DANTE ALIGHIERI was born in Florence, Italy, in 1265. His early poetry falls into the tradition of love poetry that passed from the Provençal to such Italian poets as Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s friend and mentor. Dante’s first major work was the Vita Nuova (New Life), 1293–1294. This sequence of lyrics, sonnets, and prose narrative describes his love, first earthly, then spiritual, for Beatrice, whom he had first seen as a child of nine, and who had died when Dante was twenty-five.

Dante married about 1285, served Florence in battle, and rose to a position of leadership in the bitter factional politics of that city-state. In 1300 he and the other city magistrates found it necessary to banish leaders from both the Black and White factions, including Dante’s friend Cavalcanti, a fellow White. But after the Blacks seized control of Florence in 1301, Dante himself was tried in absentia and was banished from the city on pain of death. He never returned to Florence.

In exile he wrote his Convivio, or Banquet, a kind of poetic compendium of medieval philosophy, as well as a political treatise, Monarchia. He probably began his Comedy (later to be called the Divine Comedy and consisting of three parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso) around 1307 or 1308. On a diplomatic mission to Venice in 1321, Dante fell ill, and returned to Ravenna, where he died.

“Dante’s basic, quintessential clarity has largely been captured, and for the first time in English….At long last, an English Dante which…should satisfy Italianists, and medievalists, and readers of poetry.”—Burton Raffel, The Denver Quarterly

“Exactly what we have waited for these years, a Dante with clarity, eloquence, terror, and profoundly moving depths.”

—Robert Fagles, Princeton University

“A miracle. A lesson in the art of translation and a model (an encyclopedia) for poets. The full range and richness of American English is displayed as perhaps never before.”—Charles Simic