A Dante Starter Kit! 

MENTIONED BY STEVE: Dante by Barbara Reynolds Dante: The Story of His Life by Marco Santagata Dante and His World by Thomas Caldecot Chubb Reading Dante by Prue Shaw The Portable Dante, edited by Paolo Milano Recommended translators: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dorothy Sayers, and Allen Mandelbaum The Barnes and Noble leather-bound edition of the Divine Comedy The Doré Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, published by Dover

I knew you’d bring up the videogame 😂 Thanks for the kind words, and for such a great starter kit video! Fully agree with your comments about the importance of notes - for example, Mandelbaum’s are good but maybe too little, Hollander’s are good and voluminous although he has a tendency to wrap himself around minutiae and, sometimes, even irrelevant details. Dorothy Sayers - stellar!

For an English translation, I too love the Mandelbaum most, and Sayers and Longfellow have their charms, but perhaps another one worth considering is the J.G. Nichols translation with Alma Books. I've only dipped in and out of Nichols but so far (with a few exceptions) he's been a pleasant surprise.

The everyman/Mandelbaum edition has illustrations by Botticelli !!!

I find Michael Palma's transition of The Inferno to be masterful. I read Longfellow in high school and was brought back to The Inferno by Palma. I wish he would finish the task.

Portable Dante is a superb edition, and the old Viking Portable has Laurence Binyon’s terza rims that finally made the Comedy click for me. Thanks for noting the biography! Cheers, Jack

Hail the return of starter kits! Together with Tom's series, this is most appreciated. This year I have set my reading to medieval studies. Dante is on the docket for late spring. My local library has the Reynolds and Shaw books, so huzzah! there, too. I finished INVENTING THE MIDDLE AGES this morning and have started MONT ST. MICHEL AND CHARTRES. After Chaucer comes THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH that Steve mentioned in passing on a video.

The Prue Shaw book is great.

The older Portable Dante was my introduction to Dante and his writings, though as I've mentioned in many videos, it was really difficult to read that Elizabethan English, and I missed a lot of important things because I was reading so fast and had to mentally translate it into modern standard English as I read. Alas, I think it's one of my books in storage 900 miles away, though I put it in a box of special boxes that was supposed to come with me when I moved.

I nearly fell over when you mentioned that Dorothy Sayers translated the Divine Comedy. Updating my used book shopping list to include those volumes.

Surprised you didn't mention A.N. Wilson's 'Dante in Love' ... [Lights blue torch paper and exits].

Penguin does, indeed, still make The Portable Dante and it's translated by Mark Musa. Also, there are some illustrations in my Everyman's Library edition, which I recently purchased. Now I'm curious to read the Dorothy Sayers translation! 🤓 I very much enjoy the videos that are uploaded by the people at 100 Days of Dante, but in my mind, Tom's videos are *so* much better! ❤️

Love this. Thanks!

Another starter kit!!! Could this be the beginning of the daily starter kit? One can only hope. Steve, can you weigh in on the Clive James translation?

Thanks, Steve, I just received the brand-new facing-page Tuscan-English translation of Vita Nuova by Virginia Jewiss from Penguin Classics!

Should I just learn Italian at this point?

Have you returned to the Clive James translation at all?