Penguin Classics Portable Edition of Dante's Works

Chris Hennessy: Solid translation. Easy to read.

United States on May 08, 2023

patricia: Using it for a class

United States on Feb 28, 2023

STSTSTST: Excellent version

Germany on Aug 11, 2022

Visionary: I joined Dante on his fantastical jouney through the Three Worlds. What an imagination!
The Musa translation is among the more readible - although at the expense of the poetics (Musa explains decision in book intro).

Now the bad: the publisher, Penguin, desires to be placed in the lowest level of Hell. I have NEVER witnessed such a God-awful Kindle format (really lack there of). Penguin owes a polished version to both Dante and Dr Musa a polished Kindle.

United States on Nov 15, 2021

William P. Flynn: I liked that it was in English because I understand this Dante chap wasn’t an English speaker and wrote originally in Italian. Luckily someone translated it otherwise it never would have made much of a splash. I mean, afterall, who actually can read Italian these days?
An interesting story about a wag who travels through Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, not necessarily in that order, and gets an opportuinity to insult a tremendous number of his enemies from the old neighborhood, in this case Florence, Italy.

United States on Dec 18, 2020

BangorBill: On the plus side it is a good deal to get Mark Musa’s excellent, very readable translations of all three volumes of the Divine Comedy, plus Dante’s Vita Nuova, at a fair price. On the down side, the ebook does not have a complete Table of Contents that lets you jump directly to a specific canto, so you have to page through it to find the one you want. Also, the footnotes are mixed in with the cantos, rather than being separate and jump-to-able (linked). Unlike some reviewers I don’t think this fault is severe enough to warrant a one-star rating, but to make matters worse some of the embedded footnotes are out of place, even to the point of being placed within the following canto. (Vita Nuova, however, has proper jump-to footnoting.) I was disappointed that the ebook does not include all of the maps that are in Musa’s original print editions, nor does it include all of the original footnotes.

United States on Oct 11, 2018

Tim Chesterton: I give this work a one-star rating not on the basis of Dante's masterpiece or Musa's translation and notes, all of which are excellent.

No, the truth is that I'm extremely disappointed in the formatting of this Kindle edition. The print edition has footnotes at the end of every page, which works well when you're just looking down at them from the text. The Kindle edition simply reproduces this, but of course what you see at any one time on the screen is not the same as a page in the print edition, so the footnotes just appear at random places in the text, and they aren't connected by dynamic links to the text they're referring to. Also, Musa has intentionally translated in three line stanzas, but the Kindle edition simply presents each stanza as a continuous paragraph with no regard for Musa's lines.

I love my paperback copy of this classic, but the Kindle edition is awful. I would advise everyone to avoid it.

Canada on Aug 24, 2018

Byron Ashton: I was very happy with the service from PKRD and hope to use this seller again. Thank you.

United Kingdom on Apr 02, 2018

Ian Chadwick: I have Musa's translations of Machiavelli, which encouraged me to get his Dante. It's one of several translations I own, but one of the most readable because he doesn't try to force the English version to fit Dante's original rhyming scheme. To me, those translations often feel clumsy and artificial. This one feels looser, more approachable.

Canada on Nov 06, 2013

S. Harris: The Mark Musa translation is the one I find easiest to read out of the 4 I have, and I wanted a Kindle version, BUT
This version for some reason has the notes scattered throughout the text rather than separated at the end of each Canto as in the hard copy version.
It makes it almost impossible to keep the thread through the Cantos, especially for a largish note e.g. the one on the Old Man of Crete in Canto XIV
Hopefully at some point the publisher will upgrade this version to one resembling the Kirkpatrick version, which has the notes linked as foot notes at the appropriate point in the text
but for this formatting problem I would have given it 5 stars
Addition 15th May 2013 - Having seen the paperback preview of this I now realise that the notes are actually at the foot of each page, and the Kindle version reproduces the notes in the right place, BUT, does not have the page breaks. Hence it appears that the notes are scattered at random

United Kingdom on Mar 20, 2013