Divine Comedy, Cary’s Translation

Dante Alighieri · translated by Henry Francis Cary

Reading time: about 11 h
Length: 151,362 words · 613 pages
Structure: 198 chapters · 2 front-matter sections
Language: English (translated from Italian)
Era: Medieval

Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in a hundred cantos: the pilgrim lost in the wood, Virgil's guidance down through the circles — Francesca and Paolo blown on the wind, Ulysses in his flame, Ugolino in the ice — then the climb up the mountain of Purgatory, and the ascent through the planetary heavens with Beatrice to the vision at the end that the poem says it cannot report.

This is Henry Francis Cary's blank-verse translation, published in full in 1814 as The Vision; or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri. It made almost no impression until Coleridge praised it publicly, after which it went through edition after edition and became the Dante that English readers of the nineteenth century actually read — the text Keats carried with him on his walking tour of Scotland.

This Bibliomancer edition presents all three canticles complete.

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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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