Books by Catherine Cho
Inferno
by Dante Alighieri, Catherine Cho
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Inferno is a disturbing and masterfully told memoir, but it’s also an important one that pushes back against powerful taboos. . .”―The New York Times Book Review
“Explosive”―Good Morning America
When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity.
In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She masterfully interweaves these parts of her past with a vivid, immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward.
The result is a powerful exploration of psychosis and motherhood, at once intensely personal, yet holding within it a universal experience―of how we love, live, and understand ourselves in relation to each other.
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Inferno
by Dante Alighieri, Catherine Cho
An innovative and fascinating new version of Dante Alighieri's Inferno as it has never been rendered
Stopped mid-motion in the middle
Of what we call a life, I looked up and saw no sky-
Only a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.
--from Canto I
Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang has translated the Inferno into English at a moment when popular culture is so prevalent that it has even taken Dante, author of the fourteenth century epic poem, The Divine Comedy, and turned him into an action-adventure video game hero. Dante, a master of innovation, wrote his poem in the vernacular, rather than in literary Latin. Bang has similarly created an idiomatically rich contemporary version that is accessible, musical, and audacious. She's matched Dante's own liberal use of allusion and literary borrowing by incorporating literary and cultural references familiar to contemporary readers: Shakespeare and Dickinson, Freud and South Park, Kierkegaard and Stephen Colbert. The Inferno--the allegorical story of a spiritual quest that begins in a dark forest, traverses Hell's nine circles, and ends at the hopeful edge of purgatory--was also an indictment of religious hypocrisy and political corruption. In its time, the poem was stunningly new. Bang's version is true to the original: lyrical, politically astute, occasionally self-mocking, and deeply moving. With haunting illustrations by Henrik Drescher, this is the most readable Inferno available in English, a truly remarkable achievement.
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Inferno
by Dante Alighieri, Catherine Cho
Dante's immortal vision of Hell shines "as it never did before in English verse" (Edward Mendelson) in Clive James's new translation of Inferno. The most captivating part of perhaps the greatest epic poem ever written, Dante's Inferno still holds the power to thrill and inspire. The medieval equivalent of a thriller, Inferno follows Dante and his faithful guide, Virgil, as they traverse the complex geography of Hell, confronting its many threats, macabre punishments, and historical figures, before reaching the deep chamber where Satan himself resides. Now, in this new translation, Clive James communicates not just the transcendent poetry of Dante's language but also the excitement and terror of his journey through the underworld. Instead of Dante's original terza rima, a form which in English tends to show the strain of composition, James employs fluently linked quatrains, thereby conveying the seamless flow of Dante's poetry and the headlong momentum of the action. As James writes in his introduction, Dante’s great poem "can still astonish us, whether we believe in the supernatural or not. At the very least it will make us believe in poetry."
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Inferno
by Dante Alighieri, Catherine Cho
"As poetry, Mr. Zappulla's English Dante is successful--. The power of Dante's descriptive poetry should be apparent, and that is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a translator."--Washington Times
In this new rendition of a timeless classic, Italian scholar Elio Zappulla captures the majesty and enduring power of the Inferno, the first of the three canticles of Dante's The Divine Comedy, unarguably one of the masterpieces of world literature. Rendering Dante's terza rima into lyrical blank verse, Zappulla's translation makes accessible to the modern reader the journey of the famed Florentine poet Dante through the nine circles of hell. With Virgil at his side, the great poet descends through horrific landscapes of the damned--dark forests, boiling muck, and burning plains filled with unspeakable punishment, lamentation, and terror--depicted with gruesome detail unmatched in all literature. Richly annotated, this translation takes even the first-time reader on a truth-seeking journey whose imaginative and psychological discoveries make clear why this work persists at the heart of Western culture.
"If Dante's Inferno is a cautionary tale of the history of human depravity, it is also an amazingly complex narrative, treating timeless ethical themes, medieval philosophy and religion, tendentious political issues and deeply personal events."--San Diego Union-Tribune
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