Inferno

(Paperback)

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Description

This is a new prose translation of Dante's epic. A newly edited version of the Italian text will be on facing pages. This edition includes fully comprehensive notes with the latest in contemporary scholarship as well as 16 short essays on special subjects at the end of the book.

Reviews

Professor Esolens translation of Dantes Inferno is the best one I have seen. . . . And his endnotes and other additions provoke answers to almost any question that could arise about the work. A. Kent Hieatt, translator of The Canterbury Tales

Crisp and clear, Esolens version avoids two modern temptations: a slavish literalness to the Italian or a taking of liberties in the attempt to make this greatest of medieval poems esthetically modern. . . . In addition to his scholarly tact, Esolen is simply one of the most vigorous English translators of Dante ever.Crisis magazine

Esolens new translation follows Dante through all his spectacular range, commanding where he is commanding, wrestling, as he does, with the density and darkness in language and in the soul. This Inferno gives us Dantes vivid drama and his verbal inventiveness. It is living writing. James Richardson, professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University

Opening the book we stand face to face with the poet, and when his voice ceases we may marvel if he has not sung to us in his own Tuscan."William Dean Howells, The Nation

Author Bio

Anthony Esolen is a published poet and professor of English at Providence College who has written extensively on Renaissance and medieval literature. His translations include the three volumes of The Divine Comedy-Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise-Lucretius's De rerum natura, and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata.