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 Italian (retired) 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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Prue Shaw is an emeritus reader in Italian at University College London. She is the editor of the edizione nazionale of Dante’s medieval Latin treatise Monarchia and of a groundbreaking digital edition of the Commedia (freely accessible at www.dantecommedia.it). She lives in Cambridge, England. She is the author of Reading Dante From Here to Eternity and of a translation of Leopardi’s Letters 1817 – 1837.