Dimensions
109 x 175 x 24mm
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 the 'Inferno', 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 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. 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
Dante's most important sources - from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other
Catholic theologians - that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.
