… the Divine Comedy isn’t just a story, it’s a poem: one of the biggest, most varied, and most accomplished poems in all the world. Appreciated on the level of its verse, the thing never stops getting steadily more beautiful as it goes on. T. S. Eliot said that the last cantos of Heaven were as great as poetry can ever get. The translator’s task is to compose something to suggest that such a judgment might be right.
No need to convince me. I finished the Paradiso in Tuscany with wondrous Tuscan sunlight streaming through the window. I had take Italian lessons before our trip and used an interlinear version, but was able to read it mostly in Italian. The thrill of the last pages will never leave me.
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