Robert Chandler reviews Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri, translated by D.M. Black, Dante, by Alessandro Barbero, translated by Allan Cameron, and Visions of Heaven: Dante and the Art of Divine Light, by Martin Kemp, at the Financial Times.
"Barbero is at his best when, as with the Latini episode, he allows the poem and the life to shed light on each other. Most of the time, though, he limits himself to recounting the life. This inevitably makes it hard for him to answer the question implied in the title of his preface: 'Why Dante Matters.
"Two other books, however, answer this question helpfully. The art historian Martin Kemp, in his richly illustrated Visions of Heaven, argues that Dante deeply influenced the next few centuries of Italian painting — both through the clarity of his visual detail and through his boldness in trying /to describe extremities of divine light that were beyond the scope of our earthbound sense of sight'. ...
"Part of what enables Black’s success in this is a scrupulous attention to metre and line breaks. In poor translations, form and content are often at war; here, the form helps to emphasise the crucial words and so bring out the meaning. ..."
See Dante, "On World Government" from De Monarchia in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 7, and The Divine Comedy in Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 21, (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 19.
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