The Undivine Comedy (English Edition)

Count Henryk is a poet of the Byronic stamp. However, so devoted is he to ideal beauty, that he neglects his very real wife and son, and is led near his own death by Poetry Incarnate, who is nothing more than the diabolically reanimated corpse of a whore. No sin goes unpunished; for his inhuman abandoning of his family, Henryk learns that his blind son, Orcio, has been "cursed" with the poetic gift. Beset with visions of heaven, Orcio is tortured with forebodings of his father's damnation. Henryk, one of the greatest anti-heroes of European Romanticism, is fated to die on the walls of a castle defending the Old Order against the new men of the socialist future. A critique of dreamy poetics and the first tract on class warfare (predating Karl Marx by several decades), Zygmunt Krasiński's Undivine Comedy comes alive in this most recent, full translation of the work into English. Recently revised and accompanied by the essay "Zygmunt Krasiński: the Clear-Edyed Romantic," this is the only authorized edition of the eminently readable and faithful modern translation from the pen of poet and translator C.S. Kraszewski