Le città possono essere costruite sulla roccia. Niente può essere costruito sulle bugie che oggi ci diciamo. Viviamo rintanati nella Città Irreale e questo libro è una critica alle sue mura che non reggono, alle sue torri che si inclinano e schricchiolano, alle sue porte che né si aprono né si chiudono. «Sarete come Dio», disse il serpente. Perciò la battaglia dei nostri giorni è teologica, che lo si voglia ammettere o meno.

“If there is any justice in the world of books, [Esolen's] will be the standard Dante . . . for some time to come.”–Robert Royal, Crisis

In this, the concluding volume of The Divine Comedy, Dante ascends from the devastation of the Inferno and the trials of Purgatory. Led by his beloved Beatrice, he enters Paradise, to profess his faith, hope, and love before the Heavenly court. Completed shortly before his death, Paradise is the volume that perhaps best expresses Dante's spiritual philosophy about resurrection, redemption, and the nature of divinity. It also affords modern-day readers a clear window into late medieval perceptions about faith. A bilingual text, classic illustrations by Gustave Doré, an appendix that reproduces Dante's key sources, and other features make this the definitive edition of Dante's ultimate masterwork.

The Divine Comedy is a complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion,' wrote T.S. Eliot.  'The last canto of the Paradiso is to my thinking the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach.'

The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world literature, and its climactic section, the Paradiso, is perhaps the most ambitious poetic attempt ever made to represent the merging of individual destiny with universal order.  Having passed through Hell and Purgatory, Dante is led by his beloved Beatrice to the upper sphere of Paradise, wherein lie the sublime truths of Divine will and eternal salvation, to at last experience a rapturous vision of God.

'A spectacular achievement,' said poet and critic Archibald MacLeish of John Ciardi's version of Dante's masterpiece.  'A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original.'

A new translation by Anthony Esolen
Illustrations by Gustave Doré
 
Written in the fourteenth century by Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy is arguably the greatest epic poem of all time—presenting Dante's brilliant vision of the three realms of Christian afterlife: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. In this second and perhaps most imaginative part of his masterwork, Dante struggles up the terraces of Mount Purgatory, still guided by Virgil, in a continuation of his difficult ascent to purity. Anthony Esolen's acclaimed translation of Inferno, Princeton professor James Richardson said, “follows Dante through all his spectacular range, commanding where he is commanding, wrestling, as he does, with the density and darkness in language and in the soul. It is living writing.” This edition of Purgatory includes an appendix of key sources and extensive endnotes—an invaluable guide for both general readers and students.

An extraordinary new verse translation of Dante's masterpiece, by poet, scholar, and lauded translator Anthony Esolen

Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem's line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.

Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante's most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians—that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.

Late in the eleventh century the First Crusade culminated in the conquest of Jerusalem by Christian armies. Five centuries later, when Torquato Tasso began to search for a subject worthy of an epic, Jerusalem was governed by a sultan, Europe was in the crisis of religious division, and the Crusades were a nostalgic memory. Tasso turned to the First Crusade both as a subject that would test his poetic ambition and as a reflection on the quandaries of his own time. He sought to create a masterpiece that would deserve comparison with the great epics of the past.

Gerusalemme liberata became one of the most widely read and cherished books of the Renaissance. First published in 1581, it was translated into English by Edward Fairfax in 1600. That translation has been the standard, even though Fairfax was only a good, not a great, poet. Fairfax tried to fit Tasso's verse into Spenserian stanzas, adding to and subtracting from the original and often changing Tasso's meaning.

Anthony Esolen's new translation captures the delight of Tasso's descriptions, the different voices of its cast of characters, the shadings between glory and tragedy—and it does all this in an English as powerful and clear as Tasso's Italian. Tasso's masterpiece finally emerges as an English masterpiece.

Titus Lucretius Carus was probably born in the early first century B.C., and died in the year 55. Little is known of his life, although two tantalizing bits of gossip were passed on by St. Jerome: that he was poisoned by a madness-inducing aphrodisiac given him by his wife, and that his great poem On the Nature of Things was posthumously edited by Cicero. For the latter assertion, writes Anthony Esolen in his introduction to the present volume, there is little evidence, and none whatsoever for the former.

What does survive is a masterful poetic work that stands as the greatest exposition of Epicurean philosophy. Writing in the waning days of the Roman Republic—as Rome's politics grew individualistic and treacherous, its high-life wanton, its piety introspective and morbid—Lucretius sets forth a rational and materialistic view of the world which offers a retreat into a quiet community of wisdom and friendship.

Even to modern readers, the sweep of Lucretius's observations is remarkable. A careful observer of nature, he writes with an innocent curiosity into how things are put together—from the oceans, lands, and stars to a mound of poppy seeds, from the 'applause' of a rooster's wings to the human mind and soul. Yet Lucretius is no romantic. Nature is what it is—fascinating,purposeless, beautiful, deadly. Once we understand this, we free ourselves of superstitious fears, becoming as human and as godlike as we can be. The poem, then, is about the universe and how human beings ought to live in it. Epicurean physics and morality converge.

Until now, there has been no adequate English verse translation of Lucretius's work. Anthony Esolen fills that gap with a version that reproduces—with remarkable faithfulness—the meaning, pace, and tone of the original Latin.

Here is a book that will introduce a new generation of readers to a thinker whose powers of observation and depth of insight remain fresh to the present day.

'Esolen has the rare gift of being both a fine poet and a lover of languages. His diction is poetic and natural; he has a fine ear for sound, and the translation benefits greatly from being read aloud—as Latin poetry was meant to be. This translation is clear and forceful. It can, and will, be read.'—Kenneth J. Reckford, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill