville Best Anderson · 1921Page images of Melville Best Anderson's translation, 'a line-for-line translation in the rime form of the original' (Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book Company, 1921), from Cornell University's copy: the whole Comedy in English terza rima, English only.
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E.HF45SV.MReport - PDF Divina Commedia (Internet Archive) PD AbridgedTrans. Thomas William Parsons · 1893Page images of Thomas William Parsons's verse translation (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893), from the University of California's copy. Parsons died in 1892 before finishing; this volume prints all he completed, so the Purgatorio and Paradiso are not whole.
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E.MF1FAN.9Report - OTHER Divina Commedia (Project Gutenberg) ItalianThe Italian text of the whole Commedia as a Project Gutenberg e-text (1997); the canticles are also separate. In Italian, with no English translation.Much harder than the work: The original Italian, with no translation.
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E.89MVZW.VReport - OTHER Divina Commedia (Wikisource (Italian)) ItalianThe Italian text of the whole Commedia on Italian Wikisource, canto by canto, marked there as a complete, checked transcription. In Italian, with no English translation.Much harder than the work: The original Italian, with no translation.
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E.JDK2PZ.YReport - PDF Divina Commedia (Internet Archive) PD Italian1913Page images of C. H. Grandgent's annotated edition, La Divina Commedia (Boston: D. C. Heath, [1913]), from the University of Toronto's copy: the Italian text with English notes and an English argument before each canto, written, as his preface says, so that readers with little Italian need no other book but a dictionary.Harder than the work: The Italian text, but with English introductions and notes to help.
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E.8VBTBV.HReport - 🎧 AUDIO Divina Commedia (LibriVox) ItalianA free LibriVox audiobook of the whole Commedia read in Italian by volunteers (about 10 hours 57 minutes). In Italian, with no English translation.Much harder than the work: Read in the original Italian.
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E.DSPX3T.5Report
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