The Inferno

Quotes

"A distinguished act of poetry and scholarship in one and the same breath, the Hollander Dante, among the strong translations of the poet, deserves to take its own honored place."
--Robert Fagles

"This new version of the Inferno wonderfully captures the concision, directness, and pungency of Dante's style.  Like a mirror, it reflects with clarity and precision the Italian original.  Each canto's set of copious, authoritative notes complements the facing-page Italian and English translation. A grand achievement."
--Richard Lansing, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, Brandeis University

"The New Inferno, as this is likely to be called, is both majestic and magisterial and the product of a lifelong devotion to Dante's poetry and to the staggering body of Dante scholarship. The Hollanders capture each and every accent in Dante, from the soft-spoken, effusive stilnovista poet, to the wrathful Florentine exile, to the disillusioned man who would become what many, including T. S. Eliot, consider the best poet who ever lived.  The Hollanders' adaptation is not only an intelligent reader's Dante, but it is meant to enlighten and to move and ultimately to give us a Dante so versatile that he could at once soar to the hereafter and remain unflinchingly earthbound."
--AndrÈ Aciman, author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir

"A brisk, vivid, readable-and scrupulously subtle-translation, coupled with excellent notes and commentary.  Every lover of Dante in English should have this volume."
--Alicia Ostriker

"English-speaking lovers of Dante are doubly in the Hollanders' debt: first, for this splendidly lucid and eminently readable version of Dante's Hell, and second, for the provocative, elegantly-written commentary, which judiciously synthesizes a lifetime of deeply engaged, wide ranging scholarship, as well as as the past six centuries of commentary on the poem. No student of Dante would want to be without it."
--John Ahern, Antolini Professor of Italian Literature, Vassar College