Purgatorio (The Divine Comedy series Book 2)

by Dante

  —Choice

  “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.”

  —André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir

  “The notes following each canto, besides being up-to-date in scholarly terms, and full of the insight produced by decades of teaching, reflection, and scholarship, are of genuinely useful length and pertinence. The decisions they made about the translation seem completely successful.…This is the translation for our time and probably beyond.”

  —National Review

  “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

  “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 Comparative Literature, Brandeis University

  “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 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

  “This new Hollander translation deserves to sweep the field.…Robert and Jean Hollander, both practicing published poets, have produced an English text of remarkable poetic sensitivity while never traducing the original Italian or pretending to supplant Dante’s poem with one of their own. They have given us The Inferno in English, not a modern poetic medley on themes by Dante. And Robert Hollander has supplied precisely that kind of commentary the student or general reader needs—an economical and graceful edifice of explanatory notes resting firmly on a foundation, massive and deep, yet invisible and therefore not distracting to the reader’s eye, of the erudition of a lifetime’s study of the medieval Italian poets.”

  —John Fleming, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University

  ALSO BY JEAN HOLLANDER

  Crushed into Honey: Poems

  Hugo von Hoffmansthal, The Woman without a Shadow (translator)

  I Am My Own Woman: The Outlaw Life of Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf, Berlin’s Most Distinguished Transvestite (translator)

  Moondog: Poems

  ALSO BY ROBERT HOLLANDER

  Allegory in Dante’s Commedia

  Walking on Dante: Poems

  Boccaccio’s Two Venuses

  Studies in Dante

  Il Virgilio dantesco: Tragedìa nella “Commedia”

  André Malraux, The Temptation of the West (translator)

  Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa Visione (translated with

  Timothy Hampton and Margherita Frankel)

  Boccaccio’s Last Fiction: Il Corbaccio

  Dante and Paul’s “five words with understanding”

  Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande

  Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire

  Dante: A Life in Works

  The Dartmouth Dante Project (founder and director)

  The Princeton Dante Project (founder and director)