I thought of those scenes last spring when I began reading three new translations of Purgatory, being published to coincide with the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, at fifty-six ...

What happens when you take the poetry out of Dante? If you replace the verse ... Chwast manages to sum up in his schematic diagram of purgatory as a multi-tiered cake? When it comes to ...

The tweet got me to thinking about Dante’s sojourn in Purgatory, on the Terrace of Envy (where the repentant Envious are purged of their tendency to envy others). In Purgatorio, everyone ...

The speaker is the Roman poet Virgil, Dante’s companion and guide, in scaling the lofty mountain of Purgatory in the second book of Dante’s tour-de-force account of the afterlife, The Divine ...

In “Inferno,” Dante and Virgil descend through the circles of horror until they reach the ice lake reserved for the traitors. In “Purgatorio” they climb through an opening in the ice ...

The purgatory drawings “involve a change in medium, abandoning the series’ pencilwork in favor of a pen and watercolor technique,” he adds. “The aesthetic shift makes sense. In Dante’s ...

Dante elevated many of his contemporaries from historical obscurity to literary immortality just by casting them as minor characters in his verse. In Canto IV of Purgatorio, we encounter a ...

Purgatory, "bruna / per la distanza," into a Seven Story Fountain. Such a hope is a kind of petitionary prayer often chanted by contemporary poet-translators, one that the current rendering ...

Perhaps more than any other teaching of the Catholic Church, the doctrine of purgatory sets Catholics apart from other Christian professions. While all Christians acknowledge the Four Last Things ...

Mary Jo Bang joins Kevin Young to to discuss her translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, excerpts of which are featured on newyorker.com. Bang is a poet who has received the National Book Critics ...

The worlds of DanteThe poet Dante holds a copy of his Divine Comedy, with hell and purgatory forming the background to this 15th-century fresco by Domenico di Michelino. The heavenly spheres arch ...

Dante himself, in the Inferno, wants to make the direct approach, hiking straight up the mountain of Purgatory towards his goal, but he is chased back by wild beasts – a leopard, a lion and a ...