He first saw the woman, or rather the child, who was to become the poetic love of his life when he was almost nine years old and she was some months younger. Dante Alighieri was born in the city-state Florence in 1265. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.Įsolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante's most important sources - from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians - that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.ĭante Alighieri, or simply Dante (May 14/J– September 13/14, 1321), is one of the greatest poets in the Italian language with the comic story-teller, Boccaccio, and the poet, Petrarch, he forms the classic trio of Italian authors. 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 teachers and students. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well.
Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. An extraordinary new verse translation of Dante's masterpiece, by poet, scholar, and lauded translator Anthony Esolen
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