Paradiso

Paradiso is the most stylistically virtuosic book of the Divine Comedy—yet it is also the most underappreciated, due to readers’ fears that it is boring and about “nothing but goodness.” D. M. Black’s clear and energetic new translation offers not only a glorious contradiction of such a view, but also, in highlighting the extraordinary beauty and sensorial richness of Dante’s verse, proves that Paradiso is in fact “Dante’s genius at its most indisputable” (Harold Bloom).

Cleansed of sin and born anew after his grueling trek up Mount Purgatory, Dante’s pilgrim leaves all that is earthly behind him as he makes his ascent through the celestial spheres. Under the guidance of his childhood sweetheart and lifelong muse Beatrice, he contemplates optics, angels, free will, justice, and love, to arrive at one of the most moving and ecstatic epiphanies in the history of literature—that God is “the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars.”

Written at a time of great political turmoil in Italy and great personal anxiety in Dante’s life, Paradiso wrestles with many questions that have echoes in our own disturbing times. At its heart, it is a book about the shape of the universe and how to find one’s place within it, composed with inventive daring and linguistic ingenuity as Dante stretches the Italian vernacular to its very limits, striving to make vivid and tangible the ineffable and sublime.