Audiobooks: Fiction, Poetry, & Drama
I am a believer in the beauty and utility of audiobooks. (It helps that I drive about an hour a day.) Humans spoke and told stories before they wrote. Homer sang or chanted. Your experience of a story may be enhanced or transformed by listening to a skilled artist bring to life. I cannot imagine reading Alexander McCall Smith's wonderful No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels, because the amazing Lisette Lecat, a South African actress, has given them life inside my head with her singular readings. If you love the experience of being read to, here are some of our carefully chosen titles. If you want books to be delivered in an old and an always new way, try an audiobook soon. (Success and technological parameters have driven me to divide our audiobooks into two pages. Be sure to browse our audiobook-nonfiction as well.)
The Divine Comedy: the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso
The Divine Comedy: the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso
John Ciardi masterfully translates with beautiful English poetry one of the greatest works in literature. Dante's story-poem is an allegory that represents mankind as it exposes itself, by its merits or demerits, to the rewards or the punishments of justice. A single listening will reveal Dante's visual imagination and uncanny power to make the spiritual visible. Dante's reputation as the outstanding figure of Italian letters rests mainly on the Divine Comedy, a long vernacular poem in 100 cantos (more than 14,000 lines) composed during his exile. Dante entitled it Commedia ; the adjective Divina was added in the 16th cent. It recounts the tale of the poet's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and is divided accordingly into three parts. In Hell and Purgatory Dante is guided by Vergil, through Heaven, by Beatrice, for whom the poem is a memorial.
The work is written in terza rima, a complex verse form in pentameter, with interlocking triads rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, etc. A magnificent synthesis of the medieval outlook, the Divine Comedy pictures a changeless universe ordered by God; its allegorical theme is the gradual revelation of God to the pilgrim. It is also a religious dialogue on the gradations of earthly sin and piety as well as on such topics as predestination and classical philosophy. The symbolism is complex yet highly rational; the verse is musical; and the entire work is one of great imagination. Through his masterpiece Dante established Tuscan as the literary language of Italy, surpassed all previous Italian writers, and gave rise to a vast literature.
Read by Pam Ward. 1 MP3 cd, 13 hours, unabridged.