LITMIR.BIZ

      CANONGATE BOOKS

      EDINBURGH 2018

      First published in Great Britain, the USA and

      Canada in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,

       14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

      Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

       canongate.co.uk

      This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Alasdair Gray, 2018

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78689 253 9

      eISBN 978 1 78689 288 1

      Typeset in Times New Roman 13/14 pt

      by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

      Falkirk, Stirlingshire

      FOREWORD

      There are more than a hundred English versions of Dante’s epic and every two years another appears. Readers always want them as, like the Bible, it answers important questions with fascinating stories. But unlike the Bible no governments have promoted one excellent translation. None exist. To compress dramatic action, thought, dialogue into a huge urgent poem Dante invented a verse form: three line verses so cleverly unified by end-rhymes that most translators try to reproduce it. In Italian end-rhymes are easy because most words end in one of five vowels. In English end-rhymes are harder so translators get them with language seldom used in daily speech. My version mainly keeps the Dantean form colloquial by using end-rhymes where they came easily, internal rhymes where they did not. My abrupt north British dialect has cut Dante’s epic down from 14,233 lines to 8,912 which shoes that the range of my intelligence is less than Dante’s. Critics who cannot read the original should compare it with any other English translation, which is more accurate but less easily read.

      Here are two examples of my abruptness. In Italy the heroine’s name is pronounced with four syllables; Be-a-trich-ay is a poor phonetic approximation to that beautiful sound. In English the name is usually spoken with two syllables, almost rhyming with mattress. My rhyme scheme needs three syllables: Be-a-tris. Other Italian names should be pronounced with as many syllables as Italians use. Dante mentions two political parties, Ghibelline and Guelph, which I translate as Tory and Whig. The main difference (as in Britain’s eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) was between old and new money, the older class being landowners, the new one merchants. Like all two-party systems the difference was constantly blurred by changing local alliances or intermarriage.

      Other apologies for mishandling Dante’s texts will be attached to my Purgatory and Heaven translations.

      CONTENTS

       1 The Dark Wood. Virgil

       2 Early Doubts Quelled

       3 Hell’s Entry. Doom of Moderates. Charon’s Ferry

       4 Limbo of Sinless Pagans

       5 Minos. Doom of Adulterers

       6 Cerberus. Doom of Gluttons

       7 Plutus. Avaricious. Styx

       8 The Wrathful. Gate of Dis

       9 Citadel of Dis. Furies

       10 Doom of Heretics

       11 A Lecture on Hell

       12 The Minotaur, Centaurs and Unjust Conquerors

       13 Doom of Suicides

       14 Blasphemers. Phlegethon and Giant History

       15 An Old Sodomite Friend

       16 Sodomite Patriots

       17 Fraud Demon Geryon. Bankers

       18 Love Frauds

       19 Simoniac Popes

       20 Magicians

       21 Swindling Councillors

       22 Swindling Devils

       23 Hypocrites

       24 Doom of Thieves

       25 Doom of More Thieves

       26 Liars and Ulysses

       27 Another Liar’s Fate

       28 Doom of Sectarians

       29 Doom of Forgers

       30 Doom of More Falsifiers

       31 Ancient Giant Rebels

       32 Doom of Traitors

       33 Doom of More Traitors

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