The Divine Comedy

"‘The love that moves the sun and the other stars’ must have moved Michael Palma, too, in his heroic rendering of The Divine Comedy into English terza rima. Honoring Dante’s triply rhymed pattern, line by line, tercet by tercet, Palma has crocheted Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso into a vast poetic fabric, giving the feel, not of a fake antique, but of a work of timeless authority." -- Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters
"Michael Palma’s monumental accomplishment is even more sublime because his translation of all three books of The Divine Comedy is so engrossing and easy to read. The accessibility and forward-driven pace might even inspire readers to go beyond the Inferno into the subtleties of Purgatorio and the fresh feel of Paradiso. Palma’s lines are both relaxed and energetic, sticking to the rhyme scheme while also adhering to Dante’s sense, bringing this masterpiece fully into the twenty-first century." -- Molly Peacock, president emerita, Poetry Society of America
"Michael Palma’s new Divine Comedy is an astonishing achievement—a modern English version that sounds and moves like Dante’s original. Every line is rhymed in the pattern Dante invented for his epic journey into the afterlife. Palma’s translation is poetic in a style true to the Italian. This is the closest you will get to Dante’s masterpiece without learning Italian." -- Dana Gioia, poet and author of Can Poetry Matter?
"Michael Palma is a magician. This lucid and beautiful translation of The Divine Comedy in elegant terza rima is something to savor, to live in, and to admire." -- Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015
"Palma’s translation is so right, the language unforced, carrying the reader along in its easy-to-read immediacy. He has managed terza rima as naturally as the original, a form even harder to achieve in less-easy-to-rhyme English. This translation is as good as it gets." -- Greg Delanty, author of The Professor of Forgetting and No More Time
"Palma hits the sweet spot between faithfulness to sense and fidelity to form. In skillfully rhymed and metered English terza rima (let no one now say this can’t be done), in contemporary, unfussy language, Palma gets across the scope and sweep, the infinite human dimensions, of this great theological exploration and philosophical allegory, without losing its winks of wit and precision. Worth the price of admission for the informative erudition of the notes and introduction alone, Palma’s translation not only reintroduces us to the endlessly popular Inferno, but makes the case for the poetic tours de force of the Purgatorio and the underestimated charm of the Paradiso, in short, for taking the poem as a wonderous whole." -- A. E. Stallings, author of This Afterlife: Selected Poems