Mark Musa

Mark Louis Musa was born on 27 May 1934 and died on 31 December 2014. He studied at Rutgers, where the poet and Dante translator John Ciardi supervised his first translation, a new version of Dante's Vita Nuova. It came out in 1961 and has been in print ever since. That year he finished a doctorate at Johns Hopkins and began teaching at Indiana University. In 1965 he founded its Bologna study program, and the university's Italian doctoral program grew up under his guidance.

Musa worked as a translator and critic rather than a novelist or poet. His shelf of Italian classics includes Petrarch's Canzoniere, Boccaccio's Decameron, Machiavelli's The Prince and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. He also wrote Advent at the Gates: Dante's Comedy, published by Indiana University Press in 1974, and compiled The Italian Renaissance Reader.

The Divine Comedy is the work that made his name. Penguin Classics issued it in three volumes, Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, each with his introduction and commentary. Indiana University Press later brought out a revised six-volume edition with the Italian text alongside his English. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and received Indiana University's Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring Award in 1996.

Start with the Penguin Divine Comedy, beginning at Inferno, where the poem itself begins. Musa's commentary comes with every canto, so you can see who Dante meets in each circle of Hell and why they matter. Readers who know some Italian, or want to learn, can then try the Indiana edition with the original beside the translation.