The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio Book

The California Dante is indeed "exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror and profoundly moving depths" (Robert Fagles).

Each element in its making—poetic, scholarly, graphic, typographic—joins in masterful harmony, inviting assessments such as Henri Peyre's: Mandelbaum's "rendering is a marvel of fidelity to the original, of sobriety, and, truly, of inspired poetry;" his introduction is "rich," "acute," "convincing;" and "I was more strongly impressed by Moser's illustrations than by an other, from Gustave Dore on, which I ever looked at…A splendid volume." And James Merrill's in The New Republic: Mandelbaum's translation is "lucid and strong," with "rich orchestration," "overall sweep and felicity," and "countless…free, brilliant, utterly Dantesque stroke[s];" the California Dante is "a noble work of typography," and Moser's drawings are "at best fearfully expressive, always beautifully reproduced."

In Purgatorio, Dante, the chief imagination of Christendom, as Yeats called him, pursues his journey to salvation, ascending the seven terraces of the island Mount of Purgatory, still in the steps of Virgil, until that pagan father—guide, governor, and master—must be left behind when Dante reaches the Earthly Paradise and Beatrice. After the sunless slime, fire, mists, crags, pitch, and ice of Hell, Purgatorio is the poem of penance and hope, of "that second kingdom / in which the human soul is cleansed of sin, / becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven."

Under the spell of Allen Mandelbaum's translation and Barry Moser's pen and ink arabesques, we find, in Dante, a poet-savant speaking to our own age, crossing a linguistic border, reinstating not only an entire body of knowledge and doctrine but patterns of thought and feeling, and images of Earth, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven that both enact and alter our human situation.

Allen Mandelbaum's luminous translations are arranged on facing pages with the Italian text, and merge with Barry Moser's graphic meditations, celebrating craft, organic with text and format. The typeface, Monotype Dante, designed in 1957 by the late Giovanni Mardersteig, was first used by him at the Officina Bodoni, Verona. The type was set by Michael and Winifred Bixler of Boston, Massachusetts.