"The Purgatorio, the middle section of Dante's great poem about losing, and subsequently finding, one's way in the middle of one's life is, unsurprisingly, the beating heart of the Divine Comedy, as this powerful and lucid new translation by the poet D. M. Black makes wonderfully clear. After days spent plumbing the depths of hell, the pilgrim staggers back to the clear light of day in a state of shock, the sense of pervasive dread and deep bewilderment with which he began his pilgrimage as intensified as alleviated by his terminal vision of evil. The slow and initially arduous climb up the mount of Purgatory that ensues, guided as always by Virgil, his poetic model and mentor, is simultaneously both a reckoning with human limits and a rediscovery of human potential in the light of divine promise. Dante's Purgatorio, which has been an inspiration to poets as different as Shelley and T. S. Eliot, is a book full of human stories, of philosophical inquiry, that is also a tale of individual reintegration and healing. Black, a distinguished psychoanalyst as well as a poet, provides notes to the poem and an introduction to this masterpiece by Dante from a contemporary point of view"--
Biografie (Dante Alighieri)
Dante Alighieri, geb. 1265 in Florenz, gest. 1321 in Ravenna, sah mit neun Jahren erstmals Beatrice, die er später in seinem Werk verklärt. Sein Engagement im Kampf um die Unabhängigkeit von Florenz führte 1302 zu einem Gerichtsprozess und schließlich zu lebenslänglicher Verbannung. Dante, der seitdem als vogelfrei galt, hielt sich danach vor allem in Verona auf und reiste von dort aus in viele oberitalienische Städte und Landschaften. Ab etwa 1316 ließ Dante sich in Ravenna nieder, znächst am Hofe des Cangrande della Scala, später als fürstlicher Sekretär und Lehrer für Poetik und Rhetorik.
