Thursday 12 February, 6.30pm

Dante: The Essential Commedia by Prue Shaw

Prue Shaw presents her new book, published by W.W. Norton, dedicated to the immortal Divina Commedia, in conversation with Prof. John Dickie, Professor of Modern Italian at UCL; Prof. Peter Hainsworth, Professor of Medieval Italian at Oxford University and Prof. Catherine Keen, Professor of Dante Studies at UCL.

Prue Shaw’s absorbing, highly accessible introduction to the Commedia promises to be the essential edition for years to come

Dante’s epic story of a man’s journey from darkness to the revelation of divine light is one of the greatest works of Western literature. Because of its length and its language, it is viewed as forbidding. Undergraduate courses often cherry-pick from the Inferno and barely glance at Purgatorio and Paradiso.

In The Essential Commedia, Prue Shaw fillets the epic to create an absorbing tour of all three realms of the afterlife. Extensive passages, astutely excerpted, are offered in translation alongside the original, making it easy to read Dante in English, Italian or both. The translation into modern, idiomatic English avoids archaisms, padding and syntactic contortions. With no loss of rigour, a complex text is rendered accessible by a teacher whose decades of experience enable her to highlight those aspects of the poem readers will appreciate.

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