The Divine Comedy
Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Dante journeys through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, meeting souls from history and his own time. The poem brings its account of the afterlife together with questions of faith, politics and human conduct.
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The opening
Canto I
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more; But of the good to treat, which there I found, Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered, So full was I of slumber at the moment In which I had abandoned the true way.
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About this edition
- The words
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's English translation, copied word for word.
- Copied from
Standard Ebooks, The Divine Comedy; source ebook first released 2021-05-31T02:32:46Z. This ebook was produced for Standard Ebooks by Emma Sweeney, and is based on a transcription produced in 1997 by Jennifer Hogan, Tanya Larkin, Robert W. Cole, Jennifer Cook, and Distributed Proofreaders for Project Gutenberg and on digital scans from the Internet Archive.
- Left out
- The title page and opening pages before chapter 1, in 2 places
- Standard Ebooks' imprint page (5 blocks)
- Notes and pages added by translators, editors or publishers, in 3 places
- A preface, foreword or afterword, in 3 places
- Standard Ebooks' colophon and uncopyright pages (12 blocks)
- Kept as written
Its bodily punishments and its judgments about religion, sexuality and political enemies are kept as the author wrote them.