{"id":257606,"date":"2007-11-09T21:03:42","date_gmt":"2007-11-09T21:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2007\/11\/09\/longenbach-on-new-dante-translation\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:36:12","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:36:12","slug":"longenbach-on-new-dante-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2007\/11\/09\/longenbach-on-new-dante-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Longenbach on new Dante translation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The University of Rochester&#8217;s own <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/ENG\/faculty\/James_Longenbach.html\">James Longenbach<\/a> has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/11\/11\/books\/review\/Longenbach-t.html?_r=1&#38;8bu&#38;emc=bu&#38;oref=slogin\">review of a new translation<\/a> of Dante&#8217;s <em>Paradiso<\/em> in this Sunday&#8217;s <em>New York Times<\/em> book review:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When Dante wrote the poem we call \u201cThe Divine Comedy,\u201d he called it simply the \u201cCommedia\u201d: a story, beginning in sorrow and ending in joy, of one man\u2019s journey from hell, through purgatory, to paradise. It\u2019s a good story. But while many of us are eager to harrow the halls of hell, with its gossipy tales of human suffering, few of us make it to heaven, where we are instructed in the theological intricacies of free will, gravity and the soul. No one said the journey was going to be easy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>But if the \u201cParadiso\u201d is low on human interest (its inhabitants neither want nor regret anything), it contains some of the most exhilarating poetry even written. Recently, the poet Robert Pinsky offered us an English \u201cInferno\u201d; W. S. Merwin translated the \u201cPurgatorio.\u201d Robert and Jean Hollander have made the whole journey: their \u201cParadiso\u201d completes their verse translation of the entire \u201cCommedia.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Robert Hollander is one of the pre-eminent Dante scholars of our time. Each canto comes trailing notes of generous length elucidating the political, theological and cosmological aspects of Dante\u2019s allegory. In addition, the translators refer to 73 commentaries compiled over the centuries and available at the Dartmouth Dante Project (dante.dartmouth.edu). But the \u201cCommedia\u201d is above all else a poem, and the Hollander translation obscures this fact \u2014 not because its scholarly apparatus is vast, but because the translation only fitfully succeeds as English poetry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The University of Rochester&#8217;s own James Longenbach has a review of a new translation of Dante&#8217;s Paradiso in this Sunday&#8217;s New York Times book review: When Dante wrote the poem we call \u201cThe Divine Comedy,\u201d he called it simply the \u201cCommedia\u201d: a story, beginning in sorrow and ending in joy, of one man\u2019s journey from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[5406,2136,7886,5416,1646],"class_list":["post-257606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-dante","tag-ejvl","tag-james-longenbach","tag-paradiso","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":327736,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257606\/revisions\/327736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}