Dante: A Life in Works - Review

Dante: A Life in Works. Robert Hollander. Yale University Press. [pound]20.00. 221 pages. ISBN 0-300-08494-3. Professor Hollander is a widely regarded expert on Dante and one of the three translators of a new edition of the Inferno. Readers are naturally curious about the authors of works they like and even more so about the authors of great works such as The Divine Comedy.

Yet the facts concerning Dante's life are few and his magnum opus has more clues than any other work. This short book is 'an attempt ... to sketch out the lines of Dante's intellectual biography'. While this book was first published in Rome last year, the English version is longer and slightly different. The task facing the biographer is a mammoth one because so little is known about Dante: the chapter entitled 'Dante's Life' only takes up some five and a half pages. Thereafter the author discusses various surviving texts and examines them to see what they tell us about one of the greatest mediaeval writers. He naturally devotes the bulk of his text to a discussion of the Commedia. Dante, who was not a humble man, would probably have been pleased. This is as near as we can get to a biography in the modern sense and it will be a great help to those reading his masterpiece. (P.P.F.)

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