Inferno (Modern Library Classics)

An extraordinary new verse translation of Dantes masterpiece, by poet, scholar, and lauded translator Anthony Esolen

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 theInferno, 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 poems line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding anInfernothat 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 Dantes most important sourcesfrom Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologiansthat deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.