‘I finally realized that I was practicing for this job every time I wrote a quatrain . . . I had spent all this time – the greater part of a lifetime – preparing my instruments.’ The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James's vivid translation – his life's work and the result of decades – presents the entire epic poetry of Dante in a single tone. While many poets and translators have tried to capture the full glory of the Divine Comedy in English, many have failed. Victorian poetic translations established an unfortunate tradition of reproducing Dante's vivid metrical verses, while at the same time betraying the translator's imagination's difficulty. For Dante, the dramatic human stories of Hell were captivating, but the spiritual studies of Purgatory and the wonderful panoramic images of Paradise were no less interesting. In this enchanting translation, James – defying tradition by writing in quatrains – tackles these problems and creates a striking and highly accessible translation that offers us the Divine Comedy as a single, dramatic work.