description: Of the great 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.Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante’s most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians—that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.
language: English
title: Inferno
titlecomplete: Inferno
characters: Francesca, Virgilio (Publius Vergilius Maro), Charon (mythology), Dante Alighieri, Odysseus, Paolo, Beatrice (diverse works)
genres: Fiction, Religion, Poetry, Philosophy, School, Literature, Classics, Medieval, Fantasy, Italian Literature
ratings_count: 174808
series: La Divina Commedia
awards: awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Poetry, awardedAt: 1420099200000
name: Премія імені Максима Рильського
publisher: Turtleback Books