The Divine Comedy
The member's edition. The leader's edition adds notes for whoever opens the discussion: what the cantos are doing, where Longfellow's literal English helps and where it hides a pun or a tone, which doctrine is in play and how a Reformed reader and a Catholic one will hear it, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
Longfellow's Divine Comedy is in the public domain. The whole poem is on this page, canto by canto, with every harder word glossed where it stands; the Society's library, the Armarium, has the poem under divine_comedy in Cary's translation on the same twelve-line grid.
Listen free
LibriVox's group reading of Longfellow's translation (2007): the whole poem, a canto or two a track, by a dozen volunteer readers, about fifteen hours. It is the same translation as this page, so you can read and listen together. The track list and the player are not on this page yet: the Society's build machine could not reach the Internet Archive when this page was made, and the list of files and their lengths will be filled in from Adam's ThinkPad; the catalogue link opens the recording now.
Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; in the public domain. A group reading: the voice changes between cantos, and a few of the Archive's track labels are known to be out of order against the cantos they hold, which the player will note when the track list is in. Each track is a 64 kbps MP3 of 5 to 15 MB: on a phone plan, start it on Wi-Fi.
Kindle + Audible
Whispersync links a Kindle book to its Audible narration: own both, and your phone keeps one place between them, so you can read at home and pick up by ear in the car where you stopped.
The Divine Comedy read by Charlton Griffin on Audible (unabridged)For the car the Society's nomination is Charlton Griffin's unabridged reading for Audio Connoisseur (about fourteen hours), which uses Longfellow's text, the same words as this page. Members who want a modern translation on audio have John Ciardi's read by Heathcote Williams, and the Hollander, Pinsky and Kirkpatrick versions are on Audible in parts; none of those is this page's text, and the glossary will not match them. Longfellow's translation is free or pennies on Kindle in several editions; whether a Kindle copy pairs with a narration is Amazon's to say: on the Kindle book's page, look for Add Audible narration.
The Divine Comedy is one poem in three parts and a hundred cantos: a Florentine lost in a dark wood at thirty-five is led by Virgil down through the nine circles of Hell, up the seven terraces of the mountain of Purgatory, and then, by the woman he loved as a boy, through the nine heavens to the sight of God. It is a map of the soul, a history of Italy, an encyclopedia of medieval thought and the most personal poem ever written, and it was finished in exile by a man who never saw his city again. Readers who stop at the Inferno have read the cellar and missed the house.
This is the whole poem in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation of 1867, the first complete American Dante and still the most literal of the great ones: Longfellow keeps Dante's tercets as three-line stanzas, keeps his word order where English will bear it, and gives up the rhyme to do it. The result is sometimes stiff and always faithful, which is what a reading club wants under its hand; the famous lines come through nearly word for word, and where Longfellow's English is Victorian the glossary says what it means. The text is Project Gutenberg's, as canon-corpus holds it. The Society's library has the poem in Cary's older blank verse under the same unit names, so a link from this page lands on the same canto and the same lines in a different translation; the note on the text below explains.
The poem is cut here into twenty-nine groups of cantos, nine for each canticle and eleven for the Paradiso, each a night's reading of about three hundred lines. Before each group is a short note on what happens; after it, the turn of the cantos in plain words, who is in them, the lines worth keeping, the harder words glossed, the Great Ideas they touch, the Scripture they lean on (Dante quotes it constantly and the Vulgate's Latin is left as he left it, with the reference beside it), books in the Armarium to read beside them, questions for the meeting, and (in the leader's edition) notes for whoever opens the discussion. The Society reads Milton's Paradise Lost the same season and the two companions point at each other where the poets disagree. At the foot of the page are the indexes for the whole poem, the Potent Quotables and the memory deck.
A note on the text
The text is Longfellow's translation (Ticknor and Fields, 1867), from Project Gutenberg #1004 as canon-corpus holds it, with Longfellow's own notes left out and the Latin and Provençal lines left as he printed them. Each canto is cut into units of four tercets (twelve lines), named divine_comedy:Inf.I.1, Inf.I.13 and so on by canticle, canto and first line, which is the shape the Armarium gives this poem; the Armarium's copy is the Rev. H. F. Cary's blank-verse translation of 1814, not Longfellow's, so a link from this page lands on the same canto and the same twelve lines of Dante in Cary's English, and the words will differ. Nothing is cut. The Society's featured translation is Longfellow's; the library's older Cary is kept because it was there first and because two translations are better than one.
Persons
Everyone in the book, alphabetically by surname, with the parts they are in.
The Great Ideas
Each of Adler's Great Ideas the book touches, with the parts where it does. Ideas marked in gold are from the Society's own Syntopicon Addendum and link to it.
Scripture
Every quotation and clear allusion, in canonical order, with the King James text.
Glossary
Every harder word, A to Z, glossed in the sense it has here. Each links to the place it is used. Rarity is measured by how seldom the word turns up in English at large; the commonest words are never glossed.
Lines Worth Keeping
Every line the Society marked, in order.
Potent Quotables
The book's most-quoted lines, as first-letter study cards: read the first letters and say the line, then check it against the full text.
The Armarium Shelf
Books in the Society's library that the companion sends you to, and which parts send you there.
Memory Work
The Potent Quotables, and every line worth keeping ( of them), as decks for the Mnemonicon.
Download the Potent Quotables or the whole deck, then in the Mnemonicon choose Import and pick the file. Importing both adds nothing twice.
To study the glossary's words with spaced repetition, open the Vocabularium.