Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Volume 5 and Volume 6

Musa's final additions to his Indiana Masterpiece Editions of Dante's Divine Comedy provide a fitting culmination to a lifetime of thinking about, studying, and teaching the poem. As with the earlier two-volume releases in the set—vols. 1-2, the Inferno text and commentary (CH, Oct'97, 35—0804); vols. 3-4, the Purgatory text and commentary (2000)—the first in this pair offers a revised version of Musa's well-known translation of The Divine Comedy (1984), and the second provides a detailed textual and interpretive commentary based on thorough familiarity with both canonical and contemporary scholarship, in English and Italian alike. The many virtues of both translation (clarity, readability, accuracy) and commentary (comprehensiveness, erudition, critical acumen) earn Musa's six-volume masterwork a place of honor alongside the established achievements of John Ciardi and Allen Mandelbaum—and the ongoing work of Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, and of Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez—in the pantheon of distinguished recent American versions of Dante's monumental (though perhaps, alas, eternally elusive) masterpiece. Summing Up: Essential. All collections; all levels.January 2006

-- S. Botterill * University of California, Berkel