Highest Comedy
Paradise
by Dante Alighieri, edited and translated by Anthony Esolen
The Modern Library
(Random House), 2004
(537 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by R. V. Young
With the publication of Paradise, Anthony Esolen brings to completion his translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia or The Divine Comedy, begun with the Inferno (2002) and Purgatory (2003). As I maintained in my review of these volumes, Dante is among the handful of the greatest authors of world literature, and his Commedia is in many ways at the heart of Western culture because both its poetic excellence and its Christian vision are indisputable.
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R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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