Acknowledgements
My indebtedness to the world of dante scholarship will be readily apparent from the bibliography and accompanying notes. There are four richly annotated editions of the Commedia in particular—two Italian, two English—to which I always turned when thinking about points of difficulty in the translation and the commentary. I found all four unfailingly illuminating and thought-provoking. Their editors came to seem like companions as I wrote, and I am especially grateful to them: Natalino Sapegno, Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez, and Robert and Jean Hollander (the two Bobs—Durling and Hollander—are much-missed friends). Full details of these editions, and a brief description of them, can be found in “Further Reading with Notes.”
Translations from Italian and Latin are my own throughout (see “A Note on the Translation”).
The edition from which the Italian text is cited is Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, a cura di Giorgio Petrocchi, vol. VII in Le opere di Dante Alighieri (Milan: Edizione Nazionale a cura della Società Dantesca Italiana, 1966–67; 2nd ed., Florence: Le Lettere, 1994).
“Excursus on Metre” and “Principal Events in Dante’s Life” are reproduced from my Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (New York: Liveright, 2014).
I would like to thank friends and family members who read all or parts of the book and made constructive suggestions: John Dickie, Jill Golden, Claerwen James and Peter Marsh. Any remaining infelicities, it goes without saying, are my own. Heartfelt thanks also to Jonathan Grove for his patient and good-humoured help with the tricky formatting. Thank you, too, to Dr. Glauco Frizzera, professor of pathology (retired) at the Weill Cornell medical school, who wrote an appreciative letter about Reading Dante and suggested that an anthology of the Commedia would be welcomed by readers: the first germ of an idea that has taken nearly a decade to come to fruition. And thank you, Clive, for encouraging me to do this.