The Portable Dante (Penguin Classics)

Solid translation. Easy to read.

Using it for a class

I joined Dante on his fantastical jouney through the Three Worlds. What an imagination!The Musa translation is among the more readible - although at the expense of the poetics (Musa explains decision in book intro).Now the bad: the publisher, Penguin, desires to be placed in the lowest level of Hell. I have NEVER witnessed such a God-awful Kindle format (really lack there of). Penguin owes a polished version to both Dante and Dr Musa a polished Kindle.

On the plus side it is a good deal to get Mark Musa’s excellent, very readable translations of all three volumes of the Divine Comedy, plus Dante’s Vita Nuova, at a fair price. On the down side, the ebook does not have a complete Table of Contents that lets you jump directly to a specific canto, so you have to page through it to find the one you want. Also, the footnotes are mixed in with the cantos, rather than being separate and jump-to-able (linked). Unlike some reviewers I don’t think this fault is severe enough to warrant a one-star rating, but to make matters worse some of the embedded footnotes are out of place, even to the point of being placed within the following canto. (Vita Nuova, however, has proper jump-to footnoting.) I was disappointed that the ebook does not include all of the maps that are in Musa’s original print editions, nor does it include all of the original footnotes.

I liked that it was in English because I understand this Dante chap wasn’t an English speaker and wrote originally in Italian. Luckily someone translated it otherwise it never would have made much of a splash. I mean, afterall, who actually can read Italian these days?An interesting story about a wag who travels through Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, not necessarily in that order, and gets an opportuinity to insult a tremendous number of his enemies from the old neighborhood, in this case Florence, Italy.

The footnote format on Kindle is a little odd, but I began to enjoy it, and get used to it. They are incredibly vital in reading and studying the Divine Comedy.Mark Musa’s translation is the most worthwhile.

Class

Mr. Musa's rendering of the Divine Comedy is just wonderful. And being published by Penguin Classics puts all of it in a convenient easy to carry volume. He captures the scope and fire of Dante's genius as thoroughly as any single volume can. You have complete verse translations of Dante's 2 masterworks, The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova plus a bibliography, notes, and an introduction by Mark Musa.

The content is of course excellent, but the Kindle edition is sloppily executed. This is a very poor show from a reputable publisher. When you pay £10 for an ebook, the formatting should be right. As it is:1. The notes are randomly scattered through the text, as though someone had simply passed the paperback through an OCR scanner.2. The navigation menu is limited to the book titles contained. You cannot navigate within the books, making it a laborious task to find a particular canto.It would only take one editor a day’s labour to do a proper job of this. Unfortunately, it reads like one of those cheap OCR scans of out-of-copyright material which the unscrupulous peddle on Amazon, rather than like a £10 book from an established publisher. I do hope that Penguin might fix this.

Don't be misled by Amazon's description. This is not the edition with translations by Lawrence Binyon and DG Rossetti but a modern edition with new translations by Mark Musa. Perfectly readable translations yes, but not what I was expecting when I bought it. With no disrespect to Musa, his translation of La Vita Nuova is no match for Rossetti's, which while it may be a little archaic for some tastes makes it more suitable for a renaissance poet, in my view. Also worth mentioning is the fact that this edition does not have the excerpts from the 'Rhymes' and the Latin Prose works, that were included in the earlier edition so in that respect is a much 'lesser' volume and an inferior overview of Dante.

The Mark Musa translation is the one I find easiest to read out of the 4 I have, and I wanted a Kindle version, BUTThis version for some reason has the notes scattered throughout the text rather than separated at the end of each Canto as in the hard copy version.It makes it almost impossible to keep the thread through the Cantos, especially for a largish note e.g. the one on the Old Man of Crete in Canto XIVHopefully at some point the publisher will upgrade this version to one resembling the Kirkpatrick version, which has the notes linked as foot notes at the appropriate point in the textbut for this formatting problem I would have given it 5 starsAddition 15th May 2013 - Having seen the paperback preview of this I now realise that the notes are actually at the foot of each page, and the Kindle version reproduces the notes in the right place, BUT, does not have the page breaks. Hence it appears that the notes are scattered at random

A highly idiosyncratic translation. Not for the beginner.

I was very happy with the service from PKRD and hope to use this seller again. Thank you.