The Inferno

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Summary: David Cronenberg starts here.
Review: Normally, it is a matter of indifference to me what a writer's opinions are. it would be pretty boring if we only read people we agreed with. Nevertheless, Dante provided a severe test to my tolerance. It's not that the book is a religious allegory - with a title like 'The Divine Comedy', you know what you're getting, although allegories always seem to me the narrowest form of literature, a transparent expression of dogma.

It was partly being uncomfortable with Dante's spectacular arrogance at playing God, deciding who was going to Hell. It was partly shock at the Pilgrim's unpunished bursts of abuse at perceived sinners, at one point hilariously pulling a buried man's hair out to his guide's tacit approval. it was mostly that Dante's high-minded conception was tainted by frequent pot-shots at various personal and ideological enemies. I'm all for pungent satire, but consigning someone you don't like to Hell because they're in the wrong political party seems, to me, to undermine an artist's integrity and credibility.

One way to defeat Dante's procedures is to de-allegorise the allegory. In other words, instead of reading every event for its theological significance, enjoy it for what it is on the surface. Reading about an exile lost in a wood after taking a wrong turning, frightened away by savage animals, is much more intriguing than reading about a man blocked in his spiritual life by earthly interests.

You can enjoy the astonishing precision of Dante's architecture, not just of Hell, and its various circles, but the poem itself. You can read it as a fascinating compendium of mythology, history and art - how cool is it in any work to meet Homer and Ovid on your travels, with Virgil as your guide? Dante's references to gruesome contemporary history suggests his vision of hell has nothing on reality.

You can enjoy 'Inferno' for the pictorial vividness - not just the 'hellish' scenes (souls turned into weeping trees; the proto-Cronenberg mutation of a man and a snake; the surreal sight of an ice floor covered in heads; the Fu Manchu-like appearance of Lucifer); but also the beautiful pastoral similes referring back to a lush, green, fertile Italy unavailable to the damned.

You can relish the fact that, though a Comedy in the classical sense, the poem is frequently comic, either in the over-emphatic repulsiveness of some scenes, or, more usually, in the Pilgrim's gauche lack of etiquette. You can enjoy it as a sci-fi/horror adventure/ghost story with two intrepid sidekicks.

I would recommend most strongly Steve Ellis's awesome translation 'Hell', a case of needing 600 years to get it finally right. Dante's mixing the epic and the vernacular is freshly, often provocatively, realised, making the narrative as immediate and exciting as it once was, not a bogged down cultural icon.

Even better, the clause-heavy clumping of his competitors is replaced by clean, simple English, with a hurtling, fluid rhythmic momentum that compels you to continue; notes are kept to a functional minimum, and there are NO distracting maps. I notice with sadness that this is out of print, probably explaining why the subsequent volumes haven't been tackled. If you're out there Professor Ellis, get cracking! Even if your reward will only be in the next world.

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Summary: Dante/Sinclair - A marriage made in heaven... (Or hell ? :)
Review: La Commedia Divina is one of the cornerstones in litterature, and Sinclair's translation is, hands down, STILL the Primus Inter Pares of English translations of Dante Alighieri's work of genious. Sinclair's translation is based on even older source-material than Giorgio Petrocchi, but instead of trying to "get artistic" with Dante's original Terza Rima's, he stick to easily understood prose backed up with lots of elaborate notes, invaluable in understanding Dante's work fully.

Be sure to get the "Purgatorio" and "Paradisio" volumes too; they are equally essential.

"The divine comedy" is such a grand piece of work that it deserves to be read in different translations, but for God's sake, make the Sinclair version one of them... ...A good alternative is the Mark Musa translation.

Another good idea is to get the book "The Dore Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy", because, to me at least, the imagery of Doré has become an integral part in fully appreciating the medieval way of thinking, portraited in Dante's Comedy.

"La Commedia Divina" has had such an impact on me, that I at some point actually considered learning Italian to get the full splendour out of Dante's poetry... ...Well, there's still time...

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Summary: 700 YEAR OLD MASTERPIECE . . .
Review: I just finished reading Dante's Inferno a couple minutes ago. This is the first time I've read it, and I must say that I was very impressed with it. It exceeded my expectations. I'm aware that there are other translations out there, but I picked up this one because it rhymes and reads--for the most part--easily. Some of the Italian names are hard to pronounce, but that's a minor thing in the long run. I've read some long poems where not much seems to happen since the poet just rambles on and on about the scenery. But in The Inferno, every tercet is important. I'm most surprised at how good this work is even though it is 700 years old. There is A LOT of Italian characters and history in here, but you don't HAVE to know anything about Italy in order to enjoy this book--although it sure would help. I will agree with one other reviewer that going from circle to circle can get a bit redundant: go to the next circle, talk to the people, describe things, go to the next circle, etc. But the people and descriptions always change as you go on. And in Dante's Hell, the further you go, the worse it gets. Here's how I think The Inferno should be read: Very slowly. Not in one gulp. Enjoy each Canto--maybe one a day. That is--haha--if you can "enjoy" a trip to Hell. Finally, I love the part about Minos and his tail, the fiery walls that surround Hell, the disgustingness and violence that is found in Hell. If you're still deciding whether or not to read this book, don't hesitate. They don't call it a Masterpiece for nothing . . . .

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Summary: The Lord of Fantasy
Review: Medieval illuminators liked to illustrate whole stories in every miniaturesque detail on barely more than a square inch of parchment. We see the bread loaf on the table, bricklayers work on unfinished walls which direct the view to a landing ship. Hunters chase game in a near forest. It is this view into a doll house, the comfort and cosines of enclosing walls and complete self-sufficiency that stirred the medieval mind. It is the mind of a child, a child with not enough supervision. It doesn't wash, terrorizes the streets in gangs, it is illiterate and hysterically credulous, it brutalizes animals and immolates witches; it is a street-wise thug, superstitious like a fox, ill fed, blaspheming and continually drunk, because only beer avoids the ever present diarrhea which lurks in every well. In such surrounding, hell needs to be painted in strong colours. But trapped in a lifelong purgatory of ceremony and feudal obligation, the individual may seek escape into prayer and a paranoid paradise of speculation and beauty.

This is not a ripping good yarn of conflict and conquest; just a travelogue from a parallel universe. It comes with much philosophical baggage and ponderous logic, all of which is no longer quantum physics and something of a drag. It dresses in exactly 100 cantos, each of exactly the same length. We modern readers fail to appreciate such pedantic workmanship: we ask for a more organic texture, for a crisscross of leitmotifs and echoes. Only gradually emerges how tightly knit everything falls into place. This is great poetry, not a soap opera. Entering Dante's universe, we find ourselves in the realm of an absolute power, with a gigantic concentration camp at its feet, where victims cannibalize each other and Satan himself is the "Herr Commandant." Penal colonies circle a mountain all the way up to the Lord's own top security compound, while the intellectual opposition lingers in exile: Inferno (Canto 4) is not such a bad place after all.

The visuals are intense and very specific. We pass the frowning squint of distant bystanders, address a man who can barely stop scratching his eczema while spurred to race along naked - familiar images, a survivor may remember from Auschwitz. A demon (named Dr. Mengele, no doubt), performs life surgery on Mohammed, but forgot to anesthetize. The poem's topography reaches from a city with red mosques behind a wall of iron to the unfolding rose at the centre of the empyrean. No other poem makes you hear the Sun's thundering silence; the scattered leaves of an entire universe bundle up in one flame. Similes stretch their wings and clouds of starlings and cranes crowd the sky; fishes mob the ponds at feeding time.

T.S.Eliot tries to sell us Dante's pageant in the earthly paradise as a "higher dream" of spiritual beauty. Must be me, but a three eyed woman is a troubling sight. So are wings polka-dotted with wide open eyes, or green and crimson skin pigmentations. And this is just the beginning. Subsequently, Dante's encounter with his immutable sweetheart turns into a real nightmare, before it turns into something very different. Of course, this is a carnival of allegories and the modern reader uses to frown on allegory (but Kafka did it all the time). However in the end it comes all together in a visualization of meticulous accuracy and sensual presence. Modern attempts to create alternative worlds just pale by comparison. Dante is still the undisputed Lord of Fantasy. (On a more mundane level, his poem is of course a clever way of writing libel against his enemies.)

A final observation: Poor Francesca who ended in hell for loving much, says: "if only the King of the Universe had been our friend ..." It echoes an other author of whom Dante himself had no first hand knowledge: "Gods make dangerous company," says Homer in the Iliad. There is more in this vein and the third part opens with an invocation of Apollo. Maybe it is merely a convention of learned poetry - but I wonder: why here of all places, at the entrance to Paradise? What kind of Christian is this Dante anyway? Just compare his position with the gospels's or Paul's existential assessment of this world's involuntary captivity in the clutches of evil. In Dante's presentation, sin is the voluntary failure of an individual. And what shall we think of this monumental idolatry, which Dante lavishes on his fish-blooded sweetheart, (who in real life was neither the first nor the last girl who kept the money in the family and married a banker instead of a poet?) The author seems to hold out on us, he seems to conceal the heretic in his heart. In the era before Dante, this type of idolatry was typical for the poetry at the "love-courts" in the Languedoc.

So, how can a reader with English as his only language get an authentic taste of Dante? I am sure, it could be done to produce an englished Dante in terza rima of utmost clarity and a bearable minimum of padding, but it would take a bilingual and very talented translator and a publisher willing to subsidize a lifelong and single-minded effort. I don't see it happen, so for now only an accurate prose translation, paradoxically, will preserve the essentials of Dante's poetic substance - his accurate visuals and the wealth of sub-textual counterpoints. A Miltonian barrage of "thee" and "thou" will not do. Even an unrhymed merely rhythmical translation, like Musa's, sometimes compromises on clarity. Durling's translation is very good, Singleton's still the staple, Hollander's rendition appears even to preserve many of the Italian rhyme words. They do not resonate in English, but their position at the closing of a line allows to see how their semantics toss on the ball to their companions. Pinsky is only for fans of Pinsky.

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Summary: read it!
Review: i knew the story, of course, but had never read the poem. My greek mythology knowledge is rudimentary.

none of that matters

this brilliant update of the poem is easy to read and the notes to each canto ensure you understand all the references

it was the best book i have read for quite some time, so do not be put off if this looks like a heavyweight prospect ... its not .. its fun, entertaining and educative all rolled into one

go for it!! five stars

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Summary: A Welcome Inferno
Review: The Hollanders have done a remarkable job in presenting Dante's Inferno. The annotations are extensive and varied as they pull from many authoritative sources. If you do not have a strong classics background, reading the Inferno is difficult as Dante referenced and copied the great epic poets who came before him. To read it, without the guidance of an experienced teacher or a superb annotation is to ultimately lose the book and wonder why it is a classic.

The joy of this translation is that through its notes it opens the whole text to you and if you do get lost it is in mastery of Dante which is how it should be. The Hollanders should be proud and we eternally thankful for their intelligence and care which shine through their Inferno.

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Summary: See you there when it's over.
Review: At the rate I'm going, I'll be in one of those circles of hell eventually, but since I'll be in such good company (all of late 13th century Florence, for starters) I don't think I can complain. In spite of Voltaire's opinion, I believe Dante is still read today, as was in Voltaire's time, because people find something of value in this, his most famous poem. The entire "Commedia" consists of two more books, the "Purgatorio" and the "Paradiso," which I have not read. I'll read them eventually, but, for the time being, I am quite happy with the "Inferno." The Florentine poet grabs Virgil as a guide that will take him out of the dark woods where Dante found himself wandering because he had lost the way of his life, and together they will go in a journey through Hell because the divine Beatrice has commanded that Dante must be led, so his eyes and heart can be opened and he can be saved. If this is true, I hope she is wrong, because I would like to talk to Dante, and if he goes to Paradise I would have no chance at all.

The "Inferno" is one of the most important poems ever written. Doomed lovers, murderers, traitors, liars, Dante's political enemies (including a Pope), righteous heathens, all of them have Hell as their final address. Dante talks to many of them, and they tell him their stories. I loved this poem. I found Odysseus where he belongs (with the liars), and Dido and Cleopatra, together in suicide. Most of all, I found an arrogant, self-centered Florentine poet who truly believed that the world revolved around him and wrote a monument of Western Literature just to prove it: I had to like Dante and his poem. The only reason I give this version four stars is because I do not think it is as good as the verse translation by Laurence Binyon. I have read both by now, and the old Binyon rendition of Florentine Italian into English is simply beautiful, where Mandelbaum's more businesslike version is clear if rather unpoetic. I wish a Binyon's version were available, but his translation of the Commedia seems to be out of print and I am the only person I know that has the "Divine Comedy" translated by Laurence Binyon. Still, I read the Mandelbaum for class and I enjoyed it almost as much as my favorite one. Whichever translation you choose (Ciardi's is in rhyme verse, too, while Musas's is not) I think you will enjoy this dark, wonderful journey that Dante took in 1300. If he is right about his poetic vision of the netherworld, most of us will be there in one circle or another, with medieval Florentines all around us. Enjoy.

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Summary: Clearest Translation
Review: It is the clearest translation I have read. I like Dorothy Sayers translations for beauty of language, but they come across a bit archaic by comarison to Ciardi's.

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Summary: Dante Translation Difficulties
Review: Dante's Comedy is one of the three or four must-reads if you want to gain an understanding of mediaeval thought & culture. The problem is that Dante's Italian--because of the rhyme scheme & stanza structure--is simply not translatable into English. Our language does not have enough rhymes avilable to use the same pattern as Dante, or anything like it. Many have tried--Longfellow, Sayers, Pinsky--& all have failed to some extent or other. Sinclair's prose translation tries to show you what Dante says, without trying to imitate his poetic structure.This, unfortunately, may be the best & only way to get a good feeling for the content & meaning of this remarkable work. Highly recommended--but if you're really interested in pursuing this further, try to learn some Italian.

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Summary: A major step forward in my understanding.
Review: I have started several Infernos and have dropped every one of them at some point, unwilling to continue Dante's journey. This is the first one I have read all the way through, enjoyed, and learned an immense amount without hurting my head at all.

I'm no authority on Italian but I am an avid poetry reader and I found the translation to be superb; there is no straining for effect, nor does it sound flat and/or prosaic. It's a subtle and highly admirable balance of the dramatic and scholarly. But it's the outstanding notes that really make this version work for me. Detailed without being overwhelming and referenced by line for ease of use, they bring up the key points of interpretation (as well as a lot of fascinating lesser subjects) in a friendly and enlightening manner.

I now envy those who have been fortunate enough to take Robert Hollander's class on Dante, but take solace that having his and his wife's wonderful work in this handsome volume may be the next best thing to being there. If you have found the Divine Comedy too daunting in the past, I urge you to check out the Hollanders: they provide great poetry for enjoyment and much food for thought, and all without "dumbing down" what is truly one of the greatest works of the human imagination. For me, a revelation.