Paris (AFP)
The prestigious Pleiade Library will publish a new translation of the poem "The Divine Comedy" by Italian Dante Alighieri, as he had done for two other giants of world literature, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Gallimard editions announced on Monday .
"La Divine Comédie" translated by Jacqueline Risset is due out in a bilingual edition on September 30, 700 years after the writer's death.
"Jacqueline Risset's translation, of unequaled clarity, is close to the original text and benefits from a new critical apparatus which is based on seven centuries of reading as well as on the most recent research", indicated Gallimard in a program of publication of the Pléiade.
Jacqueline Risset, poet, critic, academic, is recognized as one of the great specialists of the epic poem in three parts ("Hell", "Le Purgatoire", "Le Paradis").
She died in 2014 at the age of 78.
Its translation was initially published between 1985 and 1990 by Flammarion, a publishing house which is now part of the same group as Gallimard.
The translation of Dante's "Complete Works" published in 1965, including "The Divine Comedy", by the Pleiade had been produced by the academic André Pézard.
Its uniqueness, with a language that incorporates a sometimes obscure medieval French, has made it the target of many criticisms.
The English playwright William Shakespeare has been the subject of successive translations in the Pleiad, the first being published in 1938. As for the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, his "Don Quixote", first translated in 1934, was second in 2001.
Composed between 1303 and 1321 by the Florentine poet Dante, in a language, Italian, which was then in its literary beginnings, "The Divine Comedy" is one of the founding texts of world literature, a vast allegorical journey in the torments of love, faith and creation.
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