Kristina Landa. The poetics of joy in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The original text and the canonical translation

Abstract

The book examines the ‘poetics of joy’ in Dante’s Divine Comedy across the disciplines of lexicography, language history, philology, and theology, with reliance on an extensive body of research and supplemented with numerous comments to the poem. The book consists of two parts. In the first, the author analyses the vocabulary used by Dante and other medieval authors to express the notion. Dante’s artistic world exists within a broader cultural and religious context of the period. The book’s second part is devoted to the means by which the vocabulary denoting joy is rendered in M. Lozinsky’s now classical translation of the Comedy. The addendum contains the author’s own translations of several cantos from the Paradiso as well as of Jacopone da Todi’s lauda on the meaning of joy. The book will certainly interest Dante scholars and a broader audience of readers who are keen to understand the Divine Comedy — a unique work of world literature that has roused profound curiosity for more than seven centuries.