This collection of Dante Alighieri’s Canzoniere, translated for the first time in its entirety into English, charts his poetic evolution and displays the ground on which his Vita Nova and Divine Comedy developed. Inspired in his early poems by troubadour love poetry, Dante would later come to master all the genres of the time, such as the canzone, the sonnet and the ballad.

At the same time deeply personal – dealing with themes of love, death and exile – and imbued with the poetic and political context of the period, Dante’s Rime, presented in dual Italian and English text and rendered by prize-winning translators Anthony Mortimer and J.G. Nichols, offers a fascinating glimpse into the imagination of arguably the greatest writer of all time.

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'...beautifully produced, as you'd expect from this outfit; and it repays endless attention.' Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

"Mortimer's version preserves the lifeblood of the original through the medium of convincing poetry. With facing Italian text, adequate explanatory notes, and less of an impasse between form and language, the translation withstand the technical test of the poet's artistic epiphany… With its deft poetic touch, Mortimer's translation stakes a claim as a worthy successor to Rossetti, faithful in tone to this crucial stage in Dante's apprenticeship as 'A new intelligence that Love imparts / With weeping strives to draw him ever higher.' " TLS

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Read an excerpt from Rime

Read a review of Rime in The Guardian

Dante's Rime has been shortlisted for the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation 2009. Read more about the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize


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