Dante Alighieri (1265Ð1321) was an Italian poet and philosopher. He was the greatest poet of Italian literature, the greatest Western poet between antiquity and the modern era, and one of the half-dozen greatest poets of all time. It is no exaggeration to say that Dante is to Italian what Shakespeare is to English.
The Divine Comedy is Dante's magnum opus. It is an epic, allegorical poem recounting DanteÕs journey through the afterlife, guided by the Roman poet Virgil and Beatrice Portinari, DanteÕs ideal woman. The Comedy encapsulates late Medieval thought on subjects such as religion, philosophy, politics, and science.
The translation here given is that of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807Ð1882), a prominent American poet and translator.
This book is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah).