Following the Hollanders' widely acclaimed English rendering of Inferno, PURGATORIO, the second canticle in Dante's immortal
DIVINE COMEDY, enters English in the best'the clearest, most accurate, most readable-translation in decades, with unsurpassed
scholarship in its introduction and with extensive notes.
PURGATORIO relates in thirty-three cantos Dante's progress, still with Virgil as his guide, up the mountains of purgatory, where souls
expiate their sins before they enter heaven. As hell has circles, purgatory has terraces, one above the other, each representing one of the
seven mortal sins. In each, an appropriate type of penance is practiced, and the spirit ascending the mountain must cleanse itself of each sin
of which it is guilty.
Jean and Robert Hollander's verse translation with facing-page Italian offers the dual virtues of maximum fidelity to Dante's text with the
poetic feeling necessary to give the English reader a sense of the work's poetic greatness in Italian. And since Robert Hollander is a master
teacher whose achievements as a Dante scholar are unsurpassed in the English-speaking world, the introduction and commentaries that
accompany each canto offer superb guidance in essential matters of comprehension and interpretation.
In addition to its inherent excellence, this transla*'on is also the text of the Princeton Dante Project website (www.princeton.edu/dante), an
ambitious project that offers a multimedia version of the DIVINE COMEDY and links to other Dante websites. On every count, this
edition of PURGATORIO is the literary and scholarly translation likely to be the one that survives for the greatest period in the new
millennium.