Prue Shaw’s absorbing, highly accessible introduction to the Commedia promises to be the essential edition for years to come.

Dante’s epic story of one man’s journey from darkness to the revelation of divine light is one of the greatest works of Western literature. Because of its length and its language, it is viewed as forbidding. College courses often cherry-pick from the Inferno and barely glance at Purgatorio and Paradiso. In The Essential Commedia, Prue Shaw, a renowned Dante scholar, fillets the epic to create an absorbing tour of all three realms of the afterlife. Extensive passages of the work’s greatest poetry, astutely excerpted, are offered in translation alongside the original, making it easy to read Dante in English, Italian, or both. The translation into modern, idiomatic English avoids archaisms, padding, and syntactic contortions. With no loss of rigor, a complex text is rendered accessible by a teacher whose decades of experience enable her to highlight those aspects of the poem—the drama, the poetry, the intellectual excitement—any reader will appreciate.