posted on 01 Jan 2025

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by Charles S. Singleton

If you are thinking that 2025 might be the year in which you finally take on some of those great pieces of literature that you’ve somehow never quite got around to tackling, the publication this month of a new edition of Dante’s The Divine Comedy might just be the push you need.

The translation by Charles S. Singleton (1909 – 1985) is something of a classic and – controversially maybe for some purists – in prose. The US academic, critic and Dante specialist, Singleton, who was a professor of humanistic studies at John Hopkins University, was hugely influential in bringing both the works of Dante and, to a lesser extent, Boccaccio to a wider audience. In his introduction to the book, Simone Marchest, professor of French and Italian at Princeton University, makes this observation:

“Singleton’s version helps readers to appreciate Dante’s poem as a work that moves them along with the plot. It allows the Comedy to emerge as particularly attentive to creating and managing narrative junctures, even in moments of apparently neutral, even flat, stage direction.”

What Singleton’s prose achieves is to remind us that Dante was telling us a story that has a structure and a progression – the story of a journey that has a beginning and an end – but he manages to do this without letting go of the essential poetry of the ideas and the language. Quite an achievement.

Singleton’s translation has, of course, been published elsewhere before but what this edition brings us are two valuable additions: an inciteful and incisive introduction from Marchest and (this is the clincher for me) a series of original, new illustrations from artist, actor and book designer, Roberto Abbiati. What I really love about these illustrations is that they don’t go for the usual default of literal depictions of the poet and his guide on their journey through a material afterlife: instead, they take a more abstracted, suggestive approach. The introductory remarks capture this perfectly:

“Rather than depicting Dante’s afterlife, they have distilled precise and recognisable figures from the symbolic and ethically inflected imagination of the poem.”

What exactly does that mean?

“…Hell is an upside-down human body, with its limbs and organs corresponding to the various circles that Dante assigned to the region, and bodily attitudes toward each sin are manifested in the gestures that the hands drawn alongside the body make.”

A word here too for the publisher, Princeton University Press, who have produced a book that’s both easy to read and truly delightful to handle and enjoy. Available in January in hardback, the book can be obtained from your local independent bookshop – who will be glad to order it for you if they don’t have it on their shelves.

Terry Potter

January 2025