Dante’s Philosophical World in the 21st Century: New Approaches in a Slovak Translation of the Third Canticle

Abstract

To completely understand Dante’s work, we would need to perfectly comprehend the foundations on which it is built, as well as Dante’s own “constructs” and reinterpretations of earlier texts—the transformations of these texts and the whole ideological superstructure of the work built on them. The goal of this essay is to introduce, for the first time in English-language scholarship, a discussion of Pavol Koprda’s Slovak translation of Dante’s Paradise (2020), the result of extensive Slovak academic research on this topic, based on key sections in which Dante’s philosophical background is revealed, and focusing on an interpretation of the third canticle and a reconciliation of the intellectual debates of Dante’s time.