num_pages: 528
description: "Professor Esolen's translation of Dante's Inferno is the best one I have seen, for two reasons. His decision to use unrhymed blank verse allows him to come nearly as close to the meaning of the original as any prose reading could do, and allows him also to avoid the harrowing sacrifices that the demand for rhyme imposes on any translator. And his endnotes and other additions provoke answers to almost any question that could arise about the work." —A. Kent HieattOf 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 scholars, teachers, and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.Esolen provides a critical ntroduction and endnotes, with appendices containing Dante's most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and beyond —that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.
language: English
title: Inferno
titlecomplete: Inferno
characters: Francesca, Paolo, Dante Alighieri, Odysseus, Virgilio (Publius Vergilius Maro), Charon (mythology), Beatrice (diverse works)
genres: Fantasy, Literature, School, Philosophy, Poetry, Italian Literature, Religion, Classics, Medieval, Fiction
ratings_count: 174915
series: La Divina Commedia
awards: awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Poetry, awardedAt: 1420099200000
name: Премія імені Максима Рильського
publisher: Modern Library