Best Edition of "Divine Comedy"?

[Vladimir777]

I have heard that Mandelbaum's prose translation of Divine Comedy is probably the most reliable and safe choice (outside of Pinsky's version of Inferno...but he never completed the rest of the trilogy, so I am not considering that). I have also heard that it's good to read this poem in a facing-page version, where you have the Italian on one side of the page and the English translation on the other. I don't speak any Italian, but I am willing to try this out. I haven't seen any Mandelbaum versions that have this feature, however. Do you guys know of any? If you had to narrow it down to one version of the Divine Comedy for a beginner, what would it be? Something else other than Mandelbaum? As I said, I'm a novice and I would like something with footnotes (since this makes the going a lot easier, correct?). I am assuming Mandelbaum's version has footnotes. I'm going to read the Odyssey and Aeneid before I try out the DC (I have the Lattimore and Mandelbaum translations of these works, respectively). Anyways, any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm looking to get a version for Christmas. I wonder what other book I should ask for? I'm trying to get through the most essential works of Western literature before I move onto more obscure stuff...I just got the complete Shakespeare. Perhaps the complete Milton or Chaucer? What else would you guys recommend for rookies to get them hooked on the classics tradition?

[Lykren]

I'm a rookie myself but here is a list of nationalist epics (and epics generally)

Nibelunglied
Chanson de Roland
El Cid
Ramayana
Mahbharata
One Thousand and One Nights
Mabinogion
Beowulf
Njals Saga
Epic of Gilgamesh

Have you considered reading the Bible?

[lawpark]

When I was in college the choice were John Ciardi's verse translation, or for those willing to pay more, Charles Singleton's prose translation with Italian on one side. But that was 20 years ago ...

[stlukesguild]

Personally, I came to Dante through John Ciardi and he remains my favorite. However, among newer translations I would seriously reconsider Pinsky's Inferno and look also to Mark Musa and Jean and Robert Hollander. Pinsky captures the energy and the violence of the Inferno, Mandelbaum conveys the classicism, and Ciardi captures the lyrical poetry. The Hollanders translation may be the most accurate... a marvelous poetic prose with unmatched notes. This edition sits a mere few inches away from my hand right now... next to my computer.

Other essential texts?

Start with:

The Bible
Aeschylus- The Oresteia
Sophocles- Oedipus Rex (the Oedipus trilogy)
Euripides- Medea
Plato- The Republic
Ovid- The Metamorphoses
Horace- Odes
Firdowsi- The Shahnameh
anon.- The Arabian Nights
anon.- Beowulf
Petrarch- Sonnets
Machiavelli- The Prince
Boccaccio- The Decameron
Rabelais- Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes- Don Quixote
Chaucer- [/I]Canterbury Tales
Spenser- [I]The Faerie Queene, The Amoretti
Donne- Poems
Moliere- Tartuffe, The Misanthrope
Racine- Phèdre, Athalie
Michel de Montaigne- Essays
Jonathan Swift- Gulliver's Travels
Rousseau- Confessions
Milton- Paradise Lost
Gibbons- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Lawrence Sterne- Tristram Shandy
Daniel Defoe- Robinson Caruso
Goethe- Faust, poems
Holderlin- poems
William Blake- poems
Lord Byron- Don Juan
Coleridge- The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Kahn, Cristobel
Wordsworth- poems
Keats- poems
Shelley- poems
Jane Austen- Pride and Prejudice
Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
Leopardi- poems (canti)
Flaubert- Madame Bovary
Emile Zola- Nana
Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du Mal
Rimbaud- A Season in Hell and The Illuminations
Verlaine- poems
Mallarme- poems
Poe- tales
Hawthorne- short stories
Ambrose Bierce- short stories
Guy de Maupassant- short stories
Tennyson- poetry
E.T.A. Hoffmann- short stories
Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson- poetry
Melville- Moby Dick
Dickens- A Tale of Two Cities
Tolstoy- War and Peace, short stories
Dostoevsky- The Brothers Karamazov
Checkov- short stories
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness
Ibsen- Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People
Oscar Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest
Gautier- poetry, short stories
Proust- In Search of Lost Time
Robert Louis Stevenson- short stories
Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf
Kafka- short stories, The Trial
Thomas Mann- Doctor Faustus
James Joyce- Ulysses
Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
Hemingway- short stories
Yeats- poetry
T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland and Other Poems, The Four Quartets
Wallace Stevens- poetry
Federico Garcia-Lorca- poetry
Fernando Pessoa- poetry, prose
Pablo Neruda- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, The Captain's Verses, Residence on Earth
Camus- The Stranger
Rilke- poetry
Eugenio Montale- Cuttlefish Bones
Boris Pasternak- My Sister-Life
Paul Celan- poetry
Samuel Beckett- Endgame, Waiting for Godot
J.L. Borges- Labyrinths
Flannery O'Conner- short stories
Saul Bellow- Sieze the Day
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
Li Bo- poetry
Tu Fu- poetry
Wang Wei- poetry


I'll leave off here... this should keep you occupied for a while.:p

[Vladimir777]

Personally, I came to Dante through John Ciardi and he remains my favorite. However, among newer translations I would seriously reconsider Pinsky's Inferno and look also to Mark Musa and Jean and Robert Hollander. Pinsky captures the energy and the violence of the Inferno, Mandelbaum conveys the classicism, and Ciardi captures the lyrical poetry. The Hollanders translation may be the most accurate... a marvelous poetic prose with unmatched notes. This edition sits a mere few inches away from my hand right now... next to my computer.

Other essential texts?

Start with:

The Bible
Aeschylus- The Oresteia
Sophocles- Oedipus Rex (the Oedipus trilogy)
Euripides- Medea
Plato- The Republic
Ovid- The Metamorphoses
Horace- Odes
Firdowsi- The Shahnameh
anon.- The Arabian Nights
anon.- Beowulf
Petrarch- Sonnets
Machiavelli- The Prince
Boccaccio- The Decameron
Rabelais- Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes- Don Quixote
Chaucer- [/I]Canterbury Tales
Spenser- [I]The Faerie Queene, The Amoretti
Donne- Poems
Moliere- Tartuffe, The Misanthrope
Racine- Phèdre, Athalie
Michel de Montaigne- Essays
Jonathan Swift- Gulliver's Travels
Rousseau- Confessions
Milton- Paradise Lost
Gibbons- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Lawrence Sterne- Tristram Shandy
Daniel Defoe- Robinson Caruso
Goethe- Faust, poems
Holderlin- poems
William Blake- poems
Lord Byron- Don Juan
Coleridge- The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Kahn, Cristobel
Wordsworth- poems
Keats- poems
Shelley- poems
Jane Austen- Pride and Prejudice
Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
Leopardi- poems (canti)
Flaubert- Madame Bovary
Emile Zola- Nana
Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du Mal
Rimbaud- A Season in Hell and The Illuminations
Verlaine- poems
Mallarme- poems
Poe- tales
Hawthorne- short stories
Ambrose Bierce- short stories
Guy de Maupassant- short stories
Tennyson- poetry
E.T.A. Hoffmann- short stories
Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson- poetry
Melville- Moby Dick
Dickens- A Tale of Two Cities
Tolstoy- War and Peace, short stories
Dostoevsky- The Brothers Karamazov
Checkov- short stories
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness
Ibsen- Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People
Oscar Wilde- The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest
Gautier- poetry, short stories
Proust- In Search of Lost Time
Robert Louis Stevenson- short stories
Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf
Kafka- short stories, The Trial
Thomas Mann- Doctor Faustus
James Joyce- Ulysses
Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
Hemingway- short stories
Yeats- poetry
T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland and Other Poems, The Four Quartets
Wallace Stevens- poetry
Federico Garcia-Lorca- poetry
Fernando Pessoa- poetry, prose
Pablo Neruda- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, The Captain's Verses, Residence on Earth
Camus- The Stranger
Rilke- poetry
Eugenio Montale- Cuttlefish Bones
Boris Pasternak- My Sister-Life
Paul Celan- poetry
Samuel Beckett- Endgame, Waiting for Godot
J.L. Borges- Labyrinths
Flannery O'Conner- short stories
Saul Bellow- Sieze the Day
Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
Li Bo- poetry
Tu Fu- poetry
Wang Wei- poetry


I'll leave off here... this should keep you occupied for a while.:p

Stlukes, thanks for all of your recommendations! Just saw this now. I will definitely save this list as a good starting point. Thanks also for your recommendations about books to help with reading the Bible. I was able to finish the King James Old Testament and definitely used some of the resources that you had recommended to me in PMs.

I'm studying for LSATs (law school entrance exams) at the moment, but when I'm done with that, I do hope to conquer the King James Apocrypha and New Testament soon after, and then maybe try Dante. I'm still somewhat torn between Mandelbaum (already own this), Ciardi, and Hollander.

[Vladimir777]

I'm a rookie myself but here is a list of nationalist epics (and epics generally)

Nibelunglied
Chanson de Roland
El Cid
Ramayana
Mahbharata
One Thousand and One Nights
Mabinogion
Beowulf
Njals Saga
Epic of Gilgamesh

Have you considered reading the Bible?

Thanks, Lykren! As I said in the post I just added on here, I actually read the King James Old Testament and look forward to completing the Bible some day. Thanks for your list of epics. I definitely want to read all of the works you posted (the only one I've read before is Beowulf, which I found to be so-so a long time ago as a student), especially Gilgamesh, One Thousand and One Nights, and the Indian epics, which I hear are quite amazing, albeit very, VERY long.

[Sir Guyon]

Well, sometimes one must leave a great work of literature unread if no adequate translations exist, I hate to say that yet it is true. Either that or learn the language, which is no small task. My recommendations for a reader of English alone would be the following:

Homer - Chapman or Pope translations
Aeschylus' House of Atreus - Morshead translation
Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (Elizabeth Barrett Browning translation)
Sophocles - Three Theban Plays (Fagles translation)
Euripides - Cyclops (Percy Bysshe Shelley translation)
Euripides - Medea, Bacchae, Hippolytus (Vellacott translation)
An Oresteia - Anne Carson
Virgil - Dryden translation
Metamorphoses - Golding translation
The Divine Comedy - Ciardi translation
Jerusalem Delivered - Tasso (Fairfax translation)
Goethe's Faust - Kaufmann translation
Schiller - Wallenstein (Samuel Taylor Coleridge translation)

English Originals:

The Faerie Queene I-III - Edmund Spenser
Christopher Marlowe's Complete Plays
Shakespeare's Tragedies and Histories
Jonson's Plays and Masques
Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes - Milton

That should be a start...