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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Dante Alighieri chose the latter. At first, I had difficulty appreciating the Purgatorio, written as it was as a narrative poem. Poetry seldom holds my interest; I find it difficult to understand.

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 ...

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 ...