The Portable Dante

"Midway along the journey of life I woke to find myself in a dark wood. . ." As a philosopher, he wedded classical methods of inquiry to a Christian faith. As an autobiographer, he looked unsparingly at his own failures to depict universal moral struggles. As a visionary, he dared draw maps of Hell, with Purgatory and Paradise, and populate all three realms with recognizable human beings. As a passionate lover, he became a poet of bereavement and renunciation. As all of these things, Dante Alighieri paved the way for modern literature, while creating verse and prose that remain unparalleled for formal elegance, intellectual depth, and emotional grandeur. The Portable Dante captures the scope and fire of Dante's genius as thoroughly as any single volume can. It contains complete verse translations of Dante's two masterworks, The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova; plus a bibliography, notes, and an introduction by the eminent scholar and translator Mark Musa.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), stands alongside Homer and Shakespeare as one of the most important poets of the Western literary tradition.

Mark Musa, Distinguished Professor of French and Italian at Indiana University, is best known for his translations of Dante and the poetry of the Middle Ages.