The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James s translation decades in the making gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent, and compulsively readable lyric poem. For the first time ever in an English translation, James makes the bold choice of switching from the terza rima composition of the original Italian a measure that strains in English to the quatrain. The result is rhymed English stanzas that convey the music of Dante s triple rhymes (Edward Mendelson). James s translation reproduces the same wonderful momentum of the original Italian that propels the reader along the pilgrim s path from Hell to Heaven, from despair to revelation."