The inferno
(Book)

Arguably the greatest of poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem's line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art. In addition to a masterful verse translation, Esolen provides in each book of The Divine Comedy a critical Introduction, endnotes, and appendices containing Dante's most important sources-from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and more -that deftly illuminate the cultural and poetic universe the poet inhabited.--,Amazon.

Text in English and Italian.