title: Purgatorio: A New Verse Translation
author: Dante
description: "In the years of my reading Dante, after the first overwhelming, reverberating spell of the <i>Inferno</i>, which I think never leaves one afterward, it was the <i>Purgatorio</i> that I had found myself returning to with a different, deepening attachment, until I reached a point when it was never far from me . . . Of the three sections of [The Divine Comedy], only Purgatory happens on the earth, as our lives do, with our feet on the ground, crossing a beach, climbing a mountain. All three parts of the poem are images of our lives, but there is an intimacy peculiar to the <i>Purgatorio</i>. Here the times of day recur with all the sensations and associations that the hours bring with them, the hours of the world we are living in as we read the poem." --from the Foreword<br /><br /><br /><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>
zlib_text: PART I
  
  PURGATORY
  
  I was exhausted; with the two of us uncertain of our way, we halted on a
  plateau lonelier than desert paths.
  
  Dante, Purgatorio
  
  CHAPTER ONE
  
  I COULDN’T SHUT OUT the screams. Darkness surrounded me. A terrible weight
  pressed into my chest, making me struggle for each breath as I lay drowning in
  my own blood. I sat up with a gasp, blinking into the shadows.
  
  The screaming had stopped. The room became still, flooded with silence. I took
  a couple of painful swallows, trying to moisten my parched mouth. It took me a
  moment to realize that the screams had been my own, each cry clawing my throat
  until it was raw. I brought my hands up to my chest. My fingers moved along
  the surface of my shirt. The fabric was smooth, with no sign of rips or tears
  from the crossbow bolts. I couldn’t see well in the dim light, but I could
  tell this shirt wasn’t mine, or rather, wasn’t Shay’s borrowed sweater—the one
  I’d been wearing the night everything changed.
  
  A blur of images rushed thro