Excerpt from The Divine Comedy Purity in rendering is now so highly esteemed that the intrusion of an explanation into a text is intellectually resented. Only Dante could tell what he would change if he were engaged on the Comedy today. As Dante is a very great poet, every quality of his style demands considera tion; his choice of words and of their place in sentence and in line can not be deemed fortuitous. His firmness of phrase is that of a living organism, and not of a crystal. The beauty and strength of the Italian language and the charm of rhyme as used by the poet are not to be enjoyed completely by those to whom the idiom is not native. An English translator of the Divine Comedy has at his com mand, even if he were perfectly in control of his medium, only the strength and beauty of his own language; his results can be at best an English re-expression of his original, and with such rhythmical qualities as are pleasing to the English ear. Good workmanship asks the favor of no poetical or other license, but claims the privilege of occasional expression of a necessary connoted value, for example, of a then or there, or the use of an ellipsis when the Italian poet has worked thus economically. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.