The Divine Comedy

By: Clive James - translator, Dante Alighieri

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

Renowned poet and critic Clive James presents the crowning achievement of his career: a monumental translation into English verse of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and this translation - decades in the making - gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent and compulsively listenable lyric poem. Written in the early 14th century and completed in 1321, the year of Dante’s death, The Divine Comedy is perhaps the greatest work of epic poetry ever composed.

Divided into three books - Hell, Purgatory and Heaven - the poem’s allegorical vision of the afterlife portrays the poet’s spiritual crisis in terms of his own contemporary history, in a text of such vivid life and variety that modern readers will find themselves astounded in a hundred different ways. And indeed the structure of this massive single song is divided into a hundred songs, or cantos, each of which is a separate poetic miracle. But unifying them all is the impetus of the Italian verse: a verbal energy that Clive James has now brought into English.

For its range of emotion alone, Clive James’s poetic rendering of The Divine Comedy would be without precedent. But it is also singled out by its sheer readability. The result is the epic as a page-turner, a work that will influence the way we read Dante in English for generations to come.

The Divine Comedy is performed by Edoardo Ballerini (2013 Audie Award winner, Best Solo Narration - Male), who had this to say about the book and his experience narrating it: "There are literary classics, and then then are those few books that serve as the cultural foundation for all of western civilization. Dante's Divine Comedy is one of those rarified titles. Being asked to narrate such a monumental work was an honor, and one of the highlights of my career, across film, TV, stage and audio. It was a humbling experience, and I only hope this recording inspires listeners to experience this profoundly beautiful work of art in a new, accessible and playful way."

©2013 Clive James (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Narrator Edoardo Ballerini takes Clive James's translation of Dante's classic and breathes fresh life into it.... One particular benefit of Ballerini's performance is that his pronunciation of the very little untranslated Italian vocabulary is spot-on, giving listeners the feeling that their experience is both authentic and impressive." ( AudioFile)

One can easily understand why it is a masterpiece.

Beautifully written and preformed. It provides real insight into the nature of man and his destiny.

The greatest love poem ever written

I highly recommend you also get the lecture series about The Divine Comedy from the Great Courses and listen to both concurrently. This is the best love story ever written until Tolkien's universe built around Beren and Luthien.

Great book, great narrator

The book is obviously a great one, this translation is very good in my opinion (not too archaic, good stylistic choices, etc.), and the narration is superb.

The ending

I think it would have been more enjoyed if there had been better pacing of it’s reading.

I enjoyed it much.

This is beautiful

Would you consider the audio edition of The Divine Comedy to be better than the print version?

I have only experienced this in audio

Any additional comments?

I have read the John Ciardi translation of this monumental work. James' translation is by far the more beautiful and startling, bringing forth the pathos and horror of Hell and purgatory with a vividness that left my brain singing for days after I had finished it. This will be one I come back to time and again to enjoy the elegance and lyrical ferocity of the language. The narration is a fitting complement to such a magnificent text.

Two Translations/Audiobooks of a Sublime Epic

The Divine Comedy (1306-21) recounts Dante's tour down through the circles of hell, up through the terraces of purgatory, and finally up through the spheres of heaven, all of which he wrote as best as he was able to after returning to the world, given the limits of memory and imagination and the sublime scope of his journey. It develops that folly and despair had brought Dante head down to the brink of ruin and death, when his beloved Beatrice sent his classical poet hero Virgil to rescue him by showing him hell and purgatory so as to prepare him for Beatrice showing him heaven, all to enable him to endure his exile from Florence, to become a better man, and to tell his story to help us improve ourselves. Throughout his poem he eagerly interviews the souls he encounters ("peering into the tears of sinners"), promises to keep their names alive by writing about them, questions his guides, and expresses his struggle to describe ineffable things. Dante's journey is emotionally satisfying (even for atheist me), because of his faith in the love at the heart of everything he can and can't see (including Beatrice) and because of his vivid imagination and rich poetry.

Throughout his epic, Dante mixes classical, mythological, Biblical, and historical allusions and figures (e.g., Augustus, Pygmalion, Rachel, and Charlemagne) with contemporary late 13th-century political ones (e.g., Guelphs and Ghibellines, Florence and Arezzo, and Pope Boniface and Pope Clement). He relishes giving his personal betes noires their just deserts. Often when arriving at a new area in hell, he'll ask the tormented souls, "Are there any Italians here?" This is to find souls to speak Italian with, but also to criticize the state of morality in his "degraded Italy." Once he even sees some Italians in hell who are still alive in Italy!

I love the detail, horror, humor, beauty, and love in The Divine Comedy. Dante's epic similes comparing things he encounters to frogs, ants, bees, doves, cavalry, gamblers, arrows, books, fish scales, pasture frost, and so on are wonderful, revealing his careful observation of the world. He includes a fair amount of then current science, as with the light reflected in mirrors, the order of the planets, and the subjective perception of time. Dante goes to town envisioning the torments of hell: a soul swinging his severed head like a lantern; a soul eating the head of another soul; souls bent in uncomfortable poses in ice; heretics roasting in ovens; etc. Purgatorio has a neat ascending movement by which one by one Dante loses the seven letter P sins angelically carved on his forehead. Paradiso is less compelling. After all it's more entertaining to witness crime and punishment than happy loving souls singing in harmony, and the amount of lecturing increases in Paradiso, whole cantos involving Beatrice or some joyful soul telling Dante what's what. But it does have wonderful moments, as when Dante finds himself "Looking up through slopes of living light" or Beatrice looking down at him: "the memory of that sweet smile undoes my mind."

I nearly gave up listening to Audible's audiobook with Edoardo Ballerini reading Clive James' recent translation because Ballerini artificially emphasizes and elongates long syllables as he declaims the verse in an exaggerated "poetic" rhythm that sledgehammers poetic modulation. "WHOO/Would not be MOOOVED to KNOOHW this was the first/ BRUUtus…" He is fine when a scene is so intense that he briefly stops "reading poetry" and just speaks in character, as when a demon says, "Go, pimp! There are no women here to trade!"

I managed to get through Ballerini/James by taking breaks every several cantos to delight myself with Naxos' audiobook for which Heathcote Williams reads Benedict Flynn's translation. Whether because Williams is a superior reader to Ballerini or because Flynn's translation is superior to James, I loved all of the Naxos Divine Comedy. Naxos even provides brief snatches of beautiful medieval music (instrumental or choral) in between cantos and Flynn's excellent 75-minute introduction to Dante's life and poetry--read by John Shrapnel--while Audible leaves out James' "Introduction" and "Translator's Note."

As for the translators' poetry, James writes an alternating end rhyme scheme (with couplets closing each canto), Flynn blank verse. To avoid the need for notes, James writes explanations into his lines, making Dante's allusions more explicit, while Flynn, I believe, adheres to Dante's allusive original. Thus, for instance, while Flynn's Dante doesn't name Narcissus, James' does. Similarly, while Flynn leaves the names of Dante's demons in Italian, James translates them into grotesque English, like "Scumbag and Scallywag." Flynn often surpasses James in concision and grace, as when Dante witnesses the endless battle between spendthrifts: "Why pile it up?" "Why waste cash?" in James, "Why horde?" "Why spend?" in Flynn. Or as when Dante gets to the shores of Purgatory:

The comely planet that prompts us to love,
Veiling the school of pretty fish that lies
Each springtime in her train was there above,
And she made all the east laugh. (James)

Vs.

Love's lovely planet, the comfort in love
Was making all the eastern heavens smile
with light and veiling Pisces in her train. (Flynn)

When read without Ballerini, James does at times outdo Flynn, as when Dante tells his ancestry to a proud ghost, and "If a ghost/ Can raise an eyebrow, his did" (James) vs. "His eyebrows rose a little…" (Flynn), or as when some angels arrive, with "Garments green/ As leaves born just a breath ago" (James), vs. "Their raiment green as newborn leaves are green/ Billowed out behind them fanned by green winds" (Flynn).

Finally, anyone interested in western culture and literature should read The Divine Comedy! And if you were going to listen to it as an audiobook, Naxos would be great. However, if you were just going to read the text, James would be fine. Either way, visiting the amazing multimedia website Danteworlds would be helpful.

I Expected More From Something So Influential

It was more interesting to tease out the cultural touchstones that originated with this work than it was to follow the work itself. The local Italian politics that were raging all around when Dante wrote this are unfamiliar to most of us now, so many of the in-jokes are lost.

Excellent book

This is without a doubt one of the greatest works ever written.Theology, history, politics and poetry.

a classic

for me honestly it was a little slower than I'm used to but obviously a classic biblical esque settings and I enjoyed the characters of the ether realms, though had trouble finding motivation and meaning but I'm no scholar, just a student

Beautiful Poetry

I listened to this work with almost no help from outside, so much of the cultural references and complex language went over my head. However, I still really enjoyed the poetic language, and Eduardo Ballerini's delivery is second to none!

This was hard to get through, particularly Paradise, but I'm glad I persevered and finished it. I love the impression this work leaves me with - one of beautiful, terrible, sacred mystery.